About
Scholar. Writer. Teacher. Translator.
Photo by Anna Skarpelis
Grace En-Yi Ting (she/they) has a Ph.D. in Japanese Literature from Yale University and conducts research in a fluctuating combination of English, Japanese, and Chinese. She is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Hong Kong. You can most often find her in Hong Kong or passing through Tokyo or Taipei.
Their research demonstrates the intellectual joy of bridging disciplines and finding & creating new intersections and forms of resonance. They specialize in queer and feminist approaches to Japanese literature and popular culture, with a focus on women writers and girls’ culture. In addition, they write on problems of race and gender for non-white women in academic spaces of the U.S., Japan, and Hong Kong.
Her most recent writing situates Japanese literature and queer feminist reading practices within transnational, multilingual encounters involving Sinophone contexts. Her dissertation dealt with “queer readings” finding hope in representations of failure in Japanese literature; now, she theorizes a queer feminist diasporic ethical praxis found through minor intimacies of unexpected encounters between texts and readers as well as everyday acts of translation across contexts of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, & the U.S.
They write mostly in English but have collaborated with others to translate their public lectures and academic writing between English, Japanese, and Chinese. She has also worked on translations of Japanese fiction into English.
She has taught in Hong Kong on transnational, postcolonial, and women of color feminisms; queer and feminist Asian literatures; and queer theory. In the past, she taught Japanese girls’ culture, Japanese literature, and translation. She is also a former Japanese language instructor with experience teaching 1st-year, 3rd-year, and 4th-year classes in the United States (who sometimes feels wistful no longer having the chance to queer Japanese language classrooms).
She is equally dedicated to research and teaching. She is invested in speaking publicly on queer and feminist issues across linguistic, national, and political boundaries, particularly in Asian contexts.
Photo by Wen Liu
(from “Grief, Translation, and the ‘Asian American Woman’ in Hong Kong,” 2022)
“…I hoped to teach students that fault lines often taken for granted are not impossible to overcome. If the remarkable poetry of the texts that I taught, or something about the space of my class, could make room for students to interrogate their own identities and defy walls created by structural and historical injustice in Hong Kong, I believed that they would be able find more persistent, sustaining lines of hope and solidarity to hold onto—with each other, with the marginalized both in and outside of Hong Kong, with feminist and queer texts—instead of being crushed by grief in the days to come. The fact that identities are socially constructed does not erase their trauma, but at least it suggests the potential for reconstruction: it suggests that we live with the burden of history, but we can also try to write a new chapter of history that does something differently.”
(from「クィア・フェミニストの人生を築くということ: 越境する研究とコミュニティ」 “Building a Queer Feminist Life: Research and Community across Borders,” 2020)
「この言葉を必要としているすべての人に送りたいと思います。あなたの失敗、あるいはあなたが自分の失敗と見なすものは、あなたの人間としての価値を決定づけることはありません。あなたの弱さ、もしくは心の傷は、あなたのせいではありません。あなたは決して遅れていませんし、すべてが手遅れでもありません。周りに合わせて溶け込まなくてもいいです。中途半端で、迷ったり、混乱したりしても構いません。あなたが選んだ生き方、人の愛し方は、誰かを感心させる必要がありません。あなたは、間違いなく、いつでも人として十分です。私のクィア・フェミニズムの基盤にあるのは、こんな思いなのではないかと思います。」
“This is a message I want to send to anyone who simply needs to hear it. Your failures, or what you perceive as your failures, do not determine your worth as a person. Your weakness and trauma are not your fault. You are not behind, and it is not too late. You do not need to fit in. It does not matter if you are “in between” in some way, lost, or confused. The way you live your life, or how you love, does not need to impress anyone. You are always, without a doubt, enough. This is what is at the heart of my queer feminism.”