Overview
Kexuan is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy and a certificate student of Gender Sexuality Feminist Studies & East Asian Studies (APSI). Their research interests lie at the intersection of critical disability studies, feminist/queer/trans studies, memory studies, and asian american & diaspora studies. They also have a deep fondness for Taoist philosophies, especially the beautiful and hilarious philosophical writings in Zhuangzi.
One of Kexuan's projects is in feminist epistemology, concerning the epistemic shift that some people experience when they are born into a new and more marginalized social identity (e.g., diasporic experiences, gender transitioning, becoming disabled). They ask how the fluidity in one's social identities complicates theses of standpoint epistemology. In another project, they wrote about the hermeneutical dimension of oppressive double binds and creative resistance strategies that minoritarian subjects employ through minoritarian world traveling/ world-making.
Most recently, Kexuan wrote about trans-haunting as a means to articulate the way that both transness and (mis)translation can be intimated through spectral tropes of haunting, ghostliness, and exorcism. They argue that these spectral tropes can function simultaneously as a site of cisnormative violence and a means through which trans subjects can articulate their own complex and elusive relationship with body and temporality. Trans-haunting also points to the ghostly dimension of mis/translation and the spectral aspect that constitutes practices of voicing and listening. Currently, Kexuan is working on a project about disability arts by Sinophone diasporic & disabled artists, exploring ways in which disability and diaspora intersect—particularly in relation to "home"/"(un)belonging" in its multivalent corporeal, material, and affective sense
You are welcome to learn more about Kexuan or their research on their Personal Website.