Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 2

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Contributors

Murat Akser is lecturer in cinematic arts, in the School of Creative Arts, University of Ulster, UK. Between 2006‐2013 he was an associate professor of cinema and media studies, chair of new media department and the founding director of the Cinema and Television MA program at Kadir Has University (Istanbul, Turkey). He has his MA in Film and PhD in communication and culture from York University, Canada. He works extensively on political economy of film festivals, film genres and has recently published a book length study of Turkish cinema, Green Pine Resurrected: Film Genre, Parody, and Intertextuality in Turkish Cinema (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010). An independent filmmaker, as well, he has directed short films and music videos and is a member of International Cinematographers Guild and Academy of Canadian Film and Television. [article]

Roberto Reyes Ang is engaged in both scholarly research and in film production. He received his MA in Cinema Studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and his Advanced Certificate in Culture and Media from the same university’s joint program with the Anthropology and Cinema Studies Departments. He was born and raised in the Philippines but has mostly lived in the US. He received his BA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles’ Honors Program with minors in French and Spanish and his AA in Journalism from Chabot College. He is also an alumnus of Deep Springs College. His research interests include gender and racial representations in Philippine cinema, representations of Filipino identities in foreign literature and cinema, theories in documentary filmmaking, and the films of Lav Diaz. He is an award-winning filmmaker and is among the recipients of the Ani Ng Dangal (Harvest of Honors) granted by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in the Philippines. He is currently a member of the faculty at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines’ College of Communication where he is also the adviser of the Mulat Documentary Guild. [article]

Shi‐Yan Chao is a research assistant professor in the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University. With a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University, he has published articles on Chinese queer media (included in Chris Berry et al., The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement) and has taught classes at NYU and Columbia University. His research and teaching interests include Chinese‐language cinema, queer theory/media, documentary, horror, melodrama and martial‐arts film. Co‐founder of the Institute of Tongzhi Studies, he has organized numerous queer film events in the NYC area. [article]

Leon Cheo received his BFA from Chapman University (Singapore) in Creative Producing. He is also an alumni of the Berlinale Talents (2014), the Asian Film Academy (2013) and the Tokyo Talent Campus (2012). His The Three Sisters (2012) was named Best Short Film at the 7th NETPAC‐Jogja Asian Film Festival. His short films have traveled to festivals in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Tehran, Bangkok, Germany, Tokyo, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing a web series, "People Like Us", and developing his debut feature film, For Adults Only. He participated in the Directors' Roundtable for this issue, and his early short film Swing (2010) also appears here. [article]

Chin‐Yi Chung completed doctoral studies at the National University of Singapore in 2011. Her dissertation examined the relation between phenomenology and deconstruction through readings of Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau‐Ponty, Levinas, Ricouer, Blanchot and Jean Luc Nancy within a Derridean framework. She also has interests in post‐colonial and British literature, as well as film, and has served as a teaching assistant on art‐house film at the National University of Singapore. [article]

Kenneth Dobson is currently Adviser to Payap University for Internationalization (Thailand) and is semi‐retired. He lives rural Chiang Mai where he first arrived in 1965 as a Presbyterian missionary and now resides with his spouse, a Chiang Mai man. He has written extensively on LGBTQ and cultural issues. [article]

Victor Fan is Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College, London. He graduated with a PhD from the Film Studies Program and the Comparative Literature Department of Yale University. His dissertation is titled Football Meets Opium: A Topological Study of Political Violence, Sovereignty, and Cinema Archaeology, between "England" and "China." He holds an MFA in Film and Television Productions from the University of Southern California and a BM in Composition from Eastman School of Music. His thesis film from USC, The Well (2000; advised by Judy Irola), was screened in the NewFilmmakers series at the Anthology Film Archives (NYC), the São Paolo International Film Festival, the New Japanese Cinema, Sony Music's Celebration of Asian Heritage and Culture at the Japan Society (NYC), and the Nagisa Oshima Retrospect at the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY). It won the third prize of the Long Narrative category at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival and was screened at the First Annual Film Festival at KCLS‐TV (Los Angeles). Previously, he served as Assistant Professor with the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University between 2010 and 2012, where he taught Chinese cinema and media and modern Chinese literature. He was also the Chair of McGill Equity Subcommittee for Queer People. [article]

