Lisa Rofel

Lisa Rofel is an emerita professor at University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Rofel has consistently brought feminist, postcolonial, and Marxist poststructuralist approaches to bear on questions of modernity, postsocialism, capitalism, desire, queer identities, and transnational encounters. She has written extensively about China. Rofel was trained in East Asian history at Brown University in the 1970s and cultural anthropology at Stanford University in the 1980s. Her publications include Desiring China (Duke University Press), which addresses how public culture events in China produce desiring subjects, including soap operas, gay public life, cosmopolitan practices, and financial news; and Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in Post-Mao China, an ethnography of women workers that addresses how modernity is not a universal logic or an evolutionary tale of progress but a disparate and shifting set of discourses and practices about otherness. Rofel recently published the Twenty-First Century Silk Road between Italy and China (with Sylvia Yanagisako), a coedited volume Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics (with Petrus Liu), and a co-edited volume on contemporary documentary filmmaking in China (with Chris Berry).