PROFILE

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is also the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC). Professor Wong’s research spans across the fields of queer theory, Hong Kong literature and cinema, Chinese literary and cultural studies, Sinophone studies, transnational feminism, and the environmental humanities. His book Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone is forthcoming from Duke University Press in Spring 2025. Unruly Comparison theorizes Hong Kong as a queer region of racial, gender, and sexual incommensurability, which forms a perverse relationality to the world through asymmetrical comparisons. This queer unruly methodology actualizes Hong Kong as a queer Sinophone site for rethinking the stakes of comparison, area studies, Sinophone theory, and transnational queer studies. He has published in journals such as Journal of Lesbian Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, Culture, Theory, and Critique, Concentric, Cultural Dynamics, Continuum, JCMS, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Interventions and in edited volumes such as Transgender China, Queer Sinophone Cultures, Filming the Everyday, Fredric Jameson and Film Theory, Sinophone Utopias, Queer TV China, and Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines. He also coedited the volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020). Wong is an associate editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies (Taylor & Francis) and currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies (3S). With Daniel Elam, Wong is the coeditor of the HKU Press book series, Entanglements: Rethinking Comparison in the Long Contemporary. A comprehensive list of his publications can be found here: https://hku-hk.academia.edu/AlvinKWong.

BOOK

Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2025)

JOURNAL ARTICLES

“Queering the Cinematic Border of the PRC and Hong Kong: On Fruit Chan’s Prostitute Trilogy,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 17.1 (2023): 37-51.

“Queer Sinophone Media across Asian Regionalism,” JCMS 62.3 (2023): 159-163.

“Queer Vernacularism: Minor Transnationalism across Hong Kong and Singapore,” Cultural Dynamics 32.1-2 (2020): 49-67.

“Towards a Queer Affective Economy of Boys’ Love in Contemporary Chinese Media,” Continuum 34.4 (2020): 500-513.

“Including China? Postcolonial Hong Kong, Sinophone Studies, and the Gendered Geopolitics of China-centrism,” Interventions 20.8 (2018):1101-1120.

“Beyond Anthropocentric Futurism: Visualizing Air Pollution and Waste in Post-Olympic Beijing,” Concentric 43.1 (2017): 119-143.

“Queering the Quality of Desire: Perverse Use-Values in Transnational Chinese Cultures,” Culture, Theory and Critique 58.2 (2017): 209-225.

Co-authored with Howard Chiang, “Queering the Transnational Turn: Regionalism and Queer Asias,” Gender, Place & Culture 23.11 (2016): 1643-1656.

“From the Transnational to the Sinophone: Lesbian Representations in Chinese-language Films,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16.3 (2012): 307-322.

BOOK CHAPTERS

“Queer Hong Kong as a Sinophone Method,” in Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines: A Reader, ed. Howard Chiang and Shu-mei Shih (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), 193-208.

“Queer Sinophone Literature in Hong Kong: The Politics of Worldliness,” in A World History of Chinese Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (London and New York: Routledge, 2023), 133-144.

“Disjunctive Temporalities: Queer Sinophone Visuality across Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan,” in Queer TV China, ed. Jamie J. Zhao (Hong Kong: HKU Press, 2023), 124-142.

“Beyond the Chinese Dream: On the Unbecoming of Chineseness in Chan Koonchung’s China Trilogy,” in Sinophone Utopias, ed. Andrea Riemenschnitter, Jessica Imbach, and Justyna Jaguscik (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2022), 349-367.

“Where Jameson Meets Queer Theory: Queer Cognitive Mapping in 1990s Sinophone Cinema,” in Fredric Jameson and Film Theory, ed. Keith B. Wagner, Jeremi Szaniawski, and Michael Cramer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022), 131-145.

“Beyond Queer Liberalism: On Queer Globalities and Regionalism from Postcolonial Hong Kong,” in Sexualities, Transnationalism, and Globalization, ed. Yanqiu Rachel Zhou, Christina Sinding, and Donald Goellnicht (New York: Routledge, 2021), 107-120.

“Postcoloniality beyond China-centrism: Queer Sinophone Transnationalism in Hong Kong Cinema,” in Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies, ed. Howard Chiang and Alvin K. Wong (New York: Routledge, 2020), 62-79.

〈同志 Tongzhi/Queer〉in 《香港關鍵詞》 (Hong Kong Keywords), ed. Stephen Chu Yiu Wai (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2019), 275-286.

“Gendering Intersubjectivity in New Chinese Documentary,” in Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-First Century China, ed. Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2017), 119-133.

“Queer Sinophone Studies as Anti-Capitalist Critique: Mapping Queer Kinship in the Work of Chen Ran and Wong Bik-wan,” in Queer Sinophone Cultures, ed. Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich (New York: Routledge, 2014), 109-129.

“Transgenderism as a Heuristic Device: On the Cross-historical and Transnational Adaptations of the Legend of the White Snake,” in Transgender China, ed. Howard Chiang (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 127-158.

COURSES TAUGHT AT THE DEPARTMENT

• CLIT2014 Feminist Cultural Studies
• CLIT2065 Hong Kong Culture: Representations of Identity in Literature and Film
• CLIT2089 Culture and ‘Queer’ Theory
• CLIT3021 Advanced Studies in Theory and Cultural Analysis
• CCGL9002 Hong Kong Culture in the Context of Globalization