Fire Dragon Feminism - Conversation and Poetry Performance

Featuring stories of early settler and contemporary Asian migrant women in Asia-Pacific region, Fire Dragon Feminism discusses Asian migrant women’s encounters with coloniality and racial capitalism at their workplace and in their everyday life. Centring anti-colonial feminist philosophies and strategies, this book introduces 'fire dragon feminism' - a migrant feminist strand that aims to blow flames at colonial, racial capitalist and neoliberal structures and build solidarities for more just and sustainable futures. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 Asian migrant employees at Australian universities, the author examines how Asian migrant women are implicated and complicit in white race-making projects while being subjected to racialisation and marginalisation simultaneously. Fire Dragon Feminism presents a historicised and sociological discussion of the contradictions, trade-offs, complicities and refusals in the Asian migrant women’s tales of migration, coloniality and racial capitalism. The author ends the book with a celebration of anti-colonial grassroots feminist activisms.  

Author:
DR EE LING QUAH is Associate Professor and Convenor of Culture & Society at School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, and author of Fire Dragon Feminism: Asian Migrant Women’s Tales of Migration, Coloniality and Racial Capitalism (Bloomsbury), Transnational Divorce: Understanding Intimacies and Inequalities from Singapore (Routledge) and Perspectives on Marital Dissolution: Divorce Biographies in Singapore (Springer).

Chair:
JENNIFER WONG is a writer, comedian and co-author of Chopsticks or Fork?: Recipes and Stories from Australia’s Regional Chinese Restaurants (Hardie Grant) and a contributor to the anthology Admissions: Voices within Mental Health (Upswell). Her humorous writing about food, culture, and mental health has appeared in The Guardian, ABC News, SBS Food, Monocle, and The Big Issue. She has reported on arts and books as the presenter of Bookish (ABC iview), and as a contributor to Radio National’s Books and Arts program.  

Panel Speakers:
DR SUKHMANI KHORANA is a Scientia Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW, and author of Mediated Emotions of Migration: Reclaiming Affect for Agency (Bristol University Press, The Tastes and Politics of Inter-Cultural Food in Australia (Rowman & Littlefield), and has a forthcoming co-authored book, Migrants, Television and Australian Stories: A New History.  Sukhmani has published poetry and creative non-fiction in Australian and Canadian literary magazines and is deeply invested in using the arts to tell migrant women’s stories.

DR ROANNA GONSALVES is the award-winning author of The Permanent Resident (UWAP). She is a recipient of a UNSW Vice Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence and the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award among other honours. She works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at UNSW, Sydney.

Poetry Performer:
ISRAA MERHI is a Muslim writer, student, spoken word poet, editor, finalist and one of the winners of the people's choice award at the 2025 Bankstown Poetry Grand Slam. She mainly writes about the search for love from the perspective of a hopeless romantic and the challenges of mental health. Israa is gradually expanding her poetry’s focus to include what it is like being Muslim not to dismantle Western narratives, but to show the world that those narratives have no legitimacy.