Beyond categories: intimacy, agency, and identity in Taiwan
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
11:00 am to 1:00 pm
- Venue
- Online
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Hoi Yan Yau to discuss her new book, Sex, Culture, and Identity in Taiwan, exploring intimacy, agency and identity in contemporary Taiwan.
This talk introduces Sex, Culture, and Identity in Taiwan, a person-centred ethnographic study of how individuals negotiate gender, sexuality, kinship, and identity in contemporary Taiwan. Moving beyond macro-level accounts of Taiwanese identity shaped by colonialism, nationalism, democratisation, and geopolitics, the talk turns to intimate lives: family relationships, sexual histories, filial obligations, and emotional contradictions.
Through selected life stories, it examines how social structures such as patrilineal kinship, gender norms, class mobility, and cultural expectations shape people’s possibilities without fully determining their actions. The talk argues that agency is best understood not as pure autonomy or heroic resistance, but as navigation within constraint. It also rethinks gender as a relational kinship practice and sexuality as historically and emotionally mediated. By foregrounding contradiction, ambiguity, and lived experience, the talk shows how identity is not simply inherited or categorised, but continually negotiated through intimate social worlds.
Image Credit: Wu Hsien Yu via Unsplash.
About the speaker
Hoi Yan Yau is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and Program of Global Studies at National Taiwan Normal University. An anthropologist by training, she specialises in East Asian cultural studies, gender and sexuality, Japanese popular culture, censorship, and the cultural politics of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. She is the author of Sex, Culture, and Identity in Taiwan (Routledge, 2026), and has co-authored several books, including Censorship in Japan (Routledge, 2021), The Japanese Adult Video Industry(Routledge, 2018), When Japanese Adult Videos Meet Chinese Sexual Desires (Airiti Press, 2015), Japanese Adult Videos in Taiwan (Routledge, 2014), and The Japanese Adult Video Actress (Up Publications, 2012). Her broader publications address Chinese masculinities, family business succession, pink film, censorship, and the circulation of Japanese popular culture in Chinese-speaking societies.
