Dr Ting-Fai Yu

Dr Ting-Fai Yu is a cultural anthropologist whose work has focused on the intersection between sexuality, social inequality and critical methodologies in Asian studies. He received his PhD in gender studies (emphasis in anthropology) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017. Prior to working at Monash University, Malaysia, he was a Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, in the Netherlands.

Dr Yu’s research is situated in the intellectual movement known as “queer Asia” and participates in the ongoing debate over the conceptual frames and methodological inventions towards localising queer studies in Asian contexts. His doctoral thesis is an ethnographic study of the role of class in the subjective production of Hong Kong gay men. Specifically, it examines how inequality is legitimised and reproduced in their lives in the absence of an everyday class discourse. Drawing on the cultural studies of class and theories about cultural practices resulting from East Asian modernisation, it looks at how class is manifested through other categories of social difference (i.e. age, generation, race, culture), and analyses these manifestations as historical symptoms caused by Hong Kong’s progressive transition from an impoverished colonial entrepôt to a first-world economy between the 1960s and 1980s.

Dr Yu is currently writing a monograph based on his doctoral thesis while working towards his next project which examines the historical configurations of class difference in East Asian queer practices and formations.

Qualifications

PhD (Gender Studies), The Chinese University of Hong Kong

MA (Gender Studies), The Chinese University of Hong Kong

BA Hons. (Music), Hong Kong Baptist University

Professional affiliations

Association of Asian Studies, Member

Australian Sociological Association, Member

European Association for Social Anthropologists, Member

Hong Kong Sociological Association, Member

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society, Member

Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong, Member

Research Interests

Dr Ting-Fai Yu’s research is situated in the intellectual movement known as “queer Asia” and participates in the ongoing debate over the conceptual frames and methodological inventions towards localising queer studies in Asian contexts.

His research interests include contemporary queer practices and formations, cultural studies in Asia, social movements, human rights, social class, and the historical legacies of East Asian modernisation.

Education

Dr Ting-Fai Yu has taught gender studies, anthropology and media studies subjects at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Melbourne.

At Monash University Malaysia, Dr Yu teaches two introductory units (Introduction to Gender Studies & Introduction to Sexuality Studies) as well as coordinates the Workplace Learning Internship unit.

Journal Articles

Yu, Ting-Fai. 2019. “Reconfiguring Queer Asia as Disjunctive Modernities: Notes on the Subjective Production of Working-class Gay Men in Hong Kong.” Journal of Homosexuality (Online First). https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2018.1560126

Yu, Ting-Fai. 2018. “Class as a Method to Localise Queer Studies in Hong Kong.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 28(2): 309-312.

Yu, Ting-Fai. 2018. “Contextualising the National Anthem Law in Mainland China and Hong Kong: Football as a Field of Political Contention.” China Perspectives 2018/3: 79-82.

Yu, Ting-Fai. 2017. “The Imprisonment of Occupy Student Leaders: Public Reactions and Debates over Hong Kong’s Judicial Independence.” China Perspectives 2017/4: 59-62.

Book Reviews

Yu, Ting-Fai. 2017. “Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition, by Michel Agier.” Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration 1(2): 269-271.

Yu, Ting-Fai. 2017. “Rethinking Sexual Citizenship, by Jyl J. Josephson.” H-Citizenship, H-Net Reviews.

URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46906

Yu, Ting-Fai. 2017. “Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China, by Tiantian Zheng.” WagRev: Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Review 12.

URL: http://www.wagnet.ox.ac.uk/wagrev/journals/issue12.html

Areas of Research & Supervision

Potential areas of supervision include 1) gender, sexuality and queer studies, 2) cultural studies in Asia, and 3) qualitative research on class and social inequality

Awards

Fellowship, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, 2018.

Global Scholarship Programme for Research Excellence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2016.

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