Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone

Alvin K. Wong (University of Hong Kong) joins the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality for a discussion about his new book Unruly Comparison Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone (Duke University Press, 2025).

The book examines queerness in Hong Kong through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature, cinema, visual culture, and civil society. Moving beyond Eurocentrism in queer theory and China-centrism in area studies, Wong frames Hong Kong as a model for global comparison by theorizing a method of unruly comparison—acknowledging the incommensurability of cultural texts and queer figures across different temporal and spatial locations. Here, unruly comparison positions Hong Kong as an undefinable time-space that troubles historicist, colonial, and China-centric renderings of the city as merely a site of British colonial legacy, Chinese rule, or global capital. Wong analyzes queer interracial desire in World War II; a cinema of gay male cosmopolitanism; queer intimacy among migrant workers; trans visuality and legality; cross-border sex work; and the queer diaspora of Hong Kong after the 2019 protests. Through Wong’s readings, Hong Kong becomes a queer region of racial, gender, and sexual incommensurability. By foregrounding the friction, asymmetry, and perverse juxtapositions of unruly comparison of Hong Kong with the Sinophone world, Wong reframes key debates in queer theory and East Asian studies.

A limited number of free copies will be available at the event.