Charlie Yi Zhang is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. He specializes in neoliberal globalization and its cultural and material articulations through gender, sexuality, race, and class in the Asia-Pacific region. His first monograph, Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China, was published by Duke University Press in 2022. At the center of Dreadful Desires is a vibrant landscape of public intimacy—as what Zhang calls “the borderless Loveland”—that subtends and underpins social upheavals across China and the globe. Drawing upon discursive analysis, empirical data, and ethnographic fieldwork as well as popular culture texts, he delineates how love is orchestrated as an apparatus of sentiments integrating individual subject making with exploitative biopolitics to serve collective interests of the Chinese state and transnational capital. On the one hand, his analysis unpacks the ways in which love is projected as a cluster of desirable potentialities that generate enduring attachment shaping people’s subjectivities, and how individual articulation of love is aligned with calculated regulation of population to reproduce labor force fueling China’s marketization and re-integration with the global economy. On the other hand, this engaged scrutiny casts light on the inherent contradiction between rationality and affect that spawns incessant ruptures within the transnational neoliberal system, such as unremitting resistance from the groups that are marginalized in the Loveland and escalating confrontation between the US and China. This book thus demonstrates how affect theory can be used as a heuristic device to reexamine challenges from neoliberalism, transnational labor exploitation, and rising authoritarianism for new possibilities of social change. Dreadful Desires won the 2023 Annual Book Prize of Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies.
Zhang's research has been published in leading journals of gender and sexuality studies, Asian studies, American studies as well as media and cultural studies. His teaching interests include social movements, gender across the world, feminist theory, affect theory, masculinities studies, body and biopolitics, queer of color analysis, transnational sexualities, gender and sexuality in East and Southeast Asia.
M.A., Communication Studies, Fudan University, 2007
B.A., English, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2002
- Gender and Sexuality in Southeast and East Asia
- Affect Studies
- Neoliberalism and Globalization
- Queer of Color Analysis
- Masculinities Studies
- Media and Cultural Studies
- International Political Economy
- Critical Animal Studies
- Gender and Women's Studies
- Social Theory
- Health, Society and Populations