Office: MC 208 C
Phone: 902-457-6504
Email: ian.tian@msvu.ca
Ian Liujia Tian (PhD, University of Toronto) is an Assistant Professor of Global Equity Studies. Their research focuses broadly on queer Marxism, queer Asian studies, queer/feminist science and technology, and Asian Canadian studies. They are particularly interested in queer/trans pleasure and survival produced in the interstices of transnational capitalism in East Asia and its diasporas. Those interests extend to the technologies and infrastructures that undergird these economies and shape racial, gender, and sexual subjectivities.
Dr. Tian is currently working on their first monograph entitled Pleasure Production: Cruising Love and Labour in China’s Global Fast Fashion, an ethnography of migrant, gender and sexual non-conforming garment factory workers’ cruising practices. The book offers a new lens to elucidate how embodied sensations and intimate relations, such as pleasure, entangle with global capitalism’ differences-making at the intersection of class, space, urban/rural differences, gender, and sexuality.
Outside of academia, Ian is active in racialized queer community and migrant workers organising, which culminated in the co-edited volume Asian Canada is Burning. Further, they are passionate about ballroom culture in China and in East/Southeast Asia, which is the basis of their second book project, tentatively entitled Sinophone Renditions.
SELECTED ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS:
Books and Edited Volumes:
Pleasure Production: Cruising Love and Labour in China’s Global Fast Fashion (Manuscript in Preparation).
2025 Asian Canada is Burning: theories, methods, pedagogies, and praxes. Brill. With Torres, R. and Chau, Coly. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004711792
Peer-reviewed Articles:
2025 “Queering Digitally mediated Social Reproduction.’’ Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (Forthcoming).
2025 “Between Parody and Pleasure: Performance and Mediation in Shange Videos in Southwestern China.” Feminist Formations (Forthcoming).
2025 “Between Pleasure and Precarity.” Made in China Journal (Online First). https://madeinchinajournal.com/2025/07/15/between-pleasure-and-precarity-surviving-love-and-labour-in-southern-chinas-urban-villages/
2025 “Queer Techno-Orientalism as Methods.” Media, Culture and Society (Online First) https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437251350046
2025 “What’s Left of China?’’ Dialogues in Human Geography 15, no.1: 141-144. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206241259447
2023 “Being Too Asian: Migrant Student Time and Resistance within the Canadian University.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 47: 119-131. https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2023-0019
2023 “Unpacking racism during COVID-19: narratives from racialized Canadian gay, bisexual, and queer men.” Int J Equity Health 22, 152, with Grey, C., Skakoon-Sparling, S. et al. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-023-01961-z
2023 “Divine Queer Sorrow, or Beyond Mythical Reparation.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 46: 260-279. https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2022-0007
2022 “Critical Socialist Feminism in China: xingbie (gender), the State and Community-based Socialism.” Rethinking Marxism 34, no.4: 519-537.
https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2144068
2021 “On Rescuable and Expendable Life: bioavailability, surplus time, and the queer politics of reproduction.” Journal of Canadian Studies 54, no.2-3: 483-507. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs-2020-0015
2020 “Perverse Politics, Postsocialist Radicality: Queer Marxism in China.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 7, no.2: 48-68. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.7.2.0048
2019 “Graduated In/visibility: reflections on Ku’er activism in (post)socialist China.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no.3: 56-75. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.6.3.0056
Peer-reviewed Chapters:
2025 “Infrastructure and/as Mediation: China 2098’s Affective Politics.” In Techno-Orientalism Vol II, edited by David Roh, Greta Nui, Betsy Huang and Christopher Fan. Rutgers University Press. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/techno-orientalism-2-0/9781978839212/
2025 “Introduction.” In Asian Canada is Burning, 1-13, edited by Rose Torres, Ian Liujia Tian, and Coly Chu. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004711792_002
2025 “Labour, Intimacy, Diaspora: Queer Asian Studies in Canada.” In Asian Canada is Burning, 88-96, edited by Rose Torres, Ian Liujia Tian, and Coly Chu. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004711792_009
2024 “Remaindered Commons: Notes towards post-socialist futures.” In Spatial futures: Difference and the Post-Anthropocene, 207-234, edited by Eaves LaToya, Heidi Nast, and Alex Papadopoulos. London: Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9761-9_5
SELECTED PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIPS:
2022 “Will you take on the challenge? Combatting racism in our communities will require all our efforts.” Engage, with Daniel Grace and Cornel Gray. https://www.engage-men.ca/will-you-take-on-the-challenge-combatting-racism-in-our-communities-will-require-all-our-efforts/
2022 “Logistics Workers’ Strikes and Social Reproduction in China.” Midnight Sun. https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/logistics-workers-strikes-and-social-reproduction-in-china/
2021 “Spaces of Feminist Hope: Notes from Two Acts.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/space-of-feminist-hope-notes-from-two-acts
2021 “Socialism from the Grassroots: new directions of Leftist Organizing in post-socialist China.” Upping the Anti 22: 93-110. Republished by Lausan. https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/22-socialism-from-the-grassroots/https:/lausancollective.com/2022/new-directions-leftist-organizing-china/
2020 “Vampiric Affect: The Afterlife of a Metaphor in a Global Pandemic.” Social Text Online. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/vampiric-affect-the-afterlife-of-a-metaphor-in-a-global-pandemic/
2020 “Living Peripheral, Thinking South: Decolonising Queer Marxism, or, Why Does Queer Marxism need Asia?” Invert Journal 1: 36-46, with Sabra Razaei, Vinaya Gopaal and Mani Azimzadeh. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341395753_Living_Peripheral_Thinking_South_Decolonising_Queer_Marxism_or_Why_Does_Queer_Marxism_need_Asia_Part_1