queer marxism in two chinas by petrus liu

8/20/2019 Queer Marxism in Two Chinas by Petrus Liu

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QUEER MARXISMIN TWO CHINAS

PETRUS LIU


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QUEER MARXISM

IN TWO CHINAS

P E T R U S L I U

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Durham and London 2015


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© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o

America on acid-ree paper ∞

Typeset in Quadraat Pro

by Westchester Publishing Services

Liu, Petrus, author.

Queer Marxism in two Chinas / Petrus Liu.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical reerences and index. 978-0-8223-5972-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-6004-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7508-1 (e-book)

1. Queer theory—China. 2. Philosophy, Marxist—China.

3. Homosexuality—Political aspects—China. 4. Chinese

ction—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

..

306.7601—dc23

2015020929

Cover Art:

Zhang Huan, 1/2, 1998, Beijing, China.

Courtesy o Zhang Huan Studio.

Duke University Press grateully acknowledges the

support o Yale- College, which provided unds

toward the publication o this book.


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F O R B RI A N


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C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments ix

C H A P T E R 1 . Marxism, Queer Liberalism,and the Quandary o Two Chinas 1

C H A P T E R 2 . Chinese Queer Theory 34

C H A P T E R 3 . The Rise o the Queer

Chinese Novel 85

C H A P T E R 4 . Genealogies o the Sel 114

C H A P T E R 5 . Queer Human Rights in andagainst the Two Chinas 138

Notes 171

Bibliography 195

Index 225


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AC K N O WL E D G M E N T S

The germination o this book began with conversations I had with

Judith Butler many years ago, and I am indebted to her or her steadast

support and critical intelligence over these years. I also want to thank

Claudine Ang, Barney Bate, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Howard Chiang, Tamara

Chin, Cui Zi’en, Jonathan Culler, Brett de Bary, Naiei Ding, David Eng,

Dustin Friedman, Xiaopei He, Josephine Ho, Hans Tao-Ming Huang,

Andrew Hui, Andrew Jones, Wenqing Kang, Bill Kennedy, DominickLaCapra, Ruhong Lin, Lydia H. Liu, Jen-peng Liu, Colleen Lye, Nata-

lie Melas, Timothy Murray, Chris Neweld, Teng Kuan Ng, Jiazhen Ni,

Amie Parry, Rajeev S. Patke, Lisa Roel, Neil Saccamano, Naoki Sakai,

Rebecca Gould, Shi Tou, Shu-mei Shih, Andy Chih-ming Wang, Wang

Fangping, Wang Ping, C. J. Wan-ling Wee, and Kenneth Wu or their

riendship and guidance.

Portions o this book were given as talks at National Taiwan Univer-

sity, Cornell University, Stanord University, Shanghai University, Berkeley, Penn State University, Brandeis University, University o Syd-

ney, University o Miami, Hong Kong University, San Francisco State

University, National Central University, National Tsinghua University,

Graduate Center, Brown University, and Yale University. I thankthe ollowing colleagues or their warmth, eedback, and encourage-

ment: Andrea Bachner, Tani Barlow, Esther Cheung, Charles Egan,

Matthew Fraleigh, Eric Hayot, Gail Hershatter, Andrew Lynch, Tina Lu,

Kam Louie, Gina Marchetti, Annie McClanahan, Robin Miller, GemaPérez-Sánchez, Jeffrey Riegel, Carlos Rojas, Teemu Ruskola, Tze-lan

Sang, Shuang Sheng, Matt Sommer, Mirana Szeto, and Jing Tsu. Many


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x AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

thanks to Chris Berry, Marshall Brown, Joe Cleary, Walter Cohen, Sean

Connolly, Jed Esty, Fran Martin, and Fredric Jameson or their incisive

comments on earlier versions o materials in the book. I also thank

several o my Cornell University graduate students whose dissertations

deepened my own thinking on topics in this book: Eno Pei Jean Chen,Carl Gelderloos, Zach Howlett, Walter Hsu, Wah Guan Lim, Matthew

Omelsky, Jennie Row, Chunyen Wang, Steven Wyatt, and We Jung Yi.

In making the nal revisions, I am extremely ortunate to have Pei Yun

Chia’s, Regina Hong’s, and Brant Torres’s editorial wisdom and invalu-

able comments. I also thank the National University o Singapore ( and Yale- librarians, Vivien Tan, Rebecca Maniates, and Amy YungMei Lin, or their assistance.

The writing o this text was made possible by research support pro-

vided by Cornell University and Yale- College. Yale- College

has also provided a generous subvention toward the production o this

book. Some o the material in chapter 2 appeared in an earlier version in

a different orm as “Queer Marxism in Taiwan” in Inter- Asia Cultural Stud-

ies 8, no. 4 (December 2007): 517–39. An earlier version o chapter 3 in

a different orm appeared as “Why Does Queer Theory Need China?”

in “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts,” a special issue o positions: east asia culturescritique 18, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 291–320. An earlier version o chapter 4 in a

different orm appeared as “The Peripheral Realism o Two Chinas” in

Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (September 2012): 395–414. An ear-

lier version o chapter 5 in a different orm appeared as “Queer Human

Rights in and against China: Liberalism, Marxism, and the Figuration

o the Human” in Social Text 30, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 71–90. My revisions

greatly beneted rom the comments provided by the anonymous

reviewers or these journals, and by the our anonymous readers DukeUniversity Press engaged or this book. Indexing was done by Clive Pyne,

Book Indexing Services. I am grateul to Ken Wissoker, Jade Brooks,

Sara Leone, and Jodi Devine or their editorial guidance in preparing

this manuscript.


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C H A P T E R 1

M A R X I S M , Q U E E R L I B E R A L I S M , A N D

T H E Q U A N DA RY O F T WO C H I N A S

When hearing about contemporary China, we do not ofen nd the

words queer and Marxism in the same sentence. I anything, it seems

that these two categories work against each other: Scholars ofen at-

tribute the emergence o queer cultures in China to the end o Marx-

ism and socialism. I a previous generation o Chinese cultural studies

scholars seemed uniormly concerned about the specters o Marxism,

today’s queer critics are more likely to worry about neoliberalism andgay normalization. The scholarly consensus is that, afer Deng’s 1978

market reorms, the phenomenon many critics have described as the

“new homonormativity” in US culture is taking place in postsocialist

China as well. The turn to neoliberalism in queer Chinese studies re-

sponds to a global conversation o the highest importance. Lisa Duggan

denes homonormativity as “a politics that does not contest dominant

heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sus-

tains them, while promising the possibility o a demobilized gay constit-uency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity

and consumption.” Michael Warner argues that homonormativity in the

gay liberation movement requires a “more consolidated gay identity”

and signals a “retreat rom its history o radicalism into a new orm o

postliberationist privatization.” The phenomenon Duggan and Warner

describe is well known and seemingly ubiquitous. A popular T-shirt

at a Pride March in San Francisco a ew years ago illustrates the point

particularly well: “My gay liestyle? Eat, sleep, go to work, pay taxes.” With the homonormative turn, many gay men and women now believe

that the best strategy or mainstream inclusion and equal rights (such


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2 C H A P T E R 1

as same-sex marriage) is to show society that they, too, are morally

upstanding citizens who are no different rom anyone else. Worried

about homonormativity, new queer theorists now ocus on critiquing

“queer liberalism,” the economic and social structure underlying this

depoliticized consumer space o metrosexual glamor and bourgeoisrights. Queer critics point out that liberalism has spawned a homonor-

mative desire to dissociate homosexuality rom culturally undesirable

practices and experiences such as , promiscuity, drag, prostitu-tion, and drug use. While it is certainly understandable why gay men

and women may wish to combat the conation o homosexuality with

other cultural denitions, the desire or mainstream inclusion has

also alienated, disempowered, and urther stigmatized gay men and

women who are prostitutes, drug users, transvestites, promiscuous,

or living with . As Nicole Ferry points out, the homonormative

movement is not an equality-based movement, but an inclusion-

based assimilation politics with exclusionary results. The situation

is clearly worrisome once we recognize that the culture o homonorma-

tivity provides a poor political model by suggesting that assimilating to

heterosexual norms is the only path to equal rights.

