Articles & Essays


This is a representative list of my scholarly writing. If you are interested in any other piece of my work, feel free to contact me for a copy.

  • “The Big Picture of Sexual Science,” British Journal for the History of Science Themes 9 (2024): FirstView.
  • “Hide and Seek: Elmer Belt, Agnes, and the Battle over Castration in Transsexual Surgery,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 98, no. 3 (2024): 394–427. [PDF]
  • “Queer Taiwanese Literature as World Literature: A Conversation,” with Hangping Xu, in Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, ed. Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 253–268. [PDF]
  • “Scientific Sex in the Modern World,” in The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 2, Systems of Thought and Belief, ed. Merry Weisner-Hanks and Mathew Kuefler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 314-339. [PDF]
  • “Roundtable: Queer/Trans of Color Transits and the Imaginaries of Racial Capitalism,” with Şahin Açikgöz, Debanuj Dasgupta, Joao Gabriel, Christoph Hanssmann, Rana M. Jaleel, Durba Mitra, and Evren Savci, South Atlantic Quarterly 123, no. 1 (2024): 157–182. [PDF]
  • “Therapeutic Humanism in Hou Chun-Ming’s Art: Queer Mimesis, Subaltern Souls, and the Body as Vessel in Sinoglossiac Taiwan,” in Sinoglossia, ed. Andrea Bachner, Howard Chiang, and Yu-lin Lee (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2023), pp. 37-54. [PDF]
  • “殖民、冷戰、帝國或全球化重構下的南方論壇” (Forum on Reconstructing the South: Colonization, Cold War, Empire, and Globalization), with Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang, Wen-Hsun Chang, Poshek Fu, Wai Siam Hee, E.K. Tan, and Min-xu Zhan, 中外文學 (Chung-Wai Literary Quarterly) 52, no. 2 (June 2023): 247-289 (in Chinese). [PDF]
  • “Trans Without Borders: Resisting the Telos of Transgender Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 32, no. 1 (January 2023): 56–65. [PDF]
  • “The Secrets of a Loyalist Soul: Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality in Wartime China,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 29, no. 1 (January 2023): 61–76. [PDF
  • “Contested Minds Across Time: Perspectives from Chinese History and Culture,” Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 56, no. 2 (June 2022): 420–425. [PDF]
  • “Translators of the Soul: Bingham Dai, Pow-Meng Yap, and the Making of Transcultural Psychoanalysis in the Asia Pacific,” Psychoanalysis and History 23, no. 2 (August 2021): 161–185. [PDF]
  • “Castration Fever: On Trans, China, and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 57, no. 3 (Summer 2021): 243–250. [PDF]
  • “酷兒論述與華語語系研究” (Queer Theory and Sinophone Studies),《華語語系研究十講》(Ten Lectures on Sinophone Studies), ed. Yu-lin Lee (Taipei: Linking Publisher, 2020), pp. 59–81 (in Chinese). [PDF]
  • “Gay and Lesbian Communities in Urban China,” in Handbook on Urban Development in China, ed. Ray Yep, June Wang, and Thomas Johnson (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2019), pp. 187–201. [PDF]
  • “Teaching Global Intimacies,” New Global Studies 12, no. 3 (December 2018): 393–399. [PDF]
  • “Sinophone Modernity: History, Culture, Geopolitics,” in Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe, ed. Chunjie Zhang (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 142–167. [PDF]
  • “Transgender in China,” in Handbook on the Family and Marriage in China, ed. Xiaowei Zang and Lucy Xia Zhao (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2017), pp. 392–408. [PDF]
  • “From Postcolonial to Subimperial Formations of Medicine: Superregional Perspectives from Taiwan and Korea,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 11, no. 4 (December 2017): 469–475. [PDF]
  • “Christine Goes to China: Xie Jianshun and the Discourse of Sex Change in Cold War Taiwan,” in Gender, Health, and History in Modern East Asia, ed. Angela Ki Che Leung and Izumi Nakyama (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), pp. 216–243. [PDF]
  • “In the Shadow of Empire: The Words and Worlds of Sexual Science,” in A Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1960, ed. Veronika Fuechtner, Douglas E. Haynes, and Ryan M. Jones (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 444–450. [PDF]
  • “Gender Transformations in Sinophone Taiwan,” positions: asia critique 25, no. 3 (2017): 527–563. [PDF]
    — reprinted (in Chinese) as “性別越界在1950年代的華語語系臺灣:歷史案例與後殖民論述,”《台灣文學研究雧刊》(National Taiwan University Studies in Taiwan Literature), no. 25 (February 2021): 85–116. [PDF]
  • “Intimate Equality and Transparent Selves: Legalising Transgender Marriage in Hong Kong,” Culture, Theory and Critique 58, no. 2 (June 2017): 166–181. [PDF]
    — reprinted (in French) as “Égalité des relations intimes et Soi(s) transparents: reconnaissance juridique du mariage transgenre à Hong Kong,” L’Homme et la Société, nos. 203-204 (janvier-mars 2017): 85–112.
