My publications explore queerness, migration and belonging through cinema, literature and popular culture. With a particular focus on East Asia, they consider how identities are shaped by movement, cultural memory and changing ideas of home, nation and community.
The books bring together sustained studies of queer lives, migration, cinema and the continuing influence of colonial histories.
This monograph looks closely at some of the most significant films within the field of queer Sinophone cinema. Examining queerness in films produced in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the book merges the Sinophone with the queer, theorising both concepts as local and global, homebound as well as diasporic.
Co-edited with Lars Jensen, Julia Suárez-Krabbe and Christian Groes. The anthology engages with the concept of ‘Europe’ across multiple registers—as a geographical space, geopolitical power and privileged epistemic site that historically occluded others, rewriting epistemologies from non-Western perspectives.
The chapters extend these interests through focused discussions of literature, travel, cinema and cultural identity.
In The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema, eds. A. Magnan-Park, G. Marchetti, S. Tan (Palgrave Macmillan)
A study of two Hong Kong independent queer auteurs, Scud and Kit Hung and how their autobiographical films blur the line between the real and the unreal.
In Postcolonial Europe: Comparative Reflections after the Empires, eds. Lars Jensen, Julia Suárez-Krabbe, Christian Groes-Green, Zoran Lee Pecic
A chapter on Zhang Yuan’s East Palace, West Palace (1996).
In Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 2, eds. S. Barbour, D. Howard, T. Lacroix, J. Misrahi-Barak
An essay arguing that Lawrence Scott’s 1998 novel Aelred’s Sin sits at the intersection of queer and diaspora studies.
In Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations, eds. Justin D. Edwards, Rune Graulund (Palgrave Macmillan)
A reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s travel and garden writing through the recurring motifs of curiosity and displacement.
The articles examine contemporary East Asian cinema, with particular attention to queerness, popular culture, memory, masculinity and environmental change.
An analysis of Pema Tseden’s film Jinpa (2018), investigating how contemporary Tibetan cinema navigates changing masculine archetypes, Buddhist karmic structures and visual framing against the backdrop of modern Tibetan aesthetics.
This paper examines cinematic engagements with colonial trauma and historical memory in Korean cinema, with particular attention to the representation of ‘comfort women’ and the role of shamanic rituals in Cho Jung-rae's Spirits' Homecoming (2016) and Park Chan-kyong's Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013).
A study of Wang Chao's 2018 feature Looking for Rohmer (aka Seeking McCartney), read as part of a new ‘Queer Cinemas of the Sinosphere’ that imagines China as an active participant in global queer culture. The essay traces how tourism, consumption and transnational independent filmmaking work alongside China's official ‘going out’ globalisation project and how these films destabilise the heteronormative family unit.
This article investigates the third instalment of the Taiwanese director Zero Chou’s tongzhi trilogy. It suggests that her 2009 film Drifting Flowers defies the “global gay” narratives of identity formation whilst remaining rooted in Taiwan’s cultural and geographical space. The article argues that the inter- and intratextual elements in Chou’s cinema position her as a Taiwanese queer auteur whose inclusive queerness points to new directions in not only New Queer Sinophone Cinema but also queer cinema globally.
Exploring ecocritical aesthetics and cinematic spectrality in Zhao Liang's documentary Behemoth (2015). The article examines industrial landscapes in Inner Mongolia, labour exploitation and Dantean allegories of ecological degradation in postsocialist China.