Many instances suggest that a culture o homonormativity hasemerged in the People’s Republic o China afer the state offi -cially entered a postsocialist era by adopting experiments in neolib-

eralism and privatization. Although political movements havemade important advances in mainland China—signicantly, the de-

criminalization o homosexuality in 1997 and its removal rom cat-

egories o mental disorder by the Chinese Psychiatric Association in

2001—other inequalities have deepened. As Lisa Roel shows, the ad-

vent o neoliberalism produced hierarchically differentiated qualitieso desire. China’s neoliberal integration into global inrastructures

intensies the process o gay normalization through the discourse o

“quality” (suzhi). With the homonormative turn, certain “improperly

gay” subjects, such as China’s “money boys,” are routinely abused

rom within the gay community. Seeing money boys as a blight on the

image o the homosexual community, Chinese gay men are eager to dis-

sociate themselves rom money boys in their quest or respectability and

global cultural citizenship as China becomes increasingly liberalized,affl uent, and cosmopolitan. Roel describes how the rise o neoliberal-

ism recongures the dreams, aspirations, and longings o gay men and


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QUANDARY OF TWO CHIN AS 3

women in China, producing novel orms o cosmopolitan aspirations,

public culture, identities, and modes o memorializing their pasts. In

this way, the differentiation o good and bad orms o gay desire also

cements boundaries between rural and urban, elite and common,

commercial and privatized.Queer critics who work on the intersections o Chinese sexualities

and neoliberalism provide numerous historical examples that explain

why queerness and Marxism are understood in antithetical ways. Roel’s

two studies, Desiring China and Other Modernities, analyze the dominant

perception among a broad public in China that Maoist socialism was a

distortion o people’s natural genders and sexualities. Roel argues

that this view, which has become common sense among many, relies

on a revisionist history, a distortion o the past that encourages people

to reject their socialist past. Once the past has been constructed this

way, postsocialist allegories emerge to represent a desire to ree one’s

gendered and sexual sel rom the dictates o the socialist state. Ac-

cordingly, the queerness o human desire comes to be viewed as what

sets limits to any and all utopian efforts to control human productiv-

ity and to explain the motions o history through economic categories.

The arrival o neoliberalism— which, as Roel crucially argues, is nota ait accompli but an ongoing series o experiments that are centrally

about desire—produces yearnings that propel people to reinvent “the

strictures and sacrices” or their socialist past by way o cosmopolitan

consumption. Compared to Roel’s work, Travis Kong’s Chinese Male

Homosexualities paints a bleaker picture o China’s newly emergent queer

communities, but similarly emphasizes the complicity between a con-

solidated homosexual identity and the consumer culture o neoliberal

capitalism. Kong shows that the emergence o gay and lesbian identi-ties in China was predicated on the relaxation o state control o the

private sphere ollowing the replacement o communism by neoliber-

alism. Song Hwee Lim similarly attributes the rising representations

o homosexuality in Chinese screen cultures to neoliberal globaliza-

tion, arguing that an internationalized, deterritorialized economy o

lm production “introduced homosexuality as a legitimate discourse

in Chinese cinemas in ways that may not have been previously pos-

sible.” These accounts o China’s neoliberal queer culture comple-ment the global narrative developed by David Eng’s critiques o the

increasingly mass-mediated consumer liestyle in The Feeling of Kinship:


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4 C H A P T E R 1

Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (2010). In these studies,

queer critics either emphasize the agency o queer desire and bodies

against state prescriptions, or expose the complicity between new sexual

politics and advanced liberalism. But in either scenario, the ocus is on

China’s postsocialist character afer the neoliberal turn, which impliesthat Marxism, whether good or bad or queers, has ceased to be a rel-

evant consideration.

The critique o queer liberalism thereore unwittingly naturalizes

the assumption that China has unequivocally entered a postsocialist

phase. However, we might pause to ask, is neoliberalism truly the domi-

nant cultural logic o contemporary queer Chinese cultures? Are queer

cultural expressions always complicit with neoliberal globalization

and the politics o gay normalization? Is there a critical, dissident,

and, indeed, queer Chinese culture anymore? Treating contemporary

Chinese queer cultures as a symptomatic expression o a globalizing

neoliberalism creates an impression that they are belated copies o the

liberal West, evolving along the same path with no local history and no

agency. According to this narrative, China’s socialist past and dialogues

with international Marxism appear to be a detour at best, with no lasting

effects on the development o its queer cultures. Ultimately, China hasarrived at the same conundrum we see in North America today: queer

liberalism and homonormativity.

The story I tell in this book is different. Queer Marxism in Two Chinas

reconstructs a rich and complex tradition o postwar queer Chinese

works that retool and revitalize Marxist social analysis. In assembling

this queer Marxist archive, I also propose two intertwined arguments

that depart rom the scholarly consensus in Chinese queer studies.

First, instead o reading contemporary Chinese queer cultures as re-sponses to neoliberal globalization, I argue that a unique local event

has centrally shaped the development o Chinese queer thought: the

1949 division o China into the People’s Republic o China () and theRepublic o China on Taiwan (). In reerring to the and the as two Chinas, I am less interested in making a political provocation

than in historicizing the implications o their coexistence or queer

practice. My second argument is that postwar queer Chinese writers,

many o whom are based in the rather than the , developeda unique theory and literature by using Marxism with inquiries into

gender and sexuality. The act that Marxism ourished in anticommunist


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may come as a surprise. While the queer Marxist tradition em-

bodies a living dialogue between the and the that attests tothe permeability o their boundaries, it also highlights a need to dis-

articulate Marxism rom the communist bureaucracy o the . This

little known cultural history o queer Marxism in the two Chinas in-dicates the vitality and dynamism o Marxism in divergent vectors o

queer thought. The geopolitical rivalry between the and the

becomes an unexpected kind o productive tension or Chinese queer

discourse, which, in turn, is also compelled to revise and reintegrate

Marxist thought into the analysis o gender and sexuality in distinctive

ways.

