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About this talk

The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Hoi Yan Yau to discuss her new book, Sex, Culture, and Identity in Taiwan , exploring intimacy, agency and identity in contemporary Taiwan. This talk introduces Sex, Culture, and Identity in Taiwan , a person-centred ethnographic study of how individuals negotiate gender, sexuality, kinship, and identity in contemporary Taiwan. Moving beyond macro-level accounts of Taiwanese identity shaped by colonialism, nationalism, democratisation, and geopolitics, the talk turns to intimate lives: family relationships, sexual histories, filial obligations, and emotional contradictions. Through selected life stories, it examines how social structures such as patrilineal kinship, gender norms, class mobility, and cultural expectations shape people’s possibilities without fully determining their actions. The talk argues that agency is best understood not as pure autonomy or heroic resistance, but as navigation within constraint. It also rethinks gender as a relational kinship practice and sexuality as historically and emotionally mediated. By foregrounding contradiction, ambiguity, and lived experience, the talk shows how identity is not simply inherited or categorised, but continually negotiated through intimate social worlds. Image Credit: Wu Hsien Yu via Unsplash.

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