On December 4, 2025, GRK 2833 hosted its annual Equal Opportunity Event, which this year took place online and featured Associate Professor Dr. Hongwei BAO (University of Nottingham), delivering a lecture and workshop titled “Decolonising Drag: When East Asian Artists Perform Drag.”
Dr. Hongwei BAO is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Nottingham and a 2024 Marie Jahoda Fellow at the Marie Jahoda Centre for International Gender Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. Trained as a cultural historian, he has authored five monographs on Chinese queer history and culture, including Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance (Routledge, 2022) and Queering the Asian Diaspora (Sage, 2024). He is also an accomplished poet, with recent works such as The Passion of the Rabbit God (Valley Press, 2024), Dream of the Orchid Pavilion (Big White Shed, 2024), and Self-Portrait as a Banana (Poetic Edge, 2025).
Drag is often understood as a predominantly Western phenomenon rooted in Black and Latinx queer communities in the United States and popularised globally through shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race. But as Dr. BAO compellingly demonstrated, this perspective overlooks rich and diverse traditions of cross-gender performance across East Asia. By considering historical practices and contemporary artistic expressions, drag emerges not as a singular Western import but as a multifaceted, culturally dynamic form of queer performance.
The two-hour event took the shape of a three-part workshop. First, Dr. BAO introduced his latest book, Queering the Asian Diaspora (Sage, 2024), offering insight into the varied traditions of East Asian drag and the creative strategies queer East Asian artists employ in diasporic contexts. Then, the community-based documentary “Drag Up” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdayYTfyEgE) was presented, highlighting East Asian artists and their drag performances as acts of expression, resistance, and cultural negotiation. Finally, participants engaged in lively dialogue, reflecting on the gendered, sexual, racial, and political dimensions of drag, both historically and in contemporary diasporic settings.
To encourage further engagement with the topic, the RTG was delighted to provide each member with a personal copy of Queering the Asian Diaspora by Dr. BAO.
