De/Colonizing Transgender Studies of China

Abstract

As the historical research of this volume’s editor, Howard Hsueh Hao Chiang, makes clear, in recounting the introduction of “transsexuality” to China, concepts originating in Western discourses informed by sexological science have a way of travelling transnationally, as part of broader patterns of Eurocentric imperialism and colonization and as part of the global accumulation and transfer of capital. This has certainly been the case with transgender, a term that emerged in Anglophone North American gender-variant communities in the mid-twentieth century, and which experienced a meteoric rise in usage in the early 1990s as a critical, political, and identitarian label for any expression of gender that contests the familiar dichotomy of “man” and “woman.” But as Chiang’s work and the work of his colleagues collected herein makes clear as well, how such concepts as “transsexual” and transgender are variously resisted, adopted, creatively transformed, and critically redeployed frustrates any simple narrative of a coercive imposition by the West on the rest of the world of foreign epistemological and ontological constructs of personhood. In the contact zone of incommensurable cultural differences, across asymmetrical relations of power, de/colonized subjects, societies, and scholars have found opportunities for agential action not only through the rejection of concepts and categories of Western origin, but also through their appropriation, translation, hybridization, and dubbing.