Shana L Ye
I'm an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough and in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. My research areas include transnational feminism, queer studies, post/socialist studies, affect theory and Sinophone science and technology studies.
My first monograph QUEER CHIMERICA: A SPECULATIVE AUTO/ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE COOL CHILD (2024) examines the transnational circulation of queer politics and the relationship between queer fluidity and labor flexibility. Weaving together ethnography, history, memoir, science fiction, graphic arts and cultural critique, it brings to the forefront questions of representation, queer mode of knowing, and the sexualized, gendered, and racialized power relations in transnational queer praxis. Check out the book here: https://press.umich.edu/Books/Q/Queer-Chimerica3
I'm currently working on two "second" projects: SILICON YELLOW: SOJOURNER COLONIALISM AND THE AESTHETICS OF TECHNO-CHIMERICA which explores the racialized construction of Chineseness in relation to technology, the (in)animate body, and the visualization of geopower; and ARTIFICIAL NATIONS: IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND THE ECONOMY OF MEANING, which is about virtual reality, history, and the materiality of memory.
My work also appears on peer-reviewed journals such as TSQ, FEMINIST STUDIES, GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE AND FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES. Additionally, I write about death, AIs, metals and rocks. I'm an amateur digital artist(digital painting and illustration) and a playwright-wanna-be.
Supervisors: Jigna Desai, Richa Nagar, Jason McGrath, Aren Aizura, and Naomi Scheman
Address: Toronto, Canada
My first monograph QUEER CHIMERICA: A SPECULATIVE AUTO/ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE COOL CHILD (2024) examines the transnational circulation of queer politics and the relationship between queer fluidity and labor flexibility. Weaving together ethnography, history, memoir, science fiction, graphic arts and cultural critique, it brings to the forefront questions of representation, queer mode of knowing, and the sexualized, gendered, and racialized power relations in transnational queer praxis. Check out the book here: https://press.umich.edu/Books/Q/Queer-Chimerica3
I'm currently working on two "second" projects: SILICON YELLOW: SOJOURNER COLONIALISM AND THE AESTHETICS OF TECHNO-CHIMERICA which explores the racialized construction of Chineseness in relation to technology, the (in)animate body, and the visualization of geopower; and ARTIFICIAL NATIONS: IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND THE ECONOMY OF MEANING, which is about virtual reality, history, and the materiality of memory.
My work also appears on peer-reviewed journals such as TSQ, FEMINIST STUDIES, GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE AND FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES. Additionally, I write about death, AIs, metals and rocks. I'm an amateur digital artist(digital painting and illustration) and a playwright-wanna-be.
Supervisors: Jigna Desai, Richa Nagar, Jason McGrath, Aren Aizura, and Naomi Scheman
Address: Toronto, Canada
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (27)
Uploads
Journal Papers by Shana L Ye
Book Chapters by Shana L Ye
plurality of global coloniality in relation to the post-Cold War postsocialist conditions. Contextualizing
the transnational emergence and circulation of U.S. queer theory in the 1990s within the context of Cold
War anti-Marxism and China’s market economic reform, this chapter argues that the discourse of queer as
“fluid” and “anti-normative” is promised by the Chinese embrace of Western humanist knowledge,
cosmopolitan desires and vast flexible labor and capital. Yet as the liberal and democratic discourse of
queer politics predominantly frames queer precarity in term of “unfreedom under communism” rather
than postsocialist economic inequality and structural violence, the blanket rhetoric of the Cold War
displaces queer inequality onto the orientalist construction of China as an ahistorical “other.” While
queerness is often thought as embodying cutting-edge anti-normativity, this chapter shows the collusion
of dominant queer knowledge production and the logic of global coloniality and its uneven labor division.
Through placing the contradictions of Chinese queerness at the center of transnational queer knowledge
production and political economy, this chapter seeks to provincialize Euro-US queer theorization and to
critically engage the intersections and tensions of postcolonial and postsocialist theorizations.
Dissertation by Shana L Ye
Book Reviews by Shana L Ye
Books by Shana L Ye
Drawing on rare archival material and oral historical accounts of queer life from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the author shows how these accounts make sense of the variegated landscapes of desires, transformations, and conundrums in postsocialist China. The author illustrates party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism mediated by the explosive politics of Tiananmen upheaval, HIV/AIDS community outreach workers, feminist artists and digital activists, leftist queer theorists, and fictional bio-engineers, layering these vivid depictions to reveal the poetic messiness of queer world-making. Queer Chimerica offers insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, the geo- and bio-politics of identity, and the class-ridden appropriation of queer history and community. Thus understanding the production of queerness unveils the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency.
Drawing on rare archival material and oral historical accounts of queer life from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the author shows how these accounts make sense of the variegated landscapes of desires, transformations, and conundrums in postsocialist China. The author illustrates party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism mediated by the explosive politics of Tiananmen upheaval, HIV/AIDS community outreach workers, feminist artists and digital activists, leftist queer theorists, and fictional bio-engineers, layering these vivid depictions to reveal the poetic messiness of queer world-making. Queer Chimerica offers insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, the geo- and bio-politics of identity, and the class-ridden appropriation of queer history and community. Thus understanding the production of queerness unveils the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency.
plurality of global coloniality in relation to the post-Cold War postsocialist conditions. Contextualizing
the transnational emergence and circulation of U.S. queer theory in the 1990s within the context of Cold
War anti-Marxism and China’s market economic reform, this chapter argues that the discourse of queer as
“fluid” and “anti-normative” is promised by the Chinese embrace of Western humanist knowledge,
cosmopolitan desires and vast flexible labor and capital. Yet as the liberal and democratic discourse of
queer politics predominantly frames queer precarity in term of “unfreedom under communism” rather
than postsocialist economic inequality and structural violence, the blanket rhetoric of the Cold War
displaces queer inequality onto the orientalist construction of China as an ahistorical “other.” While
queerness is often thought as embodying cutting-edge anti-normativity, this chapter shows the collusion
of dominant queer knowledge production and the logic of global coloniality and its uneven labor division.
Through placing the contradictions of Chinese queerness at the center of transnational queer knowledge
production and political economy, this chapter seeks to provincialize Euro-US queer theorization and to
critically engage the intersections and tensions of postcolonial and postsocialist theorizations.
Drawing on rare archival material and oral historical accounts of queer life from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the author shows how these accounts make sense of the variegated landscapes of desires, transformations, and conundrums in postsocialist China. The author illustrates party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism mediated by the explosive politics of Tiananmen upheaval, HIV/AIDS community outreach workers, feminist artists and digital activists, leftist queer theorists, and fictional bio-engineers, layering these vivid depictions to reveal the poetic messiness of queer world-making. Queer Chimerica offers insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, the geo- and bio-politics of identity, and the class-ridden appropriation of queer history and community. Thus understanding the production of queerness unveils the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency.
Drawing on rare archival material and oral historical accounts of queer life from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the author shows how these accounts make sense of the variegated landscapes of desires, transformations, and conundrums in postsocialist China. The author illustrates party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism mediated by the explosive politics of Tiananmen upheaval, HIV/AIDS community outreach workers, feminist artists and digital activists, leftist queer theorists, and fictional bio-engineers, layering these vivid depictions to reveal the poetic messiness of queer world-making. Queer Chimerica offers insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, the geo- and bio-politics of identity, and the class-ridden appropriation of queer history and community. Thus understanding the production of queerness unveils the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency.