Wan-Chuan Kao
Biographic Data
| ID | 1593280 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wan-Chuan Kao |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wan-Chuan |
| FAMILY NAME | Kao |
| SIGNATURE | KAO W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington and Lee University |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-9144-2389 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing
The Middle Ages laid the foundations for the long European and Middle Eastern history of voyaging, colonialism, and expansion: the Papal embassies that took over a year of overland travel to reach Mongolia, Ibn Battuta's thirty years of voyaging to Africa and East Asia, or the arrival of European colonialism in the Americas. With a focus on medieval Europe, this is the first book to cover global medieval travel writing from Iceland to Indonesia, …
Shamanizing Matter: Whiteness and the Materiality of Belief
Shamanism is as much a cultural technology as a material hermeneutics. In its westward transmission, the legend of an Asiatic shaman who rode a horse into the sky and foretold the Mongol imperium transformed into a dream vision of a knight in white armor on a white horse who uttered the prophecy to Genghis Khan. Yet the divide between the Oriental shaman and the European knight is illusory, as whiteness indexes the figural modulations of race and…
In the Lap of Whiteness
This article considers medieval and early modern strategies of racialization and periodization through the figure of the hold and the critical lens of empathy. I take as my test case The Squire's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer that reimagines the medieval Mongol empire. Empathy, the act of feeling into a strange aesthetic object, person, or situation, characterizes the affective similitude interposed between the tale's heroine, Canacee, and the wounded…
Identitarian politics, precarious sovereignty
Precarious Figures, Rigorous Styles
Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory points to Plotinus’s dialectics of identity and difference as the foundation of Hegelianism and the source of modern critical theory. Of crucial importance is not only theory as a form of medievalism but also theory as a dialectics of figure and concept: theory is “thinking other.” This article examines Cole’s thesis alongside Eve Sedgwick’s diagnosis of the hermeneutics of suspicion and paranoid reading; both cr…
Cute Chaucer
Reading Sir Thopas through cuteness shifts critical attention from the tale’s generic classification to questions of aesthetics and affect. The production of cute features through infantilization and feminization triggers tender caretaking and sadistic aggression; the cute object is paradoxically held gently and squeezed violently. Under the duress of the cute response, the Chaucerian narrator, Thopas, and the text become deformed. The flattening…
Memorialization in white: Chaucerian topology and the defaute of subjectivity
The Tomboyism of Faith: Spiritual Tomboyism in the Cult of Sainte Foy
This article offers a reading of premodern, spiritual tomboyism as evident in the cult of Sainte Foy in France during the ninth to eleventh centuries. It draws attention to the signs of differently gendered and aged masculinities in the female child saint. Martyred at the cusp of puberty, Sainte Foy remains forever suspended in her gender development. Bernard of Angers, in the Liber miraculorum, portrays Foy as a trickster tomboy whose miracles a…
Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (review)
Reviewed by: Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History Wan-Chuan Kao (bio) Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007 Heather Love’s work is haunted by figures from the past, both real and fictive, who have refused to behave themselves as redeemable (queer) subjects for (queer) critics. Reacting against “the need to turn the difficulties of gay, lesbian, and tr…
Identitarian politics, precarious sovereignty
Cute Chaucer
Reading Sir Thopas through cuteness shifts critical attention from the tale’s generic classification to questions of aesthetics and affect. The production of cute features through infantilization and feminization triggers tender caretaking and sadistic aggression; the cute object is paradoxically held gently and squeezed violently. Under the duress of the cute response, the Chaucerian narrator, Thopas, and the text become deformed. The flattening…
In the Lap of Whiteness
This article considers medieval and early modern strategies of racialization and periodization through the figure of the hold and the critical lens of empathy. I take as my test case The Squire's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer that reimagines the medieval Mongol empire. Empathy, the act of feeling into a strange aesthetic object, person, or situation, characterizes the affective similitude interposed between the tale's heroine, Canacee, and the wounded…
Precarious Figures, Rigorous Styles
Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory points to Plotinus’s dialectics of identity and difference as the foundation of Hegelianism and the source of modern critical theory. Of crucial importance is not only theory as a form of medievalism but also theory as a dialectics of figure and concept: theory is “thinking other.” This article examines Cole’s thesis alongside Eve Sedgwick’s diagnosis of the hermeneutics of suspicion and paranoid reading; both cr…
Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (review)
Reviewed by: Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History Wan-Chuan Kao (bio) Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007 Heather Love’s work is haunted by figures from the past, both real and fictive, who have refused to behave themselves as redeemable (queer) subjects for (queer) critics. Reacting against “the need to turn the difficulties of gay, lesbian, and tr…
The Tomboyism of Faith: Spiritual Tomboyism in the Cult of Sainte Foy
This article offers a reading of premodern, spiritual tomboyism as evident in the cult of Sainte Foy in France during the ninth to eleventh centuries. It draws attention to the signs of differently gendered and aged masculinities in the female child saint. Martyred at the cusp of puberty, Sainte Foy remains forever suspended in her gender development. Bernard of Angers, in the Liber miraculorum, portrays Foy as a trickster tomboy whose miracles a…
Memorialization in white: Chaucerian topology and the defaute of subjectivity
Cute Chaucer
Reading Sir Thopas through cuteness shifts critical attention from the tale’s generic classification to questions of aesthetics and affect. The production of cute features through infantilization and feminization triggers tender caretaking and sadistic aggression; the cute object is paradoxically held gently and squeezed violently. Under the duress of the cute response, the Chaucerian narrator, Thopas, and the text become deformed. The flattening…
Precarious Figures, Rigorous Styles
Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory points to Plotinus’s dialectics of identity and difference as the foundation of Hegelianism and the source of modern critical theory. Of crucial importance is not only theory as a form of medievalism but also theory as a dialectics of figure and concept: theory is “thinking other.” This article examines Cole’s thesis alongside Eve Sedgwick’s diagnosis of the hermeneutics of suspicion and paranoid reading; both cr…
Identitarian politics, precarious sovereignty
In the Lap of Whiteness
This article considers medieval and early modern strategies of racialization and periodization through the figure of the hold and the critical lens of empathy. I take as my test case The Squire's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer that reimagines the medieval Mongol empire. Empathy, the act of feeling into a strange aesthetic object, person, or situation, characterizes the affective similitude interposed between the tale's heroine, Canacee, and the wounded…
Shamanizing Matter: Whiteness and the Materiality of Belief
Shamanism is as much a cultural technology as a material hermeneutics. In its westward transmission, the legend of an Asiatic shaman who rode a horse into the sky and foretold the Mongol imperium transformed into a dream vision of a knight in white armor on a white horse who uttered the prophecy to Genghis Khan. Yet the divide between the Oriental shaman and the European knight is illusory, as whiteness indexes the figural modulations of race and…
The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing
The Middle Ages laid the foundations for the long European and Middle Eastern history of voyaging, colonialism, and expansion: the Papal embassies that took over a year of overland travel to reach Mongolia, Ibn Battuta's thirty years of voyaging to Africa and East Asia, or the arrival of European colonialism in the Americas. With a focus on medieval Europe, this is the first book to cover global medieval travel writing from Iceland to Indonesia, …
Art (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · History (3 works)