In this talk, I perform queer readings of the everyday in fiction by Japanese authors Kawakami Hiromi and Ekuni Kaori, drawing out representations of intimacy built on smallness, distance, and the mundane, which are often tinged with loneliness and grief. My project of queer readings began years ago, but what does it mean in the world of 2021? I reflect on the experience of living with these texts and my own readings, through precarious employment; teaching in spaces of translation in the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong; transformations in my own awareness as a feminist/queer studies scholar; and Black Lives Matter, anti-Asian racism, and political upheaval during the pandemic. Specifically, I illustrate how—in a callous world scarred by racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and imperialism—minor intimacies of Japanese literature still offer us valuable forms of queer feminist love and solidarity.

Speaker Bio: 
Dr. Grace En-Yi Ting is a queer and feminist studies scholar and Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Ting specializes in Japanese women writers, girls’ culture, and transnational feminisms. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining female homosociality, femininities, and feminisms within representations of daily life by women writers in post-1980’s Japan. Her other work involves critique of race and gender in the field of Japanese studies, as well as investigating tensions between concepts of queerness and Asia across Japanese, Sinophone, and Asian American literary discourses. 

Link to registration: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvdeCtpzIuHdbkZSZjyEmAZSh1GFRalwEm

Sponsored by the Department of Literature at UC San Diego