Lucifer Hung (aka Hung Ling) writes and publishes numerous queer science fiction novels, reviews and academic articles. S/he teaches cultural studies, queer theory, Marxist theory, and SFFH at Graduate Institute for Gender Studies, Shih Hsin University, Taiwan. [article]

Frank Jacob is assistant professor of world history at the City University of New York (Queensborough Community College). He received his MA in Modern History and Japanese Studies from Würzburg University in 2010, and his PhD in Japanese Studies from Erlangen University in 2012. He worked as lecturer at several German universities as well as assistant professor of modern history at the University of Würzburg, before joining CUNY in 2014. In addition to a number of monographs and edited books, he is the editor of the series Comparative Studies from a Global Perspective and the journal Global Humanities. His primary research interests are modern Japanese history, global and comparative history, as well as cultural history. [article]

Katrien Jacobs is associate professor in Cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has lectured and published widely on sexuality and digital media, contemporary art and media activism. She hold two GRF grants (2010‐2017) about Japanese animation cultures and women's pornographies in greater China and has authored three books on Internet culture, art and sexuality. Her first book, Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), received critical claim amongst media scholars as a pioneering study of emerging web cultures that challenge government regulations and the aims of corporate expansionism. A pioneering study of China's unwieldy sex entertainment and its brutal surveillance, her People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet (Intellect Books, 2012) investigates mainland China's immersion in new trends in sexual entertainment and DIY media. Her most recent book, The Afterglow of Women's Pornography in Post‐Digital China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), focuses on feminist and queer media cultures. [article]

Earl Jackson, Jr. holds his PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University and began his career at the University of Minnesota. Associate Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz, He is currently Professor at National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan), and Co‐Director of the Trans‐Asian Screen Cultures Institute. His publications include Strategies of Deviance, and numerous articles on Japanese and Korean cinema. He is currently finishing a book on anime. He has worked as screenwriter for the film Kyeong (Viewfinder; dir. Kim Jeong, 2008) and received lasting accolades for his performance as the villain in Barbie (dir. Yi Sangwoo, 2010). He is the proud father of one amazingly talented canine "heartbreaker," Chandler Eileen. [article]

Anysay Keola wrote the script for Vientiane in Love, a gay love story that was banned in Laos. He is one of the founders of Lao New Wave Cinema Productions. His new feature film, Above It All, will be the first gay‐themed film to come out of Laos. An in‐depth exploration of LGBT and Hmong minority issue, it awaits release. [article]

Danish Khan considers himself a "passionate filmmaker." He resides in Karachi, Pakistan, where his work can be found commercially and in selected art houses. His poignant short I Accept Me: A Short Romantic Silent Film appears here. [article]

Dai Kojima received his PhD and was Lecturer at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. He holds the MA from Columbia University and BA from Keio University (Tokyo, Japan). His doctoral research, entitled No Arrivals: The Cultural Politics of Mobilities in Queer Asian Diasporas in Canada, examines the cultural politics of mobilities for the organization of counterpublics and oral histories in and across marginalized communities within a frame of transnational migration. His interests combine migration and diaspora studies, queer studies, public knowledge and education, and cultural media studies. Currently, he is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at York University (Canada) and is preparing his first book manuscript entitled No Arrivals: Mobilities, Enigmas and Cultural Politics of Queer Asian Migrations in Canada. [article]

Yutaka Kubo is a PhD candidate in film studies with the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University and is currently a JSPS research fellow. Born in Tokushima, Japan, he received his BA from Framingham State College (Massachusetts), where he majored in English and where film became his passion. While there, his research focus turned to the concept of "home." His MA at Kyoto University allowed him to write on Japanese home movies, resulting in his "The Function of the Semi‐Private Sphere in Home Moviemaking and Exhibition" (CineMagaziNet!). His dissertation research focuses on the cinema of Kinoshita Keisuke in the 1950s, with a specific emphasis on the representation of post‐war Japanese families and on the issues of gender and sexuality. Other current interests include film archive and preservation, the role of imaginary frame in film and photography, and queer film theory. He maintains an abiding interest in Miura Shion, Salman Rushdie and Isak Dinesen. His attitude toward life and work is-as Chaucer describes a student in The Canterbury Tale-"And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche." [article]

