THOMAS ELIAS SIDDALL

PhD Student

Research Title: Subsuming Queer Labour in Asia: Coloniality, Cultural Industries, and Questionable Futures
Research Group: Social Cultural Geographies (SCG)
Thesis Advisor: Assoc Prof Kamalini Ramdas
Co-advisor: Prof Chang Tou Chuang

Thomas Elias Siddall (they/he) is interested in the global cultural economy, queer Marxist practices, and historical and contemporary zoning practices in Asia. Their work broadly investigates how urban development and infrastructure enact violence against marginalized populations while also highlighting moments of resistance and creative collaboration.

Their doctoral thesis will investigate a core contradiction in contemporary Asian cultural development: how the increasingly visible acknowledgement and celebration of queer identity often masks the economic precarity of queer labour. Their work examines this dynamic in Taipei and Singapore, two key hubs where the demand for flexible, creative work rose in the wake of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.

Bringing together geospatial data and comparative ethnographic data, they posit such a "celebratory devaluation" works as a specific economic strategy that provides ideological cover for the exploitation of an increasingly devalued workforce in general, exploring how this process is managed differently between Taipei's grassroots context and Singapore's state-led model. Ultimately, their work challenges celebratory narratives of progress by centring the material realities of labour and class, questioning how queer life seems to get (de)valued under new forms of capitalism.

Hailing from Treaty 13 Lands (Toronto, Canada), Thomas completed their MA and BA (hons) at the University of Toronto and has held awards, such as the Canada Graduate Research Scholarship. Their work has been published in journals, such as Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Cultural Geographies.