A queer feminist anthropologist exploring the realities of culture, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Asia
Life in Progress A lone dancer skuttles onto stage dragging an arm, resting momentarily where a bare tree stands centre stage. Guillem moves like a whirring gizmo, compact and full of electricity, as though she could burst any moment. Her livewire limbs rarely come to rest for long. One quiet moment finds her face down, spread-eagle [...]
‘Things will only change if she wins. If they let her in, there will be changes. If not, things will be stable.’ Pausing at a busy junction in downtown Yangon as I wait to cross, a heavy bag on my back, an older Burmese woman mutters under her breath telling me it is safe to [...]
Sexist Faux Pas at a Beijing Bar A woman takes the Beijing subway to work every day. One day her doctor tells her she is pregnant. "That's impossible," she says. "I've only been on the subway." When this joke was told to a friend and me at a party, the punch line hung in the air. The [...]
Divine Comedy Trilogy: Inferno, Cantica, Paradiso A ring of brightly lit bodies hangs suspended above the stage of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA). A lone dancer writhes and wriggles his way across the circle in which he is encased, launching off one body, spinning in mid-air and landing securely with a soft [...]
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of my favourite authors. She's certainly my favourite African author and I believe she is the best female writer of our time. Her fiction is poetic and hugely powerful. She weaves enchanting and wonderfully moving stories about the reality of Nigerian life. Adichie was named one of the twenty most important fiction writers [...]
In their Spring Equinox programme, the LDTX dancers presented an array of creative and innovative new choreographies. On the last Saturday of March, a huge crowd squeezed into the LDTX studio in Southeast Beijing to watch eight of the fourteen works created by the LDTX dancers. The company founder, Willy Tsao, welcomed everyone warmly (in both [...]
Last week I shaved my legs for the first time in 9 months. Why? I wanted to see if it made me feel like more or less of a woman.
The 1995 incident was echoed this year: While many women were being distracted with a shower of sexism and unnecessary gifts, Chinese feminist activists were arrested and held over International Women’s Day without cause. Ten women were detained on Friday and Saturday, and five were still being held in custody on Monday.
The very fact that it is non-essential for the majority of people is possibly the most powerful element of modern marriage. Rather than becoming insignificant, it possibly means more than it once did, purely because it is so heavily reliant on individual choice.
We make ourselves feel guilty about all manner of things. Appearance, weight, eating, drinking, exercise, accidents, things we’ve said or done… I feel I have wasted days, months, maybe years of my life on guilt and regret. I tend to beat myself up about all kinds of stuff. I am ambitious and competitive. I hate [...]
Zhēn de Gender 