Maud Lavin, noted nonfiction writer and cultural historian, is a professor of Visual and Critical Studies and Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a recent recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She is author of Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontgaes of Hannah Hoech (Yale, 1993),Clean New World: Culture, Politics and Graphic Design (MIT, 2001), The Oldest We've Ever Been (Arizona, 2008) and Push Comes to Shove: New Images of Aggressive Women (MIT, 2010). Most recently, she has served as co‐editor with Ling Yang and Jing Jamie Zhao of Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, to be published by Hong Kong University Press in spring, 2017. [article]

Eunah Lee attained a PhD in English at Michigan State University in May, 2016, specializing in Contemporary Transnational Film/Literature and Diaspora studies. Conducting research and teaching in the broader field of world literature and film, she teaches film at MSU as a lecturer. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, The Sensibility of the Adopted: Modern Nation Building and Trauma in the Contemporary Literature and Cinema of East Asia and Its Diaspora. The manuscript contextualizes, within the traumatic modern nation-building process, new aesthetics of and global politics around the contemporary cinematic and literary texts of East Asia and its diaspora. In addition to the book manuscript, she is working on two smaller projects, expanding her research to transnational literature and television dramas from South Korea [article]

Jerry Leonard earned his JD in Law and his MA in English from Syracuse University, as well as his PhD in English (Modern Studies) from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He practiced as an attorney at law in North Carolina until 2006, at which time he accepted a teaching post in Nanjing, China. He is the editor of Legal Studies as Cultural Studies: A Reader in (Post)Modern Critical Theory (1995) and more recently is the author of Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak (2013). He has taught in Mianyang, Sichuan (PRC), and he currently teaches in northwestern China. He is at work on Mo Yan Thought and other writings. [article]

Andrea Lingenfelter is a noted poet, scholar of Chinese literature, and a widely published translator of contemporary Chinese‐language fiction (Farewell My Concubine, Candy) and poetry by authors from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Her translations have appeared in Manoa,Push Open the Window, Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight, Chicago Review, Frontier Taiwan, Time Asia, and Foreign Policy, to name a few, and she composed the subtitles for Chen Kaige's film, Temptress Moon. Her translation of selected poetry by Zhai Yongming, The Changing Room, won a 2012 Northern California Book Award. A 2008 PEN Translation Fund grant winner and 2014 NEA Translation Grant awardee, she is currently translating Hong Kong writer Hon Lai Chu's collection of surrealistic short fiction, The Kite Family, and Wang Anyi's historical novel, Scent of Heaven. She holds the BA in Chinese Studies from UC San Diego, the MA in East Asian Studies from Yale University and the PhD in East Asian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington. She has taught Chinese literature at UC Davis and was the Kiriyama Fellow with the University of San Francisco's Center for Asia Pacific Studies. [article]

Akaitab Mukherjee and Rajni Singh have worked together to provide an interesting argument for this issue. He is pursuing his PhD, under the direction of Rajni Signh, at the Indian School of Mines (Dhanbad, in the state of Jharkhand, India). His research area includes the film adaptations of Rituparno Ghosh, as well as film theory, Indian cinema, subaltern studies and ecocriticism. Dr. Rajni Singh is Associate Professor of English with the Indian School of Mines and has published extensively. Her teaching and research focus primarily on Victorian and Modern Poetry, Feminist Studies, Indian English Literature, Postcolonial literature and ELT. A graduate of Benaras Hindu University, she earned her PhD from the same university. [article]

Oji Nguyễn was born in Vietnam and has received considerable attention as a filmmaker and director. Love Story of a Lovely Tomboy (2012) appears here. [article]

Portico Media Productions is based in Taiwan and has been widely recognized for its accomplishments in content production, content aggregation and channel distribution. It has received major awards including the Golden Horse from The Taipei Film Festival, as well as a grant from Government Information Office. Since 2010, Portico works with key Taiwanese IPTV and digital cable platforms by distributing to them some of the world's premium channels and content. In 2015, Portico Media launched Hahatai, a comedy website of its original comedy shorts to integrate channel content and the internet for better quality entertainment. It strives "to deliver some of the world's best digital contents." Their Taiwanese short film, "Do You, Andy?" appears here. [article]

