Ep. 27: New and Decolonial Approaches to Gender Nonconformity

In this episode, Chris Lloyd talks to Kit Heyam, Jonathan Ward, Rebecca Jane Morgan, and Eva Cheuk-Yin Li about the new open access book ⁠⁠New and Decolonial Approaches to Gender Nonconformity: Forging A Home For Ourselves (Bloomsbury, 2025). Kit and Jonathan have co-edited the volume, and Rebecca and Eva have chapters within it. We talked about decolonisation and anticolonialism, trans history, gender nonconformity across time and place, cis scholarship, and embodiment (among much else).

EPISODE NOTES: 

• Heyam, K. (2022.) Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender.

• Liu, W. & Li, E.C.Y. (2025). The geopolitics of queer archives: Contested Chineseness and queer Sinophone affiliations between Hong Kong and Taiwan. Sexualities, 28(3), 1118–1138. 

• Li, E.C.Y. (2023, April 4). Hong Kongers’ mourning for Elizabeth II: Colonial nostalgia and the (impossible) project of decolonisation. The Sociological Review Magazine. 

• Morgan, R.J. (2023). Gender Heretics: Evangelicals, Feminists, adn the Alliance Against Trans Liberation.

Kit Heyam (they/he) is a writer, a heritage practitioner and a trans awareness trainer specializing in higher education. They are the author of The Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697: A Literary Transformation of History (2020) and Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (2022), which was a nominee for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction and a History Today book of the year. They are also the co-author, with James Daybell, of Gendering the Museum: A Toolkit (https://genderingthemuseum.co.uk).

Jonathan Ward (he/him) is Lecturer in Race and Diversity Studies at King’s College London. His research is generally interested in somatic disciplinarity and representations of the body in visual, literary and popular culture. He is currently working on a monograph entitled ‘What Is It?’: Examining the Construction of the Black Male Body as Threat in American Popular Culture. His recent work examines ‘misremembrance’ of racialized histories and coloniality in popular culture, the figure of the ‘White Saviour’ in US popular film, the representation of Meghan Markle on Instagram and the relationship of colonialism to Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther. He is the founder of The Abolitionist Curriculum.

Eva Cheuk-Yin Li is a media and cultural studies scholar with an interdisciplinary background in Sociology, Gender Studies, and Media Studies. Her research explores gender nonconformity, queer media and fandom in East and Southeast Asia, and diaspora media and geopolitics. She is currently based at Lancaster University and will be joining King’s College London in early 2026. Her monograph The Middle Gender: Strategic Resistance against Gender Binary in Sinophone Asia is forthcoming in 2027 (Amsterdam University Press/Routledge).

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