Abstract
Decently and nicely, Hongwei Bao's Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism ushers the reader into a kaleidoscopic world of queer culture and the representative LGBTQ artists whose political activism and creative works epitomize, explicitly or implicitly, their gender, sexuality, and desires in the various forms of literature, film, art, performance and even more, in the period of postsocialist China.
Being a scholar of media and cultural studies, Hongwei Bao intensively and unswervingly maintains his keen interest in the subject. Combining a global perspective with the historical backdrop of Chinese culture, he observes and documents events of significance to queer communities in China during a historical period spanning the last two decades of 20th century through the first two decades of the 21st century. In Queer China, he resumes this amazing journey of inquiry and critical analysis of what he personally witnessed and experienced within the queer communities in China and also what he started to demonstrate and meditate over in the previous work Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China (2018).
By the virtue of the critique of queer Sinophone, Queer China scrutinizes the impact of world geopolitics and the marginalization of gender and sexuality, destroying the mundane stereotype of Chineseness and illuminating the reshuffling and reverberating of new forms of queer identity in the historical context of the postsocialist era. The tenet of Queer China, as Hongwei Bao states, is to observe and analyze how the people of queer communities and their cultural productions are interwoven tightly in the process of “postsocialist metamorphosis” in China under the impact of neoliberalism, by which people's subjectivity, identity, sexuality, and other social senses are challenged. The metamorphosis happens so drastically that the signs of becoming and unbecoming of queerness coexist and that various forms of neoliberal actions become entangled so closely that the distinction between queerness and heternormativity is quite blurred in China's postsocialist era. In this context, Queer China advocates that the ideal response to the ambivalence of queer identification resides in queer literature and visual art, which as Hongwei Bao believes, are effective means to evoke and demonstrate resistance to the prevalence of neoliberalism.
Instead of repackaging stale historical records and documents, Queer China selects a multitude of vivid live samples from queer texts, individuals, and occasions that Hongwei Bao once encountered in the decades of China's recent past. Through combinations of personal narratives, collective memories, actual participation, and specific context-based analyses of queer activism in China, Queer China represents an intricate transdisciplinary study comprehensively encompassing a variety of artistic practices of queer communities, including comrade literature, girl's love fiction, drag shows, lesbian films, same-sex wedding performance, and queer-themed papercutting art. This approach unravels the historical and panoramic view of social advancement and “the dynamism and vitality of queer culture” in the everyday lives of community people, clashing with China's image in some reports of Western media as “a heteronormative society and an authoritarian government” (3).
Another feature of Queer China is its well-organized structure. Hongwei Bao, with a clear reader-friendly intention in mind, arranges the contents of the book in a rather amusing way. With both broad strokes and detailed nuance, he conjures up the cultural assemblage of “Queer China” and maps the dynamic correspondence between the social activism of queer communities, in such forms as queer literature, artistic creation, visual cultural productions, and more. Within the spectrum of queer scenarios, Queer China takes online queer literature (Beijing Story in Chapter Three and Pink Affairs in Chapter Four) and queer poetry (Mu Cao in Chapter Six) as examples with which to analyze the stories of becoming queer and the contestation of queer identities in the process of the overall social and historical transformation of contemporary China under the impact of neoliberalism. Hongwei Bao specifically delineates the geographical disparity of queerness between the urban and the rural communities and probes tentatively into the possibility of migration and the issue of the loss of subjectivity when considering queer artist Xiyadie's creative papercutting productions in Chapter Eight. Other intriguing forms of queer literature, such as Shi Tou's lesbian film and its relations to feminism, a same-sex wedding event and its implications, Matthew Baren's queer documentary film, and its influence are all analyzed, respectively, in different chapters.
In addition, Queer China denotes the burgeoning queer culture and the various queer cultural productions as the emblems of the vitality of queer activism in China. The core idea is convincingly supported and substantiated by individual experience, oral histories, interviews, and memories, which utter, gently but loudly, the “resilience, defiance and modes of creative existence” of queer communities in contemporary China. The relation between various cultural productions of queer community and global geopolitics in the age of global neoliberal economy is the central focus in Queer China.
In all, through the lenses of the dynamism of queer culture and creative energy of queer community in postsocialist China, Queer China revalues the impact of social regime, geopolitics, pink economy, and cultural identity on the shaping of queerness and further reveals the LGBTQ community culture in the Global South.
