Eva Cheuk-Yin Li

Eva Cheuk-Yin Li obtained her PhD in Gender, Media, and Culture from King’s College London, and MPhil in Sociology and Bachelor of Social Sciences (First Class Honours) from the University of Hong Kong. Trained as a sociologist, she is interested in the interdisciplinary inquiry of media and culture, and gender and sexualities in transnational and East Asian contexts.

Email: licy.eva [at] gmail [dot] com
Website: https://evacy-li.com/ , https://kcl.academia.edu/EvaCYLi/

Read Li's interview in Sociology Lens at http://www.sociologylens.net/article-types/opinion/early-career-researcher-focus-interview-eva-cheuk-yin-li-gender-performance-east-asia/20862

• Gender, Sexuality and Intimacy
• Media and Cultural Studies
• East Asian Popular Culture
• Fandom and Audience Reception
• Qualitative Research Methods

Li's dissertation, entitled 'Querying gender: The everyday practice of zhongxing (neutral gender/sex) among Chinese women', has been awarded the Elsevier Outstanding PhD Thesis Prize.

Zhongxing (中性, lit. 'middle gender/sex' or 'neutrla gender/sex') is a substantial mediated and gendered phenomenon that refers to the proliferating representation and self-representation of women doing non-normative gender by using the ambiguous and generic euphemism 'zhongxing' to defer the process of identification. She adopts a transnational queer feminist framework which is principally informed by interactionist sociology, materialist feminism, queer theory, and the queer Asian critique. She formulates the everyday doing of zhongxing as a tripartite matrix of practices, as opposed to a specific gender or sexual identity. By adopting a grounded theory approach that combines semi-structured interviews in Hong Kong and Shanghai and internet discourse analysis, she argues that zhongxing constitutes a contested and contradictory space of inbetween-ness for women of different sexual orientations to negotiate their gendered selfhood, which in turn provides a critical understanding to the transforming gender and sexual contours under the transnational processes of globalisation, hybridisation, and multiple Chinese modernities.

Li's research and teaching interests include (1) the transcultural reception and consumption of media and culture, (2) gender, sexuality, and intimacy in the era of disjunctive globalisation, and (3) qualitative research methods and methodology.

Li is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She has taught in the Department of Culture, Media, and Creative Industries at King’s College London and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She has also been invited to deliver guest lectures and talks to the general public and postgraduate, undergraduate, and A Level students in China, Hong Kong, and the UK.