Petrus Liu has been a presence in our graduate seminars for the past two years, as his work assigned and wrestled with across multiple courses. His March visit gave our community the chance to bring that engagement into the room with him. Graduate students, faculty, and undergraduates packed together for his talk, ready for a conversation that had, in many ways, already been building.
Liu, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature and of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University, presented "The Value Turn in Queer Theory," drawing on his most recent book, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (Duke University Press, 2023). The talk took up a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to have value—as a person, as a body, as an identity—under capitalism? Liu explored the tension between two very different answers. On one hand, value is something assigned to people: it sorts us into recognizable categories, determining whose lives and identities are legible, protected, or expendable. On the other hand, value is also the cold logic of markets and accumulation: impersonal, extractive, indifferent to identity. By bringing queer theory into dialogue with Marx, Liu proposed a new framework he calls "queer value," offering tools for understanding how our identities are never just personal, but are always shaped by the economic and political systems we live inside.
The conversation that followed was lively and wide-ranging, reflecting the depth of preparation our students and faculty brought to the room. Afterward, graduate students who have been most closely engaging with Liu's work had the chance to continue the conversation in a more intimate reception—the kind of informal exchange that often produces the most generative thinking, and that our department works to make possible whenever we bring visiting scholars to campus.