Date: 28 November 2019 (Thur)
Time: 4:30-7:30pm
Venue: Meng Wah Complex, G/F, MWT3, HKU

About the film:
Two decades after her suicide in Paris in 1995 at the age of 26, Taiwan’s foundational lesbian novelist Qiu Miaojin has prevailed as a global Chinese LGBTQ icon.  Documentarian Evans Chan traces Qiu’s lovelorn footsteps from Taiwan to Paris to Tokyo, resulting in a Chinese filmic counterpoint to "Blue is the Warmest Color" with a tragic note. Blending fiction, performing art, and rare interviews with Qiu’s friends, advocates, and associates, including France’s feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous, Love and Death in Montmartre is an artful exploration of the poignant and inspiring life and death of a gay-rights “martyr” in Taiwan, which, in 2019, became the first place in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.

Date: 29 November 2019 (Fri)
Time: 9-5:30pm
Venue: 4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

This conference engages with the literary work of Qiu Miaojin, a famous lesbian writer of Taiwan whose premature death in 1995 marks a watershed moment in queer and literary discourses both in and out of Taiwan. This conference takes the specific case of Qiu’s lifework to investigate how the mobility of queer desire enables a kind of cross-genre, transmedial, and transnational mode of textuality. Furthermore, it raises the question of why a queer Sinophone author like Qiu attracts such a global readership. In short, it suggests that the Qiu Miaojin cultural phenomenon provides a specific case for interdisciplinary engagement across literary studies, cinema studies, gender studies, and transnational theory.

Panel 1 (9:15-11AM): The Legacy of Qiu Miaojian: Writers in Dialogue
Panel 2 (11AM-12:30PM): Body, Affect, and Sentiment
Panel 3 (1:45-3:15PM): Queer Literary Publics and Performance
Panel 4 (3:30-5PM): New Research on Qiu Miaojin
Roundtable (5-5:30PM): Moderated by Alvin K. Wong and Evans Chan