Although the book title pluralizes Chinas, and most o my examples

come rom the , my project is not a Sinophone studies book. My in-tention is not to bring together materials rom the peripheries o the

Sinophone world—Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora

in Malaysia, Indonesia, and North America—to develop a non–-centered story o queer lives in Chinese-speaking communities. Rather,

I am interested in historicizing the ways in which Chinese writers, in any

location, came to view the historical creation o the and the as a

oundational event or queer lie. Because the aim o my project is not todisplace Chineseness with Sinophone, Sinoglossia, or other critical con-

cepts, I am not treating works by Taiwan-based writers as an expression

o Taiwaneseness. In choosing my examples, I have also privileged trans-

national and transcultural texts—or example, Chen Ruoxi’s Paper Mar-

riage, a novel about an American man and a mainland Chinese woman

who cross boundaries o nationality and sexual orientation, which the au-

thor wrote based on her experiences in the , the , and the United

States. Similarly, because my use o the concept o “two Chinas” is his-torical rather than ideological, my study also excludes Hong Kong as a

primary site o consideration. Certainly, Hong Kong-based authors have

also developed important queer reections on liberalism, socialism, and

Marxism. Far rom being comprehensive, my archive o queer Marxist

practice invites comparisons with not only Hong Kong’s neoliberalism

but also Singapore’s “illiberal pragmatism” as a technique o queer social

management. It is my hope that Queer Marxism in Two Chinas will initiate

critical interest in such transregional studies.My study o the continuous dialogues and cross-pollination be-

tween Marxist and queer thought stems rom a desire to understand


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6 C H A P T E R 1

Chinese queer cultures’ engagement with the geopolitics o the Cold

War that produced the two Chinas and their corresponding ideological

signications. Afer all, the ideological legacy o the Cold War cements

our habitual readings o the economic ortunes o the and the

as the historical vindication o Marxism and liberalism. I argue that anydiscussion o liberalism in the Chinese context must begin with the

Cold War divide, because the rise o liberalism in the ’s political

history is critically inormed by Taiwan’s historical claim as Free China

and by its identity as China’s “economic miracle”—namely, what would

happen in mainland China i the government had adopted liberal-ism and capitalism instead o socialism. As an ethnically Chinese state

without a colonial administration, Taiwan provided the most relevant

and compelling economic model or leaders when they rst con-sidered liberalizing the market. While the ideologically retrograde ele-

ments o Free China discourses are obvious, the legacy o the Cold War

has also given rise to positive and productive queer appropriations. In

chapter our, or example, I offer a reading o the 1980s’ queer narrative

o sel-invention, entrepreneurship, and miraculous development, to

dissect the historical subjectivity underpinning the two Chinas’ tran-

sitions to postsocialism and postmartial law market economy. For thequeer Marxist cultural producers considered in this book, the geopoliti-

cal conicts between the two Chinas are both a historical burden and

an intellectual opportunity. Indeed, I would suggest that a persistent

engagement with the geopolitics o two Chinas orms the basis o a Chi-

nese materialist queer theory that sets it apart rom its Euro-American

counterparts.

One o the aims o this book is to develop a useul account o the

insights and distinctive eatures o Chinese queer theory, since we areused to thinking o queer theory as an exclusively Euro-American enter-

prise. In writing this way about the connections between Chinese queer

theory and geopolitics, I also present theory as a product o histori-

cally determinate circumstances rather than as a set o timeless prin-

ciples we can apply to a variety o cultural situations. At the same time,

characterizing theory, queer or nonqueer, as a product o the condi-

tions o its own genesis also risks reiying cultural differences. With-

out raising the enormously complex questions o cultural essentialismand universalism, I would like to propose at this point some o the dis-

tinctive achievements and concerns o queer Marxism in the Chinas in


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QUANDARY OF TWO CHINA S 7

contrast to more amiliar intellectual paradigms in the United States.

One o the hallmark achievements o US queer theory is the exploration

o the intersectionality o identity categories. For example, the “queer

o color critique” in recent years provides a powerul ramework or ex-

posing the mutual dependency o racialization and sexual abjection. But while US-based queer theory enables a rethinking o the relations

between the diacritical markers o personhood—race, gender, class, sexu-

ality, and religion—this queer theory’s conception o social differences

remains restricted by a liberal pluralist culture o identity politics that

is distinctively American. By contrast, Chinese theory o the geopo-

litical meditations o queer lives does not begin with the concept o

social identity; instead, it emphasizes the impersonal, structural, and

systemic workings o power. Whereas US queer theory responds to the

ailures o neoliberal social management by postulating an incomplete,

oreclosed, or irreducibly heterogeneous subject o identity, Chinese

queer Marxists develop an arsenal o conceptual tools or reading the

complex and overdetermined relations between human sexual reedom

and the ideological cartography o the Cold War. For these thinkers,

to raise the question o queer desire in this context is also to examine

the incomplete project o decolonization in Asia, the achievements andailures o socialist democracy, the contradictory process o capitalist

modernization, and the uneven exchange o capital and goods.

The intellectual tradition o queer Marxism offers a nonliberal alter-

native to the Euro-American model o queer emancipation grounded in

liberal values o privacy, tolerance, individual rights, and diversity. In

my view, contemporary queer critics o homonormativity, queer liber-

alism, and homonationalism have much to gain rom a consideration

o this nonliberal queer theory. The existence o Chinese queer Marx-ism also indicates that communities in the world do not evolvealong the same, inevitable path prescribed by a globalizing neoliberal-

ism. Indeed, it would be a mistake to interpret the emergence o queer

identities and communities in the two Chinas as belated versions o

post-Stonewall social ormations in the United States under a singular

logic o neoliberal globalization. The archive o queer cultural arti-

acts and intellectual discourses I assemble in this book disrupts that

developmentalist narrative by demonstrating the importance o Marx-ist reections on the 1949 division or contemporary queer thought.

The conrontation between queer and Marxist discourses in Chinese


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8 C H A P T E R 1

intellectual scenes reveals a hidden chapter o the global history o

cultural materialism that parts company with both metropolitan under-

standings o capitalism as corporate greed and the standard signica-

tion o global Maoism as Third- World revolutionary struggles.

In literary and cultural studies in North America, Marxism has cometo be understood as a somewhat specialized academic sub-discipline

associated with gures such as Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Spivak,

whose monumental works renewed critical interest in Georg Lukács’s

concepts o totality and reication, Antonio Gramsci’s theories o hege-

mony and mediation, and Louis Althusser’s structuralist interpretation

o the economic base as an “absent cause.” While the American recep-

tion o Marxism made critical contributions to both dialectical philosophy

and historical materialism, it has also become increasingly divorced

rom the “economistic” debates in European and Asian Marxisms con-

cerning such technical questions as “the transormation problem,”

the withering away o law, the value orm, the law o the tendency o the

rate o prot to all, and theories o accumulation and crisis. Nonethe-

less, the culturalist reinterpretations o Marxism have not rescued it

rom accusations o economic reductionism and oundationalism,

against which queer theory and other “postoundationalist” projectsconsciously rebel. While the critique o oundationalism is both

timely and necessary, the raming o Marxism as a monolithic intel-

lectual orthodoxy plagued by problems o determinism, teleology,

utopianism, and economism also misses the opportunity to deploy the

insights developed by Marxist authors or queer use.

In schematic terms, the queer writers examined in this book explore

our areas o social thought that are historically associated with Marx-

ism: rst, the indivisible organicity o the social body (totality); second,the distinction between ormal and substantive equality (etishism);

third, theories o community, species-being, and primitive accumulation

(alienation); and, nally, the question o social transormation (ideol-

ogy). The rich tradition o queer Marxism thus differs rom orthodox

Marxism’s emphasis on the primacy o economics. For the queer cultural

producers discussed in this book, Marxism is not so much the content

o queer reections, but a methodology. The analysis I offer signi-

cantly differs rom projects that seek to “queer” Marxism through de-lightully perverse (mis-)readings o letters between Marx and Engels,

rehistoricizations o deskilled labor as the conditions o possibility or


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the perormance o masculinity and reied desire, or interpretations o

capitalism as the production o desiring machines and bodies without

organs. These queer Marxist projects share two assumptions: that capi-

talism is the exclusive property o Euro-American modernity, and that

Marxism is a closed system incapable o dealing with the complexitieso modern lie (such as sexuality) and thereore needs to be “queered.”

