Fellow Reflections: Amalia Torrecillas
By Amalia Torrecillas (Fall 2025 Seminar Fellow)
For me, CACI has represented a completely new open door. I have always believed that entering a new literature is incredibly difficult without guidance, especially when it concerns a region, history, or set of social realities that I have not previously studied in depth. This course offered exactly that: an intellectual entry point into a field that had long interested me, but that I did not know how to approach on my own.
At the beginning of the semester, I was particularly curious about the realities of queer life in China. My interest emerged after reading Xiong Jing and Dušica Ristivojević paper on the #MeToo movement, which opened up a series of questions for me: How do feminist and queer movements navigate authoritarian structures? What are the limits and possibilities for activism in a political context that differs so deeply from the Western one I am used to studying? From that starting point, the course allowed me to explore broader themes, including rural–urban migration, the informal economy, and the intersection of gender, precarity, and state regulation.
One of the most valuable things I learned through CACI is how these topics are not isolated but deeply interconnected. Understanding queer experiences in China requires understanding labor protections, migration policies, censorship, family structures, and the role of digital platforms. I learned to read China not as a set of exceptions or anomalies, but as a complex social world with its own internal debates, contradictions, and forms of resistance.
Another important part of this course was the opportunity to connect with students from disciplines outside of political science. Hearing how historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural-studies scholars approach China gave me new tools to interpret what I was reading. It also challenged me to rethink some of my own assumptions and to move beyond the Western frameworks that often dominate public-policy discussions.
Ultimately, CACI taught me how to place China in a truly international and comparative perspective, one that is not centered on the West. This is something I always try to do in my own work, regardless of the topic I am studying. The course helped me see China not as a “distant” case but as part of global debates on gender, inequality, informality, and state power. It opened a new intellectual path for me, one that I hope to continue exploring beyond this semester.
Amalia Torrecillas (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Politics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her primary research interests center on queer economics and the intersection of inequality and queerness, particularly as shaped by family policies. She investigates how the concept of queerness influences and intensifies economic inequality, with an emphasis on how non-normative family structures are treated within welfare states. Amalia’s work draws on feminist political theory, welfare state analysis, and social justice frameworks to analyze the lived experiences of queer individuals in relation to economic systems and policy design. Through the CACI fellowship, she hopes to gain a deeper understanding of how queerness is experienced, regulated, and expressed in the Chinese context, and to explore how comparative approaches can broaden the global scope of queer policy analysis.
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