  • “Asia is Burning: Queer Asia as Critique,” with Alvin K. Wong, Culture, Theory and Critique 58, no. 2 (June 2017): 121–126. [PDF]
  • “Sinoglossia Incarnate: The Entanglements of Castration across the Pacific,” in East Asian Men: Masculinity, Sexuality and Desire, ed. Xiaodong Lin, Chris Haywood, and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 85–105. [PDF]
  • “Queering the Transnational Turn: Regionalism and Queer Asias,” with Alvin K. Wong, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 23, no. 11 (2016): 1643–1656. [PDF]
  • “Data of Desire: Translating (Homo)Sexology in Republican China,” in Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the Modern World, 1880-1930, ed. Heike Bauer (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), pp. 72–90. [PDF]
  • “Translating Culture and Psychiatry across the Pacific: How Koro Became Culture-Bound,” History of Science 53, no. 1 (March 2015): 102–119. [PDF]
    — reprinted (in Chinese) as “文化與精神醫學的越洋轉譯:「縮陽」如何成為文化結合症候群,” in《精神科學與近代東亞》(Psy Sciences and Modern East Asia), ed. Wen-Ji Wang and Yu-Chuan Wu (Taipei: Linking Publisher, 2018), pp. 387–420. [PDF]
  • “Archiving Peripheral Taiwan: The Prodigy of the Human and Historical Narration,” Radical History Review, no. 120 (Fall 2014): 204–225. [PDF]
  • “(De)Provincializing China: Queer Historicism and Sinophone Postcolonial Critique,” in Queer Sinophone Cultures, ed. Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 19–51. [PDF]
  • “Liberating Sex, Knowing Desire: Scientia Sexualis and Epistemic Turning Points in the History of Sexuality,” History of the Human Sciences 23, no. 5 (December 2010): 42–69. [PDF]
  • “Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China,” Gender and History 22, no. 3 (November 2010): 629–657. [PDF]
  • “The Laboratory Technology of Discrete Molecular Separation: The Historical Development of Gel Electrophoresis and the Material Epistemology of Biomolecular Science, 1945-1970,” Journal of the History of Biology 42, no. 3 (August 2009): 495–527. [PDF]
  • “Rethinking ‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers of Science: Converging Lessons from Sexuality, Translation, and East Asian Studies,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40, no. 2 (June 2009): 109-118. [PDF]
  • “The Conceptual Contours of Sex in the Chinese Life Sciences: Zhu Xi (1899-1962), Hermaphroditism, and the Biological Discourse of Ci and Xiong, 1920–1950,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 2, no. 3 (September 2008): 401–430. [PDF]
  • “Effecting Science, Affecting Medicine: Homosexuality, the Kinsey Reports, and the Contested Boundaries of Psychopathology in the United States, 1948-1965,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 44, no. 4 (Autumn 2008): 300-318. [PDF]