Uday Ogra is best‐know for short films and video applications. Its value as a public‐service campaign aside, the brilliantly comic A Guy's Buying a Condom for First Time can be viewed here. [article]

Linda Rohrer Paige, retired professor of English, taught literature and women's studies courses at the University in English from the University of Tennessee, where she conducted groundbreaking research on the dramatic representations of women's suicides. She is the co‐editor, with Robert L. McDonald, of S outhern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism (University of Alabama Press, 2002), and her essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as Modern Drama, Papers on Language & Literature, The Literature/Film Quarterly, Studies in Short Fiction, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, and American Culture Studies. [article]

Golam Rabbani is an Assistant Professor at The Department of English, Jahangirnagar University (Dhaka, Bangladesh). Before joining Jahangirnagar, he taught at East West University and Eastern University in the same city. His areas of research include cognitive approaches to literature, postcolonial theory and literature, sexuality and body politics and representation and culture. He has published in journals in the USA and Bangladesh and has presented his research at a number of international conferences. He holds the BA and MA in English from Jahangirnagar University. A grantee of the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship, he obtained his second MA in English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He will embark shortly on his latest journey, working toward his PhD in Canada. [article]

JaeWook Ryu is a current PhD student conducting film studies at Lancaster University (UK). He received three bachelor degrees for information systems, communication and advertisement and completed his Masters degree for film studies at Dongguk University (Korea). He acquired a MBA degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Now, he is looking into the politics of Korean queer cinema and is interested in various Korean transformational contents adopting webtoons,or web-based cartoons in Korea. [article]

Eric Sasono holds his MA in sociology from the University of Nottingham and is currently doing his PhD in film studies at King's College, London. He also works as a freelancer with the BBC. [article]

Katsuhiko Suganuma is Lecturer of Humanities at the University of Tasmania (Australia). His research focuses on queer studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and Japanese studies. He is an author of Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male‐Queer Cultures (Hong Kong University Press, 2012), in which he discusses about the discourses of cross‐cultural queer desires between Japan and the West. He has co‐editedQueer Voices from Japan: First Person Narratives from Japan's Sexual Minorities (Lexington Books, 2007), andBoys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan (Mississippi University Press, 2015). He is a co‐founder ofJapan Association for Queer Studies (JAQS), established in 2007, and has continued to publish an annual refereed academic journal, Journal for Queer Studies Japan. He is currently a member of The Ally Network at the University of Tasmania which endeavors to realize an inclusive university culture for people of diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. [article]

Sreedevi T. K. is a much‐respected independent scholar in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. Her research includes the politics of cultural artifacts. Among her major essays are "Popularity of Folk Songs and Televisualization with Special Reference to Kalabavan Mani's Folk Songs," "Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times as a Critique of Industrial Modernism" and "Counter Points: Politics of Worldliness in Comparative Literature." She completed her MPhil at Central University of Kerala (India) in English and Comparative Literature in 2013 and has since both been involved as a Guest Lecturer and within the Teacher Training Program. She has more recently joined the faculty of Carmel College, Mala. She and her family reside in the small village of Valoor in the Thrissur district of Kerala, located along the southern tip of India. Thrissur is, she likes to explain, the cultural center of "God's Own Country." [article]

Siu Yan Xavier Tam received his BA and MPhil in Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong. He chaired the Hong Kong International Deaf Film Festival between 2011 and 2014. He is currently working in the Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong. [article]

Christa Zeller Thomas is the recipient of a prestigious international Lise‐Meitner Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship for research into representations of the "good mother" in women's life writings of WWII at the University of Graz (Austria), as well as a researcher and writer who now resides in Ottawa, Canada. Her work focuses on the intersection of memory, history, and identity/performance, and explores issues of place, self‐representation, and gender in women's writing. She is especially interested in narratives that emerged from historical periods of change or crisis, among them WWI and WWII, and also blogs about Canada's Women of Confederation at http://women‐of‐confederation.ca. [article]