By contrast, the type o Marxism I invoke in this study does not take

capitalism’s historical development in Europe as its privileged object

o analysis. Neither do I regard queerness or biopolitical production

as the conceptual tools needed to rescue Marxism rom its ideological

blind spots. Instead o queering Marxism, the authors I consider in this

book bring the methodology o Marxism to bear on queer lives. In their

works, Marxism is not a state policy such as the planned economy

or collectivized labor, but a living philosophy. As a methodology rather

than an ideology, Marxism inspires queer authors who occupy a vari-

ety o political positions that may be at odds with the “actually existing

Marxism” o the People’s Republic o China. While some o the most in-

genious and hybrid uses o Marxist theories o social structuration, alien-

ation, and totality come rom political dissidents who are openly

critical o the Communist Party, -based intellectuals have also developed textured narratives o the ailures o liberal pluralism throughrecourse to Marxist theories o substantive equality. As represented by

these texts, queerness exceeds the sexual meaning o homosexuality. In-

stead, queerness indicates a constitutive sociality o the sel that coun-

ters the neoliberal imagination o ormal rights, electoral competition,

and economic growth.

Beyond Neoliberal Homonationalism

In both English and Chinese scholarship, this turn toward a critique o

neoliberal homonormativity is inormed by two o the most galvaniz-

ing developments in queer theory. The rst development is the theory

o queer temporality, a dynamic body o scholarship that accomplishes

many things: it theorizes the conict between reproductive uturism

and queer negativity; excavates a different political historical con-

sciousness rom the pleasures o the past; critiques the normativemodel o temporality that organizes bourgeois reproduction, inheri-

tance, risk/saety, work/play; analyzes movements o sex beore the


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10 C H A P T E R 1

homo/heterosexual denition as gurations o the “untimely”; and even

writes, proleptically, queer theory’s own obituary. The second impor-

tant development is the much discussed “affective turn” in queer theory,

which has also produced an explosive growth o exciting scholarship on

gay and lesbian emotion, charting a passage rom negative eelings(shame, loss, melancholia, grie, trauma) to positive eelings (outrage,

sociability, happiness, public eelings, touching eelings, optimism)

in queer history. As generative as these orms o scholarship have

been, theories o queer temporality and works in affect studies have a

dematerializing tendency. Certainly, the affective turn in queer studies

has signicantly expanded a Marxist cultural materialism that includes

Raymond Williams’s analysis o structures o eelings and Herbert

Marcuse’s syncretic writings on Eros and civilization, attuning us to the

mutually constitutive and mutually embedded relations between emer-

gent social orms and queer affect. In their emphasis on the subjective

meanings o pleasure, play, and desire, however, new queer studies

sometimes give insuffi cient attention to the impersonal structures

and conditions o social change.

There is no question that postsocialist China and postmartial law

Taiwan have entered a new era marked by the biopolitical productiono the neoliberal subject. Yet this bioproduction has also given rise to a

reinvigorated Marxist analysis rom within Chinese intellectual circles,

which suggests that it is diffi cult to theorize queer subjectivities as a

question o affect and shifing temporalities alone. The phenomenon

o China’s “pink economy” presents a complex cultural semiotic that the

production o the neoliberal subject only partially explains. The metro-

politan dreams o China’s new queer bourgeoisie, like any dream-text,

have maniest contents as well as deep structures. On the surace, manyo these developments do suggest that a new era o liberal rights has

dawned to bring about the hypervisibility o queer issues in the public

domain. At the time o my writing in 2014, Taiwan is in the midst o

massive protests against a proposed bill to legalize same-sex marriage,

which would make Taiwan the rst Asian country to do so. In the ,

a visible and sel-affi rmative gay culture has appeared as well. A recent

mainstream blockbuster, Tiny Times (2013), adapted rom the director

Guo Jingming’s own best-selling trilogy Xiao shidai (2008, 2010, 2011),comortably and condently presents homoeroticism, male nudity,

and sexual experimentations as metropolitan glamor. In Beijing and


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Shanghai, gay bars, saunas, cruising spots in parks, and other estab-

lishments are surrounded by restaurants that cater to middle-class gay

consumers. Gay-themed tele vision shows, lesbian pulp ction, pop

songs, youth culture, lm estivals, and money boys abound. Many o

these structural transormations have impacted not only popular cul-ture but also high art: as Fran Martin’s study shows, contemporary Chi-

nese lesbian cinema has entered a distinctively new phase marked by a

“critical presentism” that denes a sel-consciously minoritizing lesbian

identity, here and now, over and against an earlier, “memorial mode”

o narrating same-sex love in the schoolgirl romance genre, where the

dominant tendency is to bracket off same-sex experiences as an inter-

lude in an otherwise unilinear and indicatively heterosexual lie his-

tory. New developments in literature, as well, contribute to this sense

o the present as a groundbreaking moment marked by new identities,

politics, communities, markets, and bodies in China. As several recent

sociological and ethnographic studies have observed, sel-identied

“tongzhi,” “tongren,” and “lala,” have established their own social vo-

cabulary, new community ormations on the internet, affective ties,

recreational culture, support networks, relationship strategies, and

even marriage rituals.

Indeed, since the 1990s, mainland China hasseen numerous milestones o gay visibility and social rights: the 1997

repeal o the criminal code o “hooliganism” (under which homosexu-

als could be prosecuted), Li Yinhe’s campaign to legalize same-sex

marriage in China in 2001, the 2001 Chinese Gay and Lesbian Film

Festival at Beijing University, the removal o homosexuality rom the

medical category o perversions by the Chinese Psychiatry Association

in 2001, the inaugural Shanghai Pride in June 2009, and the appearances

o mainstream lesbian, gay, and transgendered tele vision celebrities(such as Jin Xing). As Lisa Roel describes, while “rom one perspective

it might seem as i the Chinese state creates strict constraints on politi-

cal activism, rom another perspective the diffi culty o doing politics on

the terrain o ‘rights’ opens up a space that enables a different kind o

political creativity”—an example being Pink Space (Fense kongjian),

ounded by He Xiaopei.

Queer culture in the is so developed today that the topic o

homosexuality per se, once taboo and subsequently greeted by manypeople with ascination, can no longer command the attention o the pub-

lic. Instead, today’s China has seen a prolieration o sexual discourses


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12 C H A P T E R 1

and identities. Tongqi is a new item o China’s popular vocabulary that

reers to gay men’s wives. These “beards” or “living widows” are a new

social minority and the constituency o a new social movement in China.

