Yo-Hsin Yang, Assistant Professor

Personal Information

Research Interests: Gender/Sexuality Studies, Social Geography, Transnational Migration, Sociology of Tourism, Nation and Geopolitics
E-mail：yoshi28@mail.nsysu.edu.tw
Extension： 5672
Office： SS 5032

Education

2019 Ph.D. in Geography, Durham University, UK
2012 M.A. in European Culture and Tourism, National Taiwan Normal University
2008 B.A. in Political Science (International Relations), National Taiwan University

Current Position

• Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, National Sun Yat-sen University

Experience

• Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica (Aug. 2023 – Jul. 2024)
• Postdoctoral Researcher, Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, National Science and Technology Council (Jun. 2021 – Dec. 2022)
• Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Sociology, National Sun Yat-sen University (Aug. 2020 – May 2021)

Research Statement

I am a social geologist—or rather, a social geographer—whose research interests encompass gender and sexuality studies, transnational migration, tourism culture, and nationalism and geopolitics. My research focuses on untangling the intersections between gender and sexualities across various geographical scales, such as physical spaces, communities, cities, nations, regions, and the global, as well as the resulting social relations and human-environment interactions. I am particularly interested in how humans, especially marginalized minority groups, use everyday living spaces and places to imbue these material territories with unique social meanings and symbolic significance, and how these highly spatialized social behaviors construct and reproduce our genders and sexualities. Grounded in the spatial perspective of human geography and drawing upon theories and methods from various humanities and social science disciplines, my research agenda expands into studies of the "geographic," "social," and "global" South. I hope to add a socio-spatial analytical layer to gender/sexuality studies and sociology through this interdisciplinary approach, further deconstructing the complex dynamic co-construction processes among individuals, social structures, and social practices behind the generation of gender and sexuality. My research trajectory and future plans are outlined below:

Dissertation Research: Tourism Consumption / The "Geographic" South

My doctoral dissertation focused on the intersection of transnational mobility and gender/sexualities, taking the "geographic" South of Thailand in Southeast Asia as my field site. It asked: given that Taiwan is already East Asia's freest and most open "Asian queer lighthouse" where queer tourists from all over scramble to visit and pilgrimage, why do Taiwanese gay men "swim against the current" and head "south" to Bangkok, Thailand, for sexual tourism consumption practices? Combining an ethnography following 65 Taiwanese gay men traveling in Bangkok, supplemented by a mixed research method of in-depth interviews and multi-textual analysis of online and physical texts, the study drew upon two sociological and anthropological concepts—field theory and liminality—to analyze how the specific geopolitics of East/Southeast Asia and people's specific geographical imaginations of traveling to Thailand as a time-space make Bangkok a "sexual field" desiring East Asian bodies and a "man-made liminal space" co-produced by tourists and locals. This enabled Taiwanese gay men traveling in the city to shake off the constraints of everyday "respectful" sexual moral politics and singular mainstream aesthetic standards on their intimate interactions with others. In contexts where personal sexual appeal is significantly enhanced and unconstrained by social sexual norms, they frequently engaged in various erotic practices, subsequently translating these experiences into social and sexual capital for integration into Taiwan's gay community later on. Thus, I argue that Bangkok's sex tourism functions in contemporary society as a rite of passage elevating respondents into "normal" gay men. The empirical analysis of this study supplements the geographical perspectives of spatiality and temporality to the concepts of field and liminality, exploring the contextualized traits of these two scenarios and their mutually constitutive relationship with human behavior.

Postdoctoral Research: Spatial Governance / The "Social" South

Continuing my research interest in the intersection of gender/sexuality and space alongside a socio-spatial analytical approach, my postdoctoral stage shifted the spatial scale of research from the "nation" to the "city." Collaborating with Professor Mei-Hsuan Chen, I focused on the everyday interactions between residents surrounding Kaohsiung's urban red-light districts and the sex industry—two marginalized groups of the "social" South. I analyzed the dynamic relationship between the former's shifting sexual moral attitudes and the multi-layered sexual landscapes within the city through continuous friction and negotiation. Integrating interdisciplinary perspectives from the sociology of gender and urban geography, this study argued from the concept of "place stigma" that society often presupposes communities and the people living within them as symbolically interdependent communities. This taints both the red-light district and its residents with the moral and class stigma of the sex industry's immorality and vulgarity, subjecting them to various material and symbolic violences associated with sex work, which in turn triggers or even deepens their conservative and intolerant attitudes toward the sex industry. This reveals that the clustering patterns of the sex industry within cities are not merely spatial products of sexual moral operations; they simultaneously reproduce residents' sexual moral values. Against this backdrop, sex industry establishments created a flexible erotic visibility through special spatial deployments or disguised material facades, forming multi-layered "sexual landscapes" where they could selectively appear. This indirectly created an ambiguous space for residents to turn a blind eye, shifting them toward a more accepting stance on the moral spectrum. This study not only proposes a perspective on landscapes and visibility for the dialectic of spatial zoning use in urban geography, but its discussion on designated sex districts also represents a public sociology practice of geography intervening in national spatial policymaking.

Future Research: Transnational Migration / The "Global" South

Inheriting the research concerns of my dissertation regarding how gender/sexuality and geopolitics trigger transnational mobility, my future research project will incorporate a national analytical dimension, shifting the research theme from "tourism" to "migration." I will explore the phenomenon of foreign gay men continuously migrating to live in Taiwan alongside Taiwanese gay men migrating abroad for sex migration, comparing the position and significance of Taiwan as a "Southern" nation and nationality in global transnational mobility. In preliminary contacts with these foreign queer immigrants during pilot research, I found that they all viewed Taiwan—reputed as the "Asian queer lighthouse"—as a spiritual "home." Their transnational mobility seemingly aligns with traditional perspectives on sexual migration, assuming that sexual minority groups always migrate to free and open countries, granting themselves opportunities to explore and construct sexual identity and intimate relationships. However, from the findings of my dissertation, the gay community culture in Taiwan that theoretically promotes foreign queers' development of sexual identity and thus attracts them to migrate to Taiwan is precisely what simultaneously creates a powerful push factor driving a large number of domestic gay men to travel abroad. Therefore, is Taiwan's social environment as "gay-friendly" to everyone as foreign media and the domestic government claim? Or is Taiwan's free and progressive gay community culture only conditionally open to individual differences across different national identities and social backgrounds? This warrants further exploration by comparing the living experiences of gay men migrating to Taiwan from different regions and countries, such as Europe, North America, Northeast Asia, and Southeast Asia. Moreover, if not everyone can equally participate in and integrate into Taiwan's gay community culture, then besides the "sexual identity construction" perspective, how else can we explain the destination choices in gay men's transnational migration, and how does this relate to their occupational expertise and labor class? I anticipate using Bourdieu's concept of "capital conversion" to analyze the sexual orientation, nationality, and labor class identities of gay migrants, and how struggles or multiplications among them become resources or constraints in queer transnational migration.