International Center for Cultural Studies

Jui-an Chou

International Center for Cultural Studies Postdoctoral Fellow(2018/7-2020/7)

PhD Dissertation
Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar

Research Project
My doctoral research focused on the critical history of reading cross-gender homoerotic texts, in particular Boys’ Love, a Japanese genre and subculture that has spawned creative communities in numerous Asian cultures. Amid the rise of Boys’ Love as an increasingly popular scholarly topic, my engaged with the critical reception history of Boys’ Love. By challenging the colonial unconscious underlying the instinct to read an East-Asian subculture through Western theories of gender and sexuality, my dissertation proposes Boys’ Love fantasy itself as a critical method for reading cross-writing texts, including those that are outside of the confines of East-Asian popular culture.

My postdoctoral research works closely with the subproject “The Ongoing Shadow of Post/Cold War Cultures on Inter-Asia Knowledge Decolonization.” I propose to further historicize my analysis of academic knowledge production both within and surrounding inter-Asian cultures. I hope to contribute to the conversations around topics of inter-Asian cultural exchange, the genealogy and production of critique, and the colonial unconscious of academic knowledge.