A hotly debated topic on Chinese internet orums today, the tongqi social

movement o “living widows” demonstrates the hypervisibility o con-temporary queer issues in China. The intensity o the conversation bears

witness to the lightning speed at which Chinese reception and culture o

sexuality have evolved. In 2011 a ormer living widow, Yao Lien, ounded

Tongqi jiayuan, an organization designed to mobilize and empower other

living widows. The organization offers resources and counseling or

women who unknowingly married homosexual men, but it also em-

phatically portrays homosexuality as a threat to women’s happiness. Its

website characterizes women married to homosexual men as victims

o domestic abuse and psychological trauma, and homosexual men as

selsh liars who abuse women to protect their own secrets. In act, the

organization urges the Chinese government to penalize deceitul ho-

mosexual men by criminalizing such marriages as raud, and claims that

such marriages pose a threat to public health by exposing unsuspecting

Chinese women to . While Tongqi jiayuan pathologizes homosexual-

ity and homosexual men, other voices have emerged. Pink Space provides a support group or wives o gay men as well, but the goal o the

latter group is to promote understanding and dialogue between these

women and the gay male community. A recent tele vision show, “What

Are We Doing to Rescue Wives o Homosexuals?” described those

women as a “new minority in China more disempowered and alien-

ated than homosexuals” and estimated their number to be around 16

million based on a study by Zhang Beichuan, a proessor at Qingdao

University. According to the study o Liu Dalin at Shanghai University,China has 25 million tongqi at the moment. In the realm o arts and lit-

erature, tongqi is a well-known topic in China. As early as 2003, Andrew

Yusu Cheng’s eature lm, Welcome to Destination Shanghai, already pre-

sents a kaleidoscopic view o the entangled lives o tongqi and other dis-

enranchised characters on the margins o society. Two recent popular

novels, Qing Zizhu’s Tongqi and Jin Erchuang’s Tongfu Tongqi, depict the

social lie and dilemmas o tongqi, while a new eature lm made in

Taiwan, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (Arvin Chen, 2013), bears witnessto the cultural interest in the topic across the straits. Tongqi is thereore

a transregional and a transcultural ormation. The attention the topic


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has gained not only indicates that sexuality issues have entered a new

phase in the , but also demonstrates that the boundaries betweenthe and the are ofen more porous than we acknowledge.

While these developments unambiguously suggest a neoliberal trans-

ormation o queer identities and discourses, many crucial questions arelef unanswered without a materialist analysis. Above all, it is unclear

whether the queer community’s newound visibility indicates collective

social progress, or the cooptation o the gay movement by neoliberal

capitalism. For example, Fang Gang’s 1995 book, Homosexuality in China,

brought about the rst legal case against the libel o homosexuality

and is or that reason requently cited as a milestone o gay cultural

history in China. For queer Marxist Cui Zi’en, however, Fang Gang’s

work exemplies an opportunistic voyeurism that transorms the social

plight o homosexuals into a commodity. A similar and earlier exam-

ple is the publication o Li Yinhe and Wang Xiaobo’s coauthored book,

Their World: A Penetrating Look into China’s Male Homosexual Community. No

scholar can deny that Li and Wang’s book brought about a paradigm

shif in gay and lesbian research in China, and that Li, a prominent

sociologist, sexologist, and advocate o gay rights, has made numer-

ous contributions to China’s community. In particular, Li is wellknown or her campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in China. How-ever, Li and Wang’s book, as its title shows, has also been criticized or

objectiying and exoticizing the gay community. Critics point out that

Li and Wang emphatically separate the researchers rom the object o

their inquiry (“their world”), while establishing the researchers as the

authoritative and scientic act-nders who “penetrate” China’s male

homosexual communities. A catalogue o queer lms, novels, visual

arts, conerences, and social movements alone will not provide a mean-ingul account o how and how much ’s sexual communities haveevolved. These changes need to be recontextualized by an analysis o the

political economy o two Chinas.

Excavating the Marxist intellectual roots o contemporary queer

thought in the Chinas is one way o answering some o today’s most

urgent questions: How does being queer matter? I China’s popular cul-

ture and social science research indicate that homosexuals are not just

visible, but already rmly established in their roles as society’s latest neo-liberal subjects ghting or mainstream inclusion— what’s queer about

queer studies now, in the two Chinas or elsewhere? My ormulation o


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14 C H A P T E R 1

this question comes rom the 2005 special issue o Social Text (edited

by David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Muñoz), but it has, in some

orm or another, been at the heart o conversations around “being criti-

cally queer,” the question o social transormation, “queer occupy,”

queer antiwar movements, and a host o other concepts. As queerpeople transorm rom victims to consumers, queer theory is no longer

centered on loss, melancholia, or other eelings associated with the era

o the epidemic. Instead, contemporary queer theory mourns theloss o radicality in queer movements, which have been taken over by the

assimilationist logic o commodied desire. Against the backdrop o a

perceived universal loss o queer radicality, North American critics have

even more reason to consider the historical development o a nonliberal

alternative as it has occurred in the Chinas. The insights o Chinese queer

Marxist writers are particularly relevant to our times. In this book, I offer

an analysis o their thinking on the alliances between labor and queer

movements, the material conditions that govern permissible language

and democratic participation, and the uture o substantive equality.

In turning to these ideas, I also hope to show that Marxist methodol-

ogy has ourished in the two Chinas, both o which are locations that

international commentators expect to have been eroded by capital-ist penetrations. The vitality o Marxist thought in postsocialist China

and anticommunist Taiwan also indicates the limits o a static concep-

tion o Marxism and queer struggles as historically successive social

movements.

I do not intend to suggest that China alone has a queer Marxist

tradition. Certainly, sophisticated meditations on the convergence o

Marxism and queer studies are available in North American intellectual

circles. A vibrant tradition that encompasses, among others, KevinFloyd’s important The Reication of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism has al-

ready standardized the vocabulary or analyzing the relation between

biopolitical reproduction and crisis o capitalist accumulation, a topic

that received reinvigorated treatment in a 2012 special issue o .

However, as I mentioned already, scholars working in this vein tend

to be more interested in queering Marxism than bringing historical

materialism to bear on queer studies. But Marxism is not just a cri-

tique o capitalism, corporations, and consumption. It is also a phi-losophy o the totality o the social world, a critique o the bourgeois


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conception o rights, an analysis o the mechanism that regulates di-

erential access to resources, a social theory o alienation, and a dialecti-

cal method o reading historical tendencies and countertendencies. All

o these strands o Marxist thought have inuenced Chinese queer writ-

ings, which in turn provide some o the most powerul, yet underconsid-ered, resources or contemporary theory and politics.

The dynamic tradition o queer Marxism in the Chinas has produced

a nonliberal queer theory, but reaping its insights requires the labor o

two kinds o cultural translation. The rst is disciplinary: we must take

Chinese materials seriously as intellectual resources rather than local

illustrations o theoretical paradigms already developed by the canon

o queer theory. Doing so also means that we must adamantly reject the

common division o intellectual labor in area studies programs between

the production o paradigms (queer theory) and the gathering o raw

materials (Chinese examples). Hence, we should not assume that queer

theory automatically reers to the distinct body o theoretical works pro-

duced in 1990s’ United States and later translated into Chinese. In my

study, queer theory reers to a global discourse that was simultaneously

developed by English, Chinese, and other academic traditions. Queer

theory is a transnational and transcultural practice o which its US in-stantiation is only part. Moreover, this global dialogue is necessarily

impure in its methodology, entangled in historical trajectory, and

varied in modes o dissemination.

The second kind o translation perormed in this book is method-

ological: I read ction as theory and society as text. Literature is a node

o densely woven inormation and ideas provided by a culture, though

its insights are ofen obscured by its sel-declared status as ction in

our habitual search or stable meanings, historical truths, and readilydigestible propositions. Similarly, the social text o contemporary Chi-

nese queer cultures ofen resists our desire to transcode it into political

allegories and narratives o emergence. Despite the ormidable work

o the historians o sexuality, queer Chinese cultures remain recalci-

trant, thwarting every effort to produce neatly organized histories rom

taboo to identity. Instead, those interested in reading, interpreting, or

writing about Chinese queer cultures are more likely to be conronted

with enigmatic political signiers and overlapping temporalities. Whilethese aberrant Chinese queer narratives ail to delineate the heroic


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16 C H A P T E R 1

journey o the sel-making o a subculture, they also dey attempts to

align their signication to the economic policies o the socialist and non-

socialist parts and phases o Chinese cultures. The cultural narratives

produced by the two Chinas are too complex to be reduced to expres-

sions o Marxism and liberalism. In turn, queer writings provide pre-cisely the conceptual tools we need to overcome these static Cold War

biurcations.

The Quandary of Two Chinas

Today two nations in the world reer to themselves as China: the Peo-

ple’s Republic o China and the Republic o China on Taiwan. The coex-

istence o two Chinas (and two Koreas) indicates that the Cold War is

not yet over in Asia. This reality is signicantly absent in the American

perspective, which tends to consider the disintegration o the Soviet

Union as the beginning o a post-Cold War world order marked by “the

end o ideology.” The coexistence o two Chinas also limits the use-

ulness o nation-centered history. From the beginning, the creation

o two Chinas signals a sedimentation o multinational interests and

conicts. At the end o the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Chiang Kai-shek government relocated to Taiwan and, under the protection o the

Seventh Fleet, became America’s island ortress or the crusade against

communism in the Pacic. As part o the United States’ strategy o con-

tainment, the Sino-American Mutual Deense Treaty prevented both

the and the rom initiating direct military action against eachother, effectively ensuring the division o China. While the two Ger-

manys were unied afer the disintegration o the Soviet Union, East

Asia remains divided according to the original cartography drawn at theheight o the Cold War, and ideologically governed by popular responses

to the economic outcomes o socialism and liberal capitalism. In Tai-

wan, while the rhetoric o “taking back the mainland” has dissipated

with the liberalization o political culture and commerce, the stigma

o communism (understood as poverty, cultural backwardness, and

one-party dictatorship) translates into sinophobia and remains the pri-

mary emotional material ueling the Taiwanese independence move-

ment. As Chen Kuan-Hsing argues, decolonization in East Asia is anincomplete project that was hijacked by the US installment o a Cold


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War structure o eeling. The Cold War created the spatial racturing

and “worlding” o Chinas (rst, second, and third worlds) as well as their

temporal desynchronization (pre-, anti-, and postcapitalist). This rac-

turing is most symptomatically seen in the contradictory senses o

center and periphery in the two Chinas: while the is militarilyand politically dominant, it is also economically and culturally colo-

nized by the . Although the no longer claims to be the seat o

the legitimate government o the whole o China, it continues to see it-

sel as the center o authentic Chinese culture, where standard Chinese

writing remains in use and traditional culture remains protected rom

the disastrous events o the Cultural Revolution. Such claims no doubt

carry an imperialistic undertone, although it is ar rom clear whether it

is colonialist to consider Taiwan Chinese or not to do so. The interpen-

etrations o American neocolonial interests, Han Chinese chauvin-

ism, Taiwanese ethno-nationalism, and Sinocentrism ofen render

the operations o power illegible, greatly limiting the application o a

dichotomous model o domination and resistance rom postcolonial

studies to the quandary o two Chinas.

How, then, is the problem o queer liberalism entwined with the

quandary o two Chinas? For many international observers, Taiwan hasbeen a poster child o East Asian democratization. Taiwan’s highly

touted economic “miracle” is causally linked to its political liberalism,

although it is hard to say which is the cause and which is the effect.

The tentative links between Taiwan’s economic and political liberalism

aside, one o the most important indices o Taiwan’s political liberal-

ism is indeed its queer movement: queer literature has blossomed in

Taiwan since the 1990s, producing mainstream and internationally ac-

claimed titles such as Chu T’ien- wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man. In ad-dition, the popular gay series, Crystal Boys, aired in 2003 to wideattention. Taiwan was also the rst Chinese community to hold a Gay

Pride parade in 2003. Since then, Taiwan has been rumored to be on

its way to becoming the rst East Asian country to legalize same-sex

marriage. Since these signicant changes in queer visibility occurred

afer the lifing o the martial law in 1987 and the multiparty election in

2000, it is natural to assume that queer emancipation is a byproduct o

the advent o the liberal-democratic state. This view reinorces the linkbetween political liberalism (queer visibility) and economic liberalism


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18 C H A P T E R 1

(ree trade), which, consequently, implies that any observable degree

o queer progress in the must be attributed to the supersession osocialism by international capitalism.

The assumption o ree and repressed queer subjects depends on

the dichotomy o two Chinas. Since the Cold War period, Taiwan is al-most never studied in the West as an object o interest itsel. Instead,

as Yvonne Chang points out, Taiwan has served either as a surrogate

or China as a whole (during the years when scholars could not access

mainland China or eldwork or language training), or as a thought ex-

periment o the “road not taken” in communist studies: “What would

have happened to China without the Communist Revolution?” The cel-

ebration o Taiwan’s liberalism, then, works in tandem with the reduc-

tion o China to communist studies, whereby Marxism is caricatured as

the planned economy and rigid power structures, and democracy con-

ated with the ballot box.

Commentators who consider Taiwan to be a ormerly Leninist state

that has successully undergone democratization commonly attribute

a revolutionary character to the lifing o martial law in 1987. The event

ended near our decades o Kuomintang ( autocracy and granted

oppositional parties ormal political representation. But as Marx oncesaid, “the political revolution dissolves civil society into its elements

without revolutionizing these elements themselves or subjecting them

to criticism.” The creation o a multiparty electoral system does not

signal substantive equality and social change; nor can we comortably

equate democratization to the ormal competition between parties. De-

spite the rhetoric o radical break, this common reading o 1987 as the

beginning o democratization in Taiwan actually derives in part rom a

perception that Taiwan was always and already liberal beore the lifingo martial law.

It is worth noting that such readings are possible only because lib-

eralism itsel is a contradictory ideology whose political and economic

meanings are conated in the cultural imaginary. In the pre–1987 au-

thoritarian phase, Taiwan was the “Free China” that was not yet lost

to the revolution against the property system. During this phase, Tai-

wan was ree in the sense o the ree market. Like many other capital-

ist, but not necessarily democratic, regimes supported by the UnitedStates, Taiwan played a key role in the global translation o liberty as

laissez-aire capitalism. Long beore the popularization o the term


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East Asian Economic Miracle, triumphant accounts o the Four Asian

Tigers already identied Taiwan’s high growth rates since the 1960s as

the vindication o liberalism over the socialist model. In the period afer

the lifing o martial law in 1987, Taiwan is again a paradigmatic mani-

estation o a universal liberalism, whose meaning has suddenly shifedrom ree trade to the ballot box. Discussed in the Western media mainly

as a counterpart o the People’s Republic o China, Taiwan stands as a

comorting example o how Western liberal principles, such as reedom

o expression and ree elections, can take root in non- Western cultures.

Together with Japan, India, and Namibia, Taiwan is the living proo

that “traditional societies,” despite their recalcitrant cultural customs

and economic backwardness, can also become just like the West. By

the twenty-rst centur y, the old world order was turned upside down

by a post-martial-law, democratic Taiwan and a post-Maoist, capitalist

China. Because ormerly stable ideological metaphors are reversed, the

revamped Cold War bipolar lens o the differences between the andthe has come to depend heavily on the political rivalry between theDemocratic Progress Party () and the or a sense o Taiwan’sliberalism. Although the principal justication or the grouping o Tai-

wan with the liberal West has now shifed rom its capitalism to itsdemocracy, the theoretical inconsistencies o global anticommunism

have only reinorced the impression that Taiwan is a steadily liberaliz-

ing society on the verge o becoming a belated version o multicultural

America.

One crucial consequence o this queer emancipatory narrative is

the analytical reduction o human emancipation to democratization, to

a revolution in the form of the state rom the one-party rule o the

to the present multi-party system in Taiwan. However, since Taiwan’s“democratization”—its rst multiactional presidential election in

2000—ethnic identity has replaced anticommunism as the dominant

political issue in Taiwan. Currently, the Taiwanese polity is divided

into two color-coded camps: the Pan-Green Coalition led by the and devoted to the promotion o Taiwan’s de jure independence, and

the “One China” Pan-Blue Coalition centered on the nationalist party’s

() platorm o unitary Chinese national identity and close economic

cooperation with the People’s Republic o China. The Green Camp madethe creation o a distinctive Taiwanese identity and “de-Sinicization”

(qu Zhongguo hua) major campaign issues, emphasizing the ’s long


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20 C H A P T E R 1

record o oppression and martial law, its massacre o Taiwanese pro-

testors in the 228 Incident, and its regime o White Terror that imprisoned

and executed 45,000–90,000 intellectuals in the 1950s. The electoral

competition between Green and Blue has blocked queer issues rom

entering the domain o politics. In 2004, a group o concerned intel-lectuals, writers, artists, and activists in Taiwan ormed the Alliance

o Ethnic Equality in response to ’s electoral campaign, which cre-

ated “a divisive identity politics playing on ethnic riction rather than

resolving them.” The Alliance recognized that Taiwan did not have a

true democracy because elections were monopolized by ethnic iden-

tity issues, while other concerns—environmentalism, migrant work-

ers, queer rights— were effectively purged rom the domain o electoral

politics. More specically, elections in Taiwan are determined by the

ethnic identities o the running candidates— whether the politician

in question is Taiwan-born (bensheng) or an émigré rom the mainland

(waisheng)—and both camps have been unresponsive to and uninter-

ested in queer and eminist issues.

This analysis suggests that a simple dichotomy between liberal and

illiberal regimes, democracies and authoritarian bureaucracies, is in-

suffi cient or comprehending the conditions o queer lives. Indeed,sexual dissidents, migrant workers, and other disempowered social

groups ofen bear the brunt o globalization-induced crisis. Threatened

by the prospect o reunication with mainland China, Taiwan has o-

cused its diplomatic strategy on integrating into the global economy

and on securing popular support rom the West by promoting itsel as a

democratic regime with values similar to those in the United States. As

Josephine Ho demonstrated, the realignment o local cultures with the

demands o globalization has also created a repressive regime or queerpeople through the establishment o s, religious groups, psychi-atric and health experts, and even human rights watch groups. The

queer Marxism project runs counter to the perception that liberalism

has advanced queer rights. Giving up the notion o a liberal Taiwan,

in turn, rees us o these debilitating habits o thought inherited rom

the Cold War that are blocking more useul analyses o the complex

relations between queer struggles and power. Moreover, disabusing our-

selves o the knee- jerk equation o Marxism and liberalism with thecorrelated Chinas also allows us to recognize these struggles as intel-

lectually hybrid, impure, and even promiscuous ormations.


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Why Does Queer Theory Need the Chinas?

Viewing Marxism as an intellectual resource rather than an economic

policy necessarily raises the question o theory in Chinese studies. It

should be clear by now that “China” in this study is not an empirical loca-tion that reers to the alone. Instead, I ocus on how queer culturalproducers engage with the problematic o China(s). Treating China as

an object o theoretical reection disrupts a strong tendency in the

current eld o gender and sexuality studies to separate theory, in par-

ticular queer theory, rom empirical and historical perspectives on

same-sex relations in China. Scholars who separate theoretical and his-

torical perspectives in Chinese gender studies ofen insist that queer

theory is a Euro-American ormation o sexual knowledge, and that

applying queer theory to the study o China perpetuates a colonialist

epistemology. The critique is not unounded, since Sinophone queer

cultures indeed have important and distinctive eatures that cannot be

assimilated into a global history o sexuality. In addition, this critique

o queer theory’s Eurocentrism is both urgent and necessary, given that

it is increasingly common or critics, such as Dennis Altman, to inter-

pret new sexual ormations in Asia as the spread o Western models ohomosexuality without local history and agency. A stronger version o

this view categorically rejects the applicability o the terms queer and

homosexuality, insisting that tongxinglian and tongxing’ai in China are

entirely different rom these concepts. My study questions the as-

sumption that renders China as antithetical and exterior to queer the-

ory; in turn, I characterize queer theory as an incomplete project that is

constantly transormed by China. In my view, limiting the provenance

o queer theory to North America misses not only the opportunity ora transcultural dialogue, but also the point o queer theory altogether:

that sexual difference necessitates a rethinking o cultural comparison

and comparability.

In what ollows, I offer some reections on the historical entangle-

ment between queer theory and cultural comparison as the discipline

was practiced in North America. I assert that queer theory, or all its

emphasis on sexual difference, was actually ounded by a theory o

the non- West that was captured by the sign o China. In this context,the proper question to ask in the postcolonial debate is no longer,

“Why does China need queer theory?” but rather, “Why does queer


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22 C H A P T E R 1

theory need the Chinas?” By demonstrating that queer theory has al-

ways needed and presupposed the Chinas, and that queer theory is also a

theory o the cultural difference between China and the West, I strive to

show that queer theory requires a theory o geopolitics. In turn, Chinese

queer Marxists’ theorization o the intimacy between geopolitics andsexuality, which I reconstruct more systematically in chapter two, serves

as a model or queer writings in English. Recognizing Chinese queer

theory as a geopolitically mediated discourse, then, helps to correct the

perception o it as a derivative discourse. Instead, we can place Chinese

queer theory in the proper intellectual context as a globally capacious

tradition that pregures and encompasses its Euro-American variant.

In the United States in the late 1980s and the 1990s, a major question

in queer theory was the postulation o a universal patriarchy. In retro-

spect, it is surprising how many o the ounding texts o queer theory

were derived rom a theoretical argument or a nonidentit y between

Eastern and Western cultures. Take, or example, Judith Butler’s 1990

Gender Trouble, a text primarily known today or its theory o perorma-

tivity and or its critique o the category o women as the universal basis

o eminism. In Gender Trouble and later elaborations, Butler argues that

gender is not an immutable essence o a person but, rather, a reiterativeseries o acts and a citational practice o norms that are, signicantly,

culturally variable. The theory o cultural variability underlies the book’s

central claim, which is that a representational politics based on an

idealized and dualistic conception o gender orecloses transgressive

possibilities and agency. But Butler means several things by the phrase

“culturally variable.” The immediate context or Butler’s intervention is

a structuralist legacy in French eminist theory that she understands to

be a dyadic heterosexism. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ClaudeLévi-Strauss maintains that the prohibition against incest is not only a

law present in every culture but also what ounds culture as such. Lévi-

Strauss’s understanding o the prohibition against incest as a cultur-

ally invariable “elementary structure” o human civilization provides

the basis o the Symbolic in Lacanian psychoanalysis, which elevates

the incest taboo into a heterosexist theory o the Oedipus complex.

Later, Butler wonders what would happen i Western philosophy (and

gender theory) began with Antigone instead o Oedipus, and ormu-lates an alternative to the Oedipus complex in Antigone’s Claim. In Gender

Trouble, Butler identies the important links (and discontinuities) be-


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tween the structuralist legacy o Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure,

and Jacques Lacan, and the French eminist theory o Julia Kristeva,

Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. The contributions o French eminist

theory are many, but most signicant is the view that the undamental

difference between masculine and eminine is a precondition o humansignication and communicability. Butler argues that Lévi-Straussian

theories o universal structures and undamentals were indispensable

in elevating eminist theory to the center o social analysis: “The speak-

ing subject was, accordingly, one who emerged in relation to the dual-

ity o the sexes, and that culture, as outlined by Lévi-Strauss, was de-

ned through the exchange o women, and that the difference between

men and women was instituted at the level o elementary exchange, an

exchange which orms the possibility o communication itsel. . . .

Suddenly, [women] were undamental. Suddenly, no human science

could proceed without us.”

Why was Gender Trouble, the oundational text o US queer theory, so

preoccupied with the question o cultural variability in structuralist an-

thropology? In the 1966 preace to the second edition o The Elementary

Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss openly acknowledges that his theory

o kinship was based on insuffi cient and secondary sources aboutChina and India. Butler returns to Lévi-Strauss’s writings on China

in Undoing Gender, citing the 2001 anthropological ndings o Cai Hua

to dismiss the structuralist myth o universal kinship. Here, China

occupies a strategic place in Butler’s quarrels with the structuralists,

many o whom (such as Kristeva and Žižek) have also produced amous

statements o their own on China. Butler’s goal is not only to reveal

the heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions in structuralist

and psychoanalytic understandings o kinship, but to demonstratethat these laws, norms, and structures are products o human culture

and hence subject to social change and democratic contestations.

The thesis o social transormability then requires Butler to demon-

strate that such laws must vary rom culture to culture. I cultures like

China can be discovered to operate outside or, better yet, against the

systematic descriptions o universally valid laws and conventions o

the human world in Western philosophy, the structuralist project can be

nally overcome. In these queer battles against the heterosexism othe Symbolic, observations about the culturally constructed nature o

social categories become an argument about cultural differences in the


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24 C H A P T E R 1

anthropological sense, and the critique o gender norms becomes en-

tangled with theories o Oriental exceptionalism.

In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that the category o women is an op-

pressively restrictive notion that is dependent on an equally restrictive

imagination o a singular patriarchy. To make this argument, Butlerpoints out that there must be other cultures that do not share Western

ideas about what a woman is or what constitutes oppression and patri-

archy. In order to deconstruct the xity o women as a category, Butler

has to rst caution her reader against the search or a universal patriar-

chy in non- Western cultures:

The effort to include “Other” cultures as variegated amplications

o a global phallogocentrism constitutes an appropriative act thatrisks a repetition o the sel-aggrandizing gesture o phallogocen-

trism, colonizing under the sign o the same those differences that

might otherwise call that totalizing concept into question. . . . The

political assumption that there must be a universal basis or emi-

nism, one which must be ound in an identity assumed to exist

cross-culturally, ofen accompanies the notion that the oppression

o women has some singular orm discernible in the universal or

hegemonic structure o patriarchy or masculine domination. . . .That orm o eminism has come under criticism or its efforts to

colonize and appropriate non- Western cultures to support highly

Western notions o oppression.

What exactly are these “highly Western notions o oppression” and how

do non- Western cultures serve as their conceptual limits, as the l’impensé

de la raison? More specically, how does an argument that designates non-

Western cultures as the unrepresentable and the unspeakable counterthe history o colonial violence and the hegemony o Western thought?

In this critique o the oundational ethnocentrism o the West, para-

doxically, the non- West becomes excluded rom thought, standing in

or the epistemological limits o Western reason. This particular post-

colonial critique certainly has its political promises and uses, but the

more pressing question is why the ethical call to realign what is possible

in human gender and sexual relations in queer theory has to rely on an

anthropological hypothesis o the incongruity o Western and non- Western cultures, which in turn posits China as the exteriority and

lacunae o “Western notions o oppression.”


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Gender Trouble is not the only text rom the 1990s whose theory o gen-

der relies on this particular conception o the non- West. Another pio-

neering text o early US queer theory, Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the

Closet , makes a different argument about sexuality via the distinction

between the totalizability o the West and the nontotalizable nature othe non- West. Sedgwick’s work is generally acknowledged as a paradigm

shif that establishes the study o sexuality as the oundation o all social

analysis, rather than as its ootnote. She makes this argument by showing

that the denitional crisis o homosexuality/heterosexuality is “epidemic”

and central to all organizations o knowledge, even non-sex-specic

kinds. In many scenarios that do not appear to be primarily concerned

with homosexuality—or example, romantic English poetry—the text’s

structure o address belies a preoccupation with what Sedgwick calls

the triangulation o desire that involves the deection and disavowal o

homosocial desires. In order to show that sexuality is central to every

node o knowledge, however, Sedgwick has to qualiy her argument

with the phrase “in Western culture.” The West then becomes a totaliz-

able entity, while the non- West is denitionally excluded rom this the-

ory o sexuality.

Sedgwick begins Epistemology of the Closet with the proposal that the(crisis o the) homo/heterosexual denition is constitutive o “twentieth-

century Western culture as a whole.” This argument builds on her

analysis in Between Men (1985) that the disavowal or deection o same-

sex desire, ofen ound in English poetry whose maniest theme is

the celebration o heterosexual union, constitutes a culturally policed

boundary between homosociality and homosexuality that structures

the entire social terrain “in the modern West.” Sedgwick argues that

although the igure o the closet may appear to be a merely sexualor even trivial question, it is actually the paradigm o knowledge/

ignorance that organizes the entire domain o modern social thought.

Later, Sedgwick elaborates this argument in the discussion o the

“privilege o unknowing” in Tendencies (1993). Sedgwick shows that so-

cial domination depends on a strategic separation o mutually implied

orms o knowledge o which the closet is a paradigmatic case. This

point is the basis o Sedgwick’s claim that the interpretation o sexuality

should be taken as the starting point o social analysis rather than as itsaferthought. The uture o queer studies depends on the promise that

rethinking the sexual can lead to the rethinking o the social as well.


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26 C H A P T E R 1

The power o Sedgwick’s work comes rom her ability to show that sexu-

ality is revelatory o the ways in which an entire culture organizes itsel

and thereore central to any type o social analysis. Sedgwick, however,

cautions that sexuality studies can become the oundation o social anal-

ysis only i we do not apply such generalizations, “however sweeping,”outside the West: “It is very diffi cult or [this book’s choice o the Euro-

American male as its subject matter] to be interpreted in any other light

than that o the categorical imperative: the act that they are made in a

certain way here seems a priori to assert that they would be best made

in the same way everywhere. I would ask that, however sweeping the claims

made by this book may seem to be, it not be read as making that partic-

ular claim [o applying the analysis to non–Euro-American cultures].”

In this ormula, the mutually constitutive and dialectical relationship

between homosexuality and heterosexuality within Western culture “as

a whole” is analytically predicated on the categorical rejection o the

commensurability between Western and non- Western cultures.

Sedgwick suggests that sexuality can maintain its illustrative power

as a paradigmatic instance o the ways discourse organizes the entire

social eld only i we accept that it makes sense to speak o “twentieth-

century Western culture as a whole” in the rst place, but what are theimplications o the insistence on the links between these two argu-

ments? What are the historical and theoretical contexts in which

Sedgwick’s argument or the centrality o sexuality studies comes to be

analytically dependent on the totalizability o the West, on our ability to

view “twentieth-century West as a whole” as a coherent unit o analysis?

It is unclear whether Sedgwick would consider Spain, Greece, or Ser-

bia part o a West whose denitional axis extends rom Marcel Proust

to Henry James, Jane Austen, and Herman Melville. But it is clear thatthe hypothesis o the totality o the West requires the incommensurabil-

ity between East and West, since it is only in relation