Abstract
The unexpected Covid-19 outbreak has brought a disastrous and devastating start to the third decade of the 21st century, especially for socioculturally disadvantaged groups around the globe. Nevertheless, 2020 has thus far been a prolific year for global queer studies. The publication of the UK-based Chinese media studies scholar Hongwei Bao’s second monograph Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism heralds the importance and rapid development of ‘queer China’ as an emerging scholarly field in the 2020s. While most existing academic publications on queer China studies – including Bao’s first monograph Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China, published in 2018 – lean towards an investigation of Chinese LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) identity politics, activism and social movements, Bao’s Queer China represents a crucial shift to a scholarly account of queer cultural and media productions in contemporary China.
Written in a particularly moving and appealing autobiographical style, Queer China comprises an introduction, four major sections (each containing two chapters), a short epilogue and an extensive 10-page appendix that records major Mainland Chinese queer media and political events between 1981 and 2019. The book covers a diverse range of exciting topics on Chinese queer creative practices and artworks in an age of globalization and digitization, ranging from elitist cultural forms (poetry) to grassroots and online productions (fan fiction).
The introductory chapter opens with Bao’s account of his own journey conducting queer research and living and travelling as a gay man in contemporary China. Highlighting sociocultural encounters between China and non-Chinese – especially Western – cultures and ideologies regarding queer knowledge production and identity formation in the past four decades, Bao identifies a transformative historical process of ‘subjectivity, desire and sense of belonging in the postsocialist era’ (p. 4) for ‘gendered, sexed and desiring subjects’ (p. 5), which he terms ‘postsocialist metamorphosis’. As he explains with reference to concrete case studies throughout the subsequent four sections, the postsocialist metamorphosis in China has been made possible through persistent negotiations between mainstream realities and queer fantasy production and voicing of desires.
In the book’s first section, ‘Queer Emergence’, Chapter 1 discusses different strands of research on premodern and modern Chinese gender and sexuality. It also presents a genealogy of ‘emerging’ Chinese gay identity with rich references to queer sociocultural events, economic-political transformations, and academic and popular publications during the nation’s postsocialist self-modernizing and globalizing processes. Bao’s careful historicization suggests that ‘gay identity is the product of postsocialist China’s historical, social and discursive conditions’ and that ‘a modern sense of gay identity is situated at the intersections of neoliberal capitalism’ (p. 31). Chapter 2 discusses the 2006 film Women Fifty Minutes produced by the famous ethnic-minority lesbian filmmaker Shi Tou. In his interpretation of the documentary, Bao pays special attention to its non-linear representations of postsocialist Chinese women in various ethnicized, rural and religious contexts. Bao notes that the film adopts a state-feminist approach to conceptualizing women, thereby interrogating neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. At the same time, through the filmmaker’s strategic use of queer women images and historical events and her capturing of female same-sex intimacy in mundane lives, the film also creatively draws connections between queer spaces and feminist critique in China.
The second section of the book, ‘Queer Becoming’, explores the identity construction and imagining of postsocialist Chinese gender and sexual minority subjects in cyber literature. Chapter 3 examines the imaginary of Chinese gayness in the 1998 online queer fiction Beijing Story, which was later adapted by Hong Kong film director Stanley Kwan into the influential 2001 Sinophone gay film Lan Yu. Bao analyses the fiction’s narrativization of the economic-political turbulence and sociocultural shocks that characterized Chinese society in the 1980s and 1990s. He claims that China’s transition from socialism to a postsocialist, neoliberal society is carefully reconfigured in the storyline, which reflects contemporary Chinese people’s class-based, transnational imaginaries of male homosociality and homosexuality and ironically enables and legitimizes different ‘forms of queer resistance to neoliberal subjectivation’, ranging from culturally specific ‘premodern sentiments to socialist nostalgia to the longing for a queer utopia’ (p. 80). Chapter 4 focuses on online queer female fan fiction, a previously underexplored and undervalued form of lesbian literature, which has been blossoming in more recent years. It takes Pink Affairs – a sensational queer fan fiction about two finalists in one of the most successful Chinese female-only reality singing competitions in post-2000 years, Super Girl (Hunan TV, 2006) – as an excellent example of how the interactive mode of producing and consuming cyber literature makes the becoming, living and dreaming as queer female subjects in China possible for both the fiction writer and readers. Bao delves into the writing strategies and generic elements in Pink Affairs, including its ‘depiction of a middle class lifestyle, transnationalism, transgressive pleasure and gothic mysticism’ (p. 87). He finds that while these narrative features facilitate a ‘lesbian becoming’ in the heteropatriarchal society of contemporary China, the portrayal of the two protagonists’ experiences of growing up in post-Mao China and their search for ‘home’ within mainstream Chinese society also signifies the nation-state’s construction and negotiation of ‘its cosmopolitan identity in a postsocialist world’ (p. 95).
The third section, ‘Queer Urban Space’, offers two case studies that exemplify productive yet discursive ways to criticize contemporary China’s heteronormative, neoliberal public spaces. Chapter 5 draws on the 2009 same-sex wedding event in Qianmen – a crowded area in downtown Beijing – to illustrate how Chinese queer communities, instead of holding Western-style LGBTQ coming-out events and parades, use conventional public spaces and digital media to exercise live queer performances as a form of ‘“soft” political and social activism’ (p. 112). Similar to Chapter 5’s focus on queer artistic performances and expressions in the supposedly heteronormative, authoritarian space of central Beijing, the focus in Chapter 6 is on the working-class, less educated, queer poet Mu Cao’s work and his ‘live-scene’ poetry reading in downtown Beijing’s queer book club. Bao’s analysis of the critical realism in Mu Cao’s poetry and reading practice offers a neoliberal critique of today’s Chinese queer spaces and cultures, which are often enlivened by middle-class, transnational queer politics.
The last section, ‘Queer Migration’, casts light on two creative queer art forms: the drag ball culture in Shanghai captured in the 2018 transnational documentary Extravaganza and the local folk art of papercutting by a queer artist from lower class, rural China. Chapter 7 is a remarkably stimulating part of the book with rich theoretical and visual analyses of the burgeoning global drag scene and queer filmmaking culture in urban, transnational China. Examining Extravaganza’s queer filming strategies that frame drag performers as ‘becoming trans’ in the most cosmopolitan city in China, Bao argues that the documentary demonstrates that the performers ‘are essentially “queering” the “global drag” identity originating in the West and dominated by consumer capitalism by giving drag different meanings’ (p. 145). Chapter 8 shifts the focus from transnational queer media productions and performances to the internationally famous local gay artist from rural China, Xiyadie, whose papercutting art showcases ‘possible ways of desubjectivation and artist autonomy in neoliberal capitalism’ (p. 156). As Bao explains, the homoerotic connotations of Xiyadie’s autobiographical papercutting often converge with the artist’s rural identity and heterosexual past, which ultimately allows his queer artworks to survive and blossom as a manifestation of ‘indigenous’ Chineseness that documents the emergence and struggles of queer subjects in postsocialist China (pp. 163, 171).
As summarized in the epilogue, this monograph complicates existing scholarly understandings of how queerness and Chineseness can be ‘flexible and contingent assemblages’ in the Chinese-speaking world (p. 180). The author’s thorough interrogation of the neoliberal, globalist dimensions of mainstream Chinese society reveals how historical, regional, national and transnational factors, as well as various sociocultural identity markers, communicate, negotiate and implicate each other in forming and reformulating Chinese queer subjects and cultures. Moreover, Bao’s special efforts to unpack the value and intricacies of queer female media cultures in contemporary China are especially intriguing and necessary.
Although the book provides in-depth theoretical discussions and records rich media phenomena and queer events, the intrinsically self-conflicting, ambiguous, fluid nature of Chinese media censorship of queer and homosexual contents, which should have been a major focus of queer media and pop culture studies, is only given cursory mention in some sections. Further contemplation of certain pertinent questions, such as whether and how China’s online censorship of homosexual narratives in literature differs from its banning of queer connotations in visual media or performances of same-sex intimacy in public and theatrical spaces, would be helpful. Nevertheless, this minor omission is understandable considering the extensive information and diverse topics enclosed in this monograph.
Overall, the book presents a strong, useful and motivating study of how queer media and cultural productions have been simultaneously struggling and thriving in a heterosexual-dominated, authoritarian-power-charged China. As a foundational and timely work in the field of queer China studies, it will be of interest to and highly appreciated by students and scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines (such as Asian studies, China and Sinophone studies, literary and cultural studies, critical theory, media studies, gender, sexuality, queer and women’s studies) and the members of the general public who would like to know more about LGBTQ and feminist media, pop culture and creative practices in post-Mao China.
