In How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) and Land of Milk and Honey (2023), C. Pam Zhang explores Chinese diasporic subjectivities across shifting temporal and geographic terrains. Adopting a queer counter-perspective, she unsettles racist, classist, and heteronormative narratives of ‘Chineseness’, ‘manhood’, and ‘womanhood’ in nineteenth-century and contemporary Euro-American contexts. Using these two novels as examples, this essay traces the dialectic of self-representation and interpellation, the afterlives of transgenerational trauma, and the imbrication of aspiration with pleasure. It further elucidates how Zhang entwines debates on universal human rights amid anthropogenic catastrophe with an analysis of individual responsibility under transnational capitalism.

Since the 2010s, the debate about anti-gender politics has centred on the rise of right-wing forces and ideologies that are trans-exclusionary, queerphobic, and anti-feminist—particularly hostile to queer and intersectional feminisms (Butler 2024). These movements often weaponise victimhood to uphold existing structures of power: cisgender women are portrayed as victims of transgender rights under cis-sexism; men […]

It has become something of a truism, in both academic discourse and everyday conversation, that invisibility is a central form of queer oppression. In a culture in which queer lives are erased—whether through passive ignorance, deliberate exclusion, or reductive portrayals as tragic, broken figures—the urgency of authentic representation cannot be overstated. But when it comes […]