Chi Ta-wei

Chi Ta-wei (Chinese: 紀大偉; pinyin: Jì Dàwěi; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Kí Tāi-úi, born February 3, 1972) is a Taiwanese writer and literary scholar. Chi Ta-wei was born in Taichung, Taiwan in 1972. He graduated from National Taiwan University with B.A. and M.A. degrees in foreign languages and literatures, then left Taiwan in 1999 to pursue graduate studies in the United States. He earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, under Shu-mei Shih. He is an associate professor of Taiwanese literature at National Chengchi University in Taipei, where he regularly offers undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on LGBT representations in East Asian literatures, and Disability Studies in the Taiwanese context. Chi is known both as a writer and as a scholar of queer literature. Published in Chinese and being translated into other languages, Tongzhi wenxueshi (同志文學史, 2017), his award-winning academic monograph on the history of queer literature in Taiwan is deemed one of the most comprehensive works on LGBT literature in the Sinosphere. With Chen Xue, and Qiu Miaojin, Chi is viewed as that of a "new generation of queer authors" from Taiwan. Chi's mostly widely read work is his short novel (or categorized as a novella), The Membranes (膜, 1996, 2011), a cyberpunk science fiction. It is known for its attention to the queer desire, the transgender subjectivity, the human-android boundaries, and the prophecy of the 21st century suffering from the climate change.