Carman Fung

Education

Ph.D. Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, 2021
M.Phil. Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies, University of Cambridge, 2014
B.A. (First Hons) Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong, 2013

Biography

Born and raised in Hong Kong in the digital age of globalization, I became interested in how global circulations of media images may shape our personal understandings of gender and sexuality. My forthcoming monograph Leaving the Tomboy Behind: Sinophone Lesbian Subjectivities and Transnational Media (University of Michigan Press) follows a generation of young queer women in Chinese-speaking societies who turned to global LGBTQ+ media to make sense of their own lesbian identities and gender presentations. My current research agenda continues to address this interplay between transnational mobility and queer subjectivities: drawing on funding support from SFU FASS Kickstarter Seed Grant and the David Lam Centre, my ongoing ethnographic study examines Hong Kong queer women’s migration experiences in the UK and in Canada following the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Protests, focusing on the overlaps between migration, new media use, and queer self-identities. My other ongoing research attends to the transnational lesbian fandoms of Thailand’s Girls Love dramas across Asia and beyond. My research contributes to the fields of cultural studies, queer Asian studies, audience reception and fan studies, and appears in Continuum, International Journal of Communications, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and in edited collections published by Routledge.

Prior to joining SFU, I completed my PhD at the University of Melbourne and MPhil at the University of Cambridge, and have taught in Australia and Hong Kong. I currently live on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples and I was previously working in Naarm, the traditional lands of the Kulin Nation. In my spare time, I enjoy making classical-electronic music and cooking for my partner and friends.

Research

As a cultural studies scholar, I situate my work at the intersection of queer Asian studies, Sinophone studies, transnational/globalization studies, while also drawing on qualitative research methods from audience reception and fandom studies.

In my forthcoming monograph, I study the lesbian masculine label “tomboy” across the transnational Sinophone world encompassing contemporary China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In these contexts, “tomboy” refers to lesbian masculine fashion, gender role, and self-identity. My book follows the young women who decided to abandon their tomboy identity to pursue a more feminine (and what they believe to be a more feminist) version of lesbianism. I examine the manners in which they draw on transnational LGBTQ+ media and discourses in this pursuit. The book also addresses how their global media consumption in turn shapes how they come to understand and imagine foreign societies.

A second goal in my research is to contribute to media studies research methods, and I do so by positioning audience reception as valuable data for critical discourse analysis. I draw on audience and fandom studies’ framing of viewers as active meaning producers rather than passive decoders, but my work also deviates from and expand the fields by moving away from discussions on media texts’ meanings and by instead attuning to the wider cultural discourses generated by media consumptions. In the context of my book, I focus on how global LGBTQ+ media shape Sinophone queer women’ (mis)understandings of unfamiliar places like the US, Japan, and Thailand. In my other work, I turn to queer audience’s debates over “positive vs negative representation.” My paper challenges the longstanding view that LGBTQ+ films must be unilaterally transgressive or hegemonic, rather, I position this binary evaluation as part of queer audience’s own interpretive repertoire and use this to analyse the wider homophobic social conditions that viewers are situated in.

My PhD thesis — on which my book is based— was highly commended by the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association for the 2022 AWGSA PhD Award (a short video about my thesis can be found here). I am also the recipient of the Popular Culture Association Peter Rollins Travel Grant award for early-career faculty in 2024 and the Duke University Feminist Theory Workshop Travel Award in 2019.

Publications

Fung, C. K. M. (Forthcoming). Leaving the tomboy behind: Sinophone lesbian subjectivities and transnational media. University of Michigan Press.

Fung, C. K. M. (2026). In search of lesbian utopia: Sinophone queer women's rejection of lesbian masculinity and misreading of The L Word. In J. Evans & T. Guo (Eds.), Translating Sexuality International Queer Popular Culture in the Sinophone World Routledge (pp. 45–62). Routledge. Open access: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003639084

Fung, C. K. M. (2025). Homophobic media or lesbian memories? Hong Kong queer women’ online debate over The First Girl I Loved. Continuum, 39(2), 363–375. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2025.2462102

Fung, C. K. M. (2023). Strategic, Conflicted, and Interpellated: Hong Kong and Chinese Queer Women’s Use of Identity Labels on Lesbian Dating Apps, International Journal of Communication, 17 (Special Section on Queer Cultures in Digital Asia), 2455–2462. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/19798

Fung, C. K. M. (2022). TBG and po: Discourses on authentic desire in 2010s lesbian subcultures in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. In R. A. Hoskin (Eds.) Feminizing Theory Making Space for Femme Theory (pp. 140–157). Routledge. (Reprinted)

Fung, C. K. M. (2021). TBG and Po: Discourses on Authentic Desire in 2010s Lesbian Subcultures in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 25(2): 141–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2019.1694787

Teaching

Drawing on my research interests in queer media and transnational mobility, my teaching similarly focuses on the border-crossing media texts, ideas, and terminologies that continue to inform our personal gender and sexual identities today. My classes introduce students to queer and trans experiences from beyond the Global North, and I use a variety of online and blended learning tools to develop students’ capacity to undertake critical discourse analysis, audience reception, and cultural studies research. A few of my students have given public presentations of their original research. In my Queer Fandoms class, students complete a creative project where they create fanfiction and fan-edits, the students then analyse their own fan creations by drawing on wider scholarship. Some of my students’ creative-analytical work can be seen here:

At SFU, I also champion for teaching innovation in online and blended learning environments. I serve as Faculty Teaching Fellow (2023-2026) to create pedagogical resources for educators across the faculty, and to facilitate faculty-wide responses to the challenges and opportunities created by AI.

Community Engagement

I spoke about my research on Sinophone lesbian practices on the Peak, CJSF Radio, Transpaific Podcast, CNStorytellers, and at Lingnan University. I also worked with the grassroot lesbian organisation FingerOut to release a WeChat report in Simplified Chinese on my research on lesbian masculinity. At present, I am working on knowledge mobilization initiatives for my current ongoing research on Hong Kong queer women’s post-2019 migration.

Courses

Spring 2026

Summer 2026

Future courses may be subject to change.

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies