Date: Tuesday, 27 April 2020
Time: 5 PM (GMT +8)
Speakers: Angie Baecker, Puja Kapai, Grace Ting
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong

On March 16, 2021, a white gunman targeted three Asian owned businesses in Atlanta and murdered eight people, six of them Asian American women. Panelists will offer insights into what these killings reveal about the intersections of racism and misogyny. In particular, they will contextualize the impact of the pandemic on anti-Asian discrimination against broader histories of xenophobia, imperialism, and sexism linking the United States and Asia. Importantly, they will suggest ways in which these events in the United States are relevant for Hong Kong today.

About the speakers:
Angie Baecker is a lecturer in the department of Art History. Her research focuses on the cultural and material history of Maoist China, the politics of the aesthetic, and the postsocialist legacy in contemporary China. She received her PhD in 2020 from the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, where she wrote her dissertation on the theorization and representation of social reproduction in works of literature, film, and art from the Maoist period. She holds a master’s degree in modern Chinese literature from
Tsinghua University. She is a 2020 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant, and her writing on contemporary art has been published widely in venues including Artforum, ArtAsiaPacific, frieze, LEAP, The New Statesman, and Vulture. She previously worked as an art critic and art book editor in Beijing.

Puja Kapai is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, Convenor of the Women’s Studies Research Centre and Director of the Social Justice Summer Internship at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). An expert in international human rights law, minority rights, and intersectional legal studies, she focuses on the rights of communities marginalized on the grounds of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and citizenship. Her recent work includes a study on the experiences and help-seeking behaviors of ethnic minority victims of domestic violence, and a comprehensive report on the Status of Ethnic Minorities in Hong Kong 1997-2014. Professor Kapai has recently been awarded for her contribution to teaching, research, and the community-based impact of her work with the American Chamber of Commerce’s Women of Influence Professional Woman of the Year Award 2019.

Grace En-Yi Ting is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). As a queer and feminist studies scholar, she specializes in Japanese women writers and girls’ culture, as well as transnational feminisms and queer politics. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining femininities and female homosociality within representations of daily life by women writers in post-1980’s Japan. Her other work involves critiques of race and gender in the field of Japanese studies, as well as interrogating tensions between concepts of “queer” and “Asia” across Japanese, Sinophone, and Asian American literary discourses. At HKU, she teaches courses on postcolonial and transnational feminisms, queer and feminist literature, and queer theory and lesbian studies.

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at HKU. He is currently writing a book titled Queer Hong Kong as Method. Wong has published in journals