Event Date: November 5, 2026 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS and the Asian Studies Network (ASN)

Taiwan has been praised as the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2019, celebrating its vibrant LGBTQ+ communities and functional democracy. Dr. Kao’s new book, Fear of Queer Taiwan: Anti-LGBTQ Movements between Taiwan and the U.S. Religious Right (NYU Press 2026), takes a different approach to telling the story. He focuses on the anti-LGBTQ conservatives who fervently opposed marriage equality and LGBTQ+ inclusive education in the name of protecting children, marriage/family systems, and the “Chinese” tradition, while hiding their politico-religious motivations. In this talk, Kao relocates Taiwan on the world map of the global rise of right-wing politics and gender/sexuality-related “culture wars.” Based on ethnography, interviews, and content analysis, Kao argues that Taiwan offers a new theoretical approach for global thinkers to reconsider anti-LGBTQ politics beyond the Euro-American boxes and shed light on the “liquidity” (mobility, heterogeneity, and transformability) of modern moral conservatism.

Description of the book:

In 2019, global media celebrated Taiwan as the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage. However, the pursuit of this human rights milestone spurred waves of opposition to LGBTQ rights that have fundamentally shaped the nation’s democracy and its relationship with the United States. This book examines Taiwan’s anti-LGBTQ movements, analyzes their rise and fall, and reveals their surprising links with American religious conservatism.

Given that Christianity is a minority religion in Taiwan and East Asia, the book seeks to answer how and why Christian-led anti-LGBTQ sentiments became so powerful in Taiwan, and how they have built transnational connections with American and other international counterparts.

Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews with leading figures across a wide political spectrum, and two years of cumulative ethnographic observation in both Taiwan and the United States, Kao reveals that moral conservatism has been flowing across borders and adapting to contemporary socio-political institutions as it seeks to protect its moral territories and expand its ideological power. Exploring the transnational ebbs and flows of moral conservatism as a direct response to rising pro-LGBTQ liberalism and queer radicalism, Fear of Queer Taiwan offers a groundbreaking theoretical framework to understand conservatism’s fluidity in today’s ever-evolving global landscape of gender and sexual politics.

Speaker:

Dr. Ying-Chao Kao is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of Sociology and an Affiliate Faculty member of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, United States. Receiving his PhD degree in Sociology from Rutgers University—New Brunswick, Kao’s research areas include critical sexualities and masculinities studies, religion, globalization and transnationalism, social movement studies, global LGBTQ politics, and Queer Asias studies. Kao’s English-language articles appear in the journals Sexualities, Contexts, the International Journal of Taiwan Studies, and the Taiwan Journal of Democracy, among others. His Sexualities article, “The Coloniality of Queer Theory: The Effects of ‘Homonormativity’ on Transnational Taiwan’s Path to Equality,” won an Outstanding Article Award from the Division of Gender, Sexual Behavior, Politics, and Communities at the Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2025. His book, Fear of Queer Taiwan: Anti-LGBTQ Movements between Taiwan and the U.S. Religious Right, is published by New York University Press in 2026.

Chair:

André Laliberté is a Full Professor at the School of Political Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Research Co-Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of Ottawa.