Taiwan has been praised as the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2019, celebrating its vibrant democracy and LGBTQ+ communities. Taking a different approach to studying this social change, Dr. Ying-Chao Kao’s new book, Fear of Queer Taiwan: Anti-LGBTQ Movements Between Taiwan and the U.S. Religious Right (NYU Press 2026), focuses on anti-LGBTQ conservatives who fervently opposed marriage equality and LGBTQ+-inclusive education.

As a queer Christian, LGBTQ activist, and gender equity educator, Kao conducted 23 months of ethnography in conservative churches and interviewed over 100 people whose political ideologies ranged widely from the far right to the far left. In this talk, Kao will delineate the rise and fall of Taiwanese anti-LGBTQ conservatism, offering a new theoretical framework called “liquid conservatism” to explain the liquidity (mobility, heterogeneity, and transformability) of modern moral conservatism. Particularly, he will reveal the transnational networks through which global conservative groups distribute resources and discourses among “Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore) and their American, African, and European counterparts. Based on Queer Asian studies, Kao will discuss inter-Asian comparisons of LGBTQ-related attitudes and policies, highlighting the socio-political implications of Taiwan LGBTQ experiences for global Asia and the world.

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, was published by New York University Press in 2026.

Moderator:

Pei-Chia Lan is the Wang and Chen Senior Fellow in Taiwan Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of the Taiwan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.