Words Like Water: Queer Mobilization and Social Change in China

UChicago Yuen Campus in Hong Kong
168 Victoria Road, Mount Davis
Hong Kong

In this presentation, Dr. Caterina Fugazzola will discuss her recently published book, Words Like Water: Queer Mobilization and Social Change in China (2023, Temple University Press). The book engages with social movement theory, transnational sociology, and interdisciplinary work focused on queer China and Asia. In her ethnographic work, Dr. Fugazzola looks at tongzhi (LGBT) organizing in the PRC and examines strategies for social change in a context that precludes avenues for direct political engagement. She focuses particularly on queer organizing in the mid-2010s, centering linguistic strategies and tracing the fluid, nonconfrontational discursive approaches that Chinese queer organizers employed in order to walk the fine line between visibility and activism. In so doing, she discusses pathways to change that are not based on a rhetoric of resistance and confrontation, but rather on the cultural impact of discourses emphasizing cultural belonging, social inclusion, and an explicit and conscious avoidance of oppositional practices.  

Speaker 

Cate Fugazzola 
Assistant Senior Instructional Professor at the University of Chicago 

In-person event 

Program 
6:15 pm – 6:30 pm     Registration 
6:30 pm – 8:00 pm   Talk by Professor
8:00 pm                        Event ends 

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