Ian Liujia Tian

PhD Candidate

Email: liujia.tian@mail.utoronto.ca

Areas of Interest

  • Transnational Political Economy
  • Queer Asian Studies
  • Queer Marxisms
  • Social Reproduction Feminisms
  • Asian Canadian and American Studies
  • Sinophone Feminist STS
  • Decolonial Movements in East and Southeast Asia.

Biography

Ian Liujia Tian is a scholar of gender, sexuality, and labour. Specifically, he pratices queer ethnography to bridge Asian and Asian diaspora studies by investigating the relations between queer/trans pleasure, social reproduction, and technologized labour in the global Asias. His research examines how queer sexualities and pleasures are (re)produced through gendered migration, labor divisions, borders, and the political economy of racial capitalism across the Asia-Pacific and the Americas.

Program: PhD 2019

Education

MA, University of Toronto

BA, Shandong University, China

Dissertation

Title: Queering Social Reproduction: Pleasure and Labour in Urban Southern China

Supervisor: Jamie Magnusson (supervisor), Shana Ye, and Jesook Song (committee member)

This research is an ethnography of two queer scenes in a Chinese city: gay and gender-nonconforming migrant garment factory workers cruising for sex and queer/trans youth particioants of Ballroom culture. It explores broader questions such as how socioeconomic structure reconstitutes embodiment of pleasure in queer and trans people’ daily lives at the intersection of class, gender, sexuality, and geography. Using a Marxist, queer, and transnational feminist lens, I move from everyday pleasures (e.g., walking, joking, and touching) to the structure to give a fuller account of the inequalities and intimacies queer lives are imbedded in China today.

Presentations

Organizer, Panel Title: Unsettling Community: Exploring Queer Sociality from the Margins of Contemporary Chinese and Queer Studies, Association of Asian Studies, Seattle, Mar. 2024
“Vulgarity Production.” Paper presented at American Anthropology Association Annual Conference in Toronto, Nov. 2023
“Queer Techno-Orientalism as Methods.” Paper presented at Sexuality Studies Association, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Toronto, May. 2023
“Infrastructure and/as Mediation: China 2098’s Affective Politics.” Paper presented at Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Boston, Mar. 2023
“The Affective Commons: Social Reproduction and Mediated Life.” Paper presented at Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Hawai’i, Mar. 2022
“Feminist Hope: Pedagogies from Two Acts.” Paper presented at the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, Online, Oct. 2021
“The Affective Commons.” Paper presented at the Inter-Asian Cultural Studies in NUS, Singapore, July. 2021
“Diasporic Blaming, or the (Im)possibility of Speaking.” Paper presented at the Inter-Asian Cultural Studies Conference in Silliman University, the Philippines, Aug. 2019
“Homo/Transphobia and Global Buyers in an Era of Financialized Primitive Accumulation.” Paper presented at the 8th International Critical Geography Conference in Athens, Greece, April. 2019
“Graduated In/visibility.” Paper presented at the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference in San Francisco, Nov. 2019
“Left Resistance in China.” Paper presented at the 15th Historical Materialism Annual Conference in London, Nov. 2018

Selected Works

Forthcoming   “Infrastructure and/as Mediation: China 2098’s Affective Politics.” In Techno-Orientalism Vol II, edited by David Roh, Greta Niu, Betsy Huang and Christopher Fan. Rutgers University Press.

2023     ‘‘Being Too Asian: Migrant Student Time and Resistance within the Canadian University.’’ TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 47: 119-131, With Vedanth Govi (York U) and Rui Liu (NYU). https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2023-0019

2023    ‘‘Divine Queer Sorrow, or Beyond Mythical Reparation.’’ TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 46: 260-279. https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2022-0007

2022   ‘‘Critical Socialist Feminism in China: xingbie (gender), the State and Community-based Socialism.’’ Rethinking Marxism 34, no.4: 519-537. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2144068

2021   ‘‘On Rescuable and Expendable Life: bioavailability, surplus time, and the queer politics of reproduction.’’ Journal of Canadian Studies 54, no.2-3: 483-507. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs-2020-0015

2019    ‘‘Graduated In/visibility: reflections on Ku’er activism in (post)socialist China.’’ QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no.3: 56-75. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.6.3.0056

Honours and Awards

2021-2024
OGS International Student Stream
2023

Roxana Ng Memorial Scholarship in Equity

2022

 School of Graduate Studies Research Travel Grant

2022
The Thomas Waugh Emerging Scholar Award, Canadian Sexuality Studies Association
2021
Hallam Awards of Excellence, Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto
2021
Winner of Best Article, Canadian Studies Network. 
2019
SSHRC Connection Grant-Decolonizing Abolition