The study underneath the practice.
My readings are grounded in scholarship. I study how Taoism refuses clean lines between opposites — being and non-being, soft and hard, masculine and feminine — and what that way of seeing offers a life.
Know the Masculine, Maintain the Feminine: A Daoist Approach to Translating Queer Chinese Poetry
A translated anthology and critical introduction — seven chapters of the Dao De Jing and seven poems by six poets across roughly 1,500 years — under one frame: that Daoism’s refusal to draw clean lines between opposites makes separating “queer” from “normal” desire a non-question. Same-sex attachment reads as a continuously legible thread in Chinese literature for fifteen centuries; what changed was not Chinese desire but Chinese discourse, under Western medical and Christian pressure. The introduction sets out a translation philosophy organised around comprehensibility, then works through four case-study decisions that let the texts argue in their own register.
The Useless Tree: Tang Ping, Nihilism, and the Sage's Punk
A hybrid scholarly essay and personal manifesto arguing that China’s tang ping (“lying flat”) movement is not resistance, as the Western press frames it, but the latest expression of a 2,500-year lineage of philosophical withdrawal — Zhuangzi, Tao Yuanming, Han Shan, the Seven Sages — grounded in wu wei. Lying flat is a quiet form of punk that canonical punk theory doesn’t account for, and it becomes newly available to women only when feminists refuse the social-reproductive labour that historically subsidised male sages.
Religion in China — documentary fieldwork
Fieldwork on religious practice across contemporary China, carried out over December 2023 and January 2024: the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Beijing, a Muslim congregation in Beijing, the former synagogues and Jewish quarter of Harbin, the Daoist temple complex on Laojun Mountain in Henan, and the Shaolin Temple. Funded by the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, University of Notre Dame. No film was made from this material — a short assembly was cut for the funder, and the footage otherwise remains unedited and unreleased. The Laojun Mountain material in particular is where the Daoist practice underneath these readings was learned in situ rather than from a text.
Also ongoing: work on Nüshu, the women-only script of Hunan — Reviving Nüshu, supported by the Steinhaus/Zisson Grant at Brown's Pembroke Center, and Signal's Universe, an animated series built on that research. It is also becoming a hand-bound Nüshu third-day book →