Unruly Comparison

“Unruly Comparison cements Alvin K. Wong’s reputation as a leading scholar of queer Sinophone studies. The book’s proposal for and practice of a new theory of unruly comparison is as innovative and persuasive as its eloquent interventions in the Eurocentrism of queer studies, China-centrism of area studies, and exceptionalism of Hong Kong studies. It is a must-read for all scholars in queer studies, area studies, and Sinophone studies.”
-- Shu-mei Shih, Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles

“In this remarkable book Alvin K. Wong brings Hong Kong queer culture into critical dialogue with Western queer studies while complicating the China-centrism of both mainland Chinese nationalism and the disciplinary conventions of East Asian area studies. He asks how a range of queer genders and sexualities might contest singular universal forms of ‘Chineseness’ to imagine subject and community apart from the reproductive logic that forms the core of nationalism’s most conventional formulations. Wong also elaborates queer Hong Kong as a source of critique of the hierarchy between an ‘original’ China and its allegedly ‘lesser’ Sinophone copies.”
-- Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four Continents