CALL FOR PAPERS
Bad Matters: Trans Asia and Improper Materialities
October 22-23, 2026 | University of Toronto
A small-scale, in-person workshop with the potential for an edited volume
Abstracts due July 20, 2026
Over the past decade, trans studies has produced significant work on embodiment and materiality (Salamon 2010; Gill-Peterson 2014; Barad 2015; Aizura et al. 2020). Yet how global trans life is materially sustained by Asian pharmaceutical, chemical, manufacturing, logistical, digital, and care infrastructures has rarely been treated by trans theory as its central objects of analysis. We take this opening seriously by asking how Asian materialities transform what counts as trans, theory, and politics and what happens when we read transness through, across, as and against Asia. We hope thinking with “Trans Asia Matters” could help return trans materiality from ontology and theory as vibrant, lively, fluid, agential, and perpetually becoming, to the very substances, systems, and regimes, through which both “Asia” and “trans” are reconceptualized.
Our particular entry point is badness. One influential genealogy of North American trans studies emerged through a fraught relationship among trans studies, queer theory, and feminism. Susan Stryker famously described transgender studies as queer theory’s “evil twin” (2004), an intimate yet improper double immaterialized by the latter. More recently, Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager argue that trans studies paradoxically began by abandoning the “bad” figure of the transsexual, imagined primarily as a normative medical category against the antinormative mobility promised by “transgender” as the posttranssexual ideal (2019).
At the same time, global Asia studies has also been marked by “badness.” Euro-American and Orientalist narratives of sexual modernity, global queer discourse, and transnational activism have repeatedly positioned “Asia” as a bad object of authoritarianism, backwardness, censorship, insufficiently liberated, improperly modern, or theoretically derivative. Such representations place Asia on a developmental timeline in which queer and trans freedom is imagined as arriving late, incompletely, or from elsewhere. Queer Asian studies has long challenged both the Euro-American metropolitanism of queer theory and the relegation of non-Western queerness to the status of empirical material rather than theory (Chiang and Wong 2017; Rao 2020). Song Hwee Lim's question about whether the “trans” in transnational is the “trans” in transgender remains useful because it invites comparison without assuming that movement across borders and movement across gender categories are identical (2007).
We place these debates alongside a broader “bad turn” in queer and feminist approaches to Asia. Work on the unruly, the vulgar, the improper, and the fu腐 has refused to make respectability, aesthetic refinement, or progressive modernity the measure of political value (Gopinath 2018; Stryker 2012; Wong 2025; Zuo 2022). For this workshop, badness is not a synonym for negativity, and we do not presume that whatever is stigmatized is therefore resistant or liberatory. We approach badness as a material verdict. It enters decisions about whether hormones count as medicine or contraband, whether bodily change is recognized as treatment or condemned as damage, and whether labour is valued as care or dismissed as disposable service. Similar judgments shape the circulation of manufactured goods, the credibility of documents, and the treatment of bodies and remains. Badness may be imposed, inhabited, or made necessary by conditions that offer no clean alternative (Awkward-Rich 2022; Malatino 2022).
Our aim is not to collect examples of “bad” transgender experience from Asian or supposedly peripheral locations. We invite work that treats both trans and Asia as methods for understanding grounded material relations across different sites. Contributions may engage identities, practices, histories, and cultural forms that precede or exceed the contemporary English-language category of transgender. We especially welcome trans-centred work that draws from queer theory without allowing trans questions to disappear into queerness.
Potential topics
Improper embodiment and compromised survival. Work on passing, non-disclosure, diagnosis-seeking, surgical desire, conventional femininity or masculinity, detransition, nontransition, or survival under conditions where safe and recognized forms of transition are unavailable.
Substances, chemical life, and bodily risk. Studies of hormones, silicone, prosthetics, cosmetics, bloodwork, food, waste, toxicity, overdose, pollution, and the changing status of bodily materials.
Industrial histories, political economy, and the logistics of transition. Research on extraction, manufacturing, supply chains, medical tourism, migration, debt, housing, care work, textile production, beauty industries, entertainment, military economies, colonial medicine, or the uneven distribution of bodily risk.
Documents, databases, and archives. Work on identity cards, household registration, passports, medical files, school records, immigration documents, court decisions, financial records, biometric systems, and the archiving of trans lives and deaths.
Digital and technological materialities. Research on platform intimacy, account ownership, algorithmic classification, cyborg embodiment, digital remains, and the technical persistence of assigned identities.
Cultural materialities and creative survival. Studies of literature, film, performance, games, music, genre, translation, publishing, censorship, and creative practices that materialize or rework trans life.
Labour, maintenance, and exhaustion. Work on factory labour, care work, sex work, community work, platform labour, emotional labour, bodily depletion, repair, and suspended transition.
Aging, debility, death, and material remains. Research on chronic illness, disability, debility, dying, burial, mourning, inheritance, archives of the dead, and the afterlives of gendered bodies.
Trans Asia as material method. Theoretical, historical, and methodological interventions that approach Trans Asia as an analytic for rethinking embodiment, infrastructure, relationality, knowledge production, and global power rather than as a fixed region or identity category.
Workshop format
This will be a small-scale, two-day workshop for approximately 8 to 12 participants, with an absolute maximum of 15. Rather than organizing conventional conference, we will devote substantial time to pre-circulated works in progress, collective reading, conceptual exchange, and discussion across disciplinary boundaries.
The workshop is also envisioned as an early stage in the possible development of an edited volume, although participation in the workshop will not constitute a commitment to publication.
Pending funding, the organizers expect to cover or substantially subsidize economy travel and accommodation for invited participants. Precise information about available support will be included with acceptance notices.
The workshop will be held primarily in person at the University of Toronto. Limited hybrid accommodation may be possible. Given that October is one of Toronto’s most pleasant months, some sessions may take place outdoors and full digital participation may not be supported.
Submission guidelines
Please submit the following through the Google Form:
A paper title
A 150-250-word abstract
A 50-word bio
Submission deadline: July 20, 2026.
Questions may be directed to Shana Ye at shana.ye@utoronto.ca. or Heng Simone Wang at hengw01@student.ubc.ca
About the conveners
Shana Ye (she/they/X也) is Associate Professor at the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto.
Heng Simone Wang (she/they/X也) is a PhD student in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia.