Nguyễn Quốc Thành lives in Hanoi, Vietnam. His works, including photography, writing, performance, installation, organization of art events explore issues of queer aesthetics and activism. He has participated in exhibitions and performance art festivals in Vietnam, Japan and the USA. He is a founding member of NhÃ SÃ n Collective - an independent contemporary art collective in Hanoi. In 2013, he founded and organized the first queer art festival in Vietnam called Queer Forever! - an interdisciplinary platform for sharing love and knowledge on queerness and Vietnamese culture. . [article]

Rujie Wang is Professor and Chair of Chinese Studies with the College of Wooster. After completing work at Peking Normal University and his BA at Wabash College, he completed his MA and PhD at Rutgers University. His current research interests include Lu Xun, Chinese realism, and Chinese cinema and has appeared in East Asia, Asian Cinema, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature and Journal of Asian Studies. [article]

Reid Waterer grew up in the San Jose area and now resides in Los Angeles, California. A veteran of 200+ film festivals across six continents with his award‐winning films, he suggests that his love of film blossomed as a child when his father took him to see such classics as Ran, Diva and Das Boot at the Camera One Cinemas near San Jose State University. A graduate of USC Film School, he began his career with a brief stint working for Peter Bogdanovich before moving into editing movie advertising trailers and TV spots. In addition to his films, he has created ads for such works as The Hangover, Rounders, Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Mamma Mia! His 2004 feature, The Deviants, was released on DVD or on television in five countries, including the United States, and led him to be called "a talent to watch." He is a member of the Directors' Roundtable with this issue, and his award‐winning You Can't Curry Love (2009) can also be found here. [article]

S. Louisa Wei was born in Dongying, Shandong, spent her childhood in Xi'an (PRC) and is widely recognized for her work as a filmmaker, film producer, script translator and educator. She studied comparative literature and film in Canada, receiving her MA from Carleton University and her PhD from University of Alberta. She collaborated with veteran Hong Kong filmmaker and critic Law Kar on the feature documentary on the life and times of Esther Eng, Southern China's first woman director and San Francisco native. The result, Golden Gate Girls, made its world premiere at the 37th Hong Kong International Film Festival in April, 2013. Teaches at the City University of Hong Kong, she has recently released her much‐anticipated monograph, Golden Gate Girls (Hong Kong University Press, 2016). Her interview with the Directors' Roundtable can be found here. [article]

James A. Wren holds the PhD in comparative literature from The University of Washington, the DPhil in modern Japanese literature and cultural studies from Niigata University (Japan), and a DSc in immunogenetics and Silk Road Studies from The Chinese University of Mining and Technology (PRC). He has previously taught a Hefei Polytechnic University, Rhodes College and The University of Hawai'i and has widely published in the areas of modern Japanese, medical history, disability studies, film and performance studies, and narrative theory. He routinely publishes in English, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia and German. He has also received numerous international awards both in teaching and in poetry; his musical compositions for strings, winds and chamber orchestra have debuted widely, from the USA, Canada and Lithuania, Korea and Japan. He retired as Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at San José State University. [article]

Hyoe Yamamoto is a Japanese director who can trace her love for film back to he father and " a new invention at the time called videotapes (beta tapes mostly)." The very first film she saw in theaters was the French soft‐porn sensation Emmanuelle. Her short film, When I Become Silent, screened at the Tokyo Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival and is credited with having led to the great exposure of LGBT films in the market. It can also be viewed here. [article]

Hyon Joo Yoo is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author ofCinema at the Crossroads: Nation and the Subject in East Asian Cinema and co‐edited with Naoki SakaiThe Trans‐Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society. Her essays have appeared in Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Medical Humanities, positions: east asia cultures critique, and Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema. [article]

Jun Zubillaga‐Pow holds the PhD in Historical Musicology from King's College, London. His research interest includes twentieth‐century musical and sexual history specializing in Germanic and Sinitic cultures. He is the co‐editor with Audrey Yue of Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures (Hong Kong University Press, 2013) and Singapore Soundscape: Musical Renaissance of a Global City (2014). He has published in Music and Letters, Intersections, Sexualities, and South East Asia Research, and is currently editing two research volumes on Schoenberg studies and the LGBT in the Islamic South. [article]

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