23/04/2026
Today marked the final tutorial of Anthropology of Gender, Race and Sexuality at SOAS, co-convened by Dr Fabio Gyi, Dr Bobby Balagoun and Prof. Jieyu Liu. Over 12 weeks, this module challenged me to think critically about how race and gender are socially constructed and shaped by interlocking cultural, historical and economic power relations, drawing on scholarship from Stuart Hall, Ann Laura Stoler and Patricia Hill Collins.
A concept that stayed with me was intersectionality, developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) to describe how race, class, gender, sexuality, age and nationality operate simultaneously to produce compounded experiences of privilege and oppression. We also examined in*******al intimacies and how desire and partnership are never simply personal, always embedded within histories of colonial power and gendered norms.
Being held in thoughtful discussion with fellow students from different backgrounds and generations has itself been a form of education.
Throughout all of this, I kept returning to the work of New York-based Chinese artist Pixy Liao and her ongoing series Experimental Relationship (2007 to present). Liao photographs herself and her Japanese partner Moro, who is five years her junior, in ways that deliberately unsettle conventional heterosexual scripts. Her images ask what relationships could look like if they were not standardised, arguing that every couple generates its own relational logic with its own particular value. In this sense, Liao’s practice sits in productive conversation with intersectional feminist thought, insisting that intimacy, power and identity are always being negotiated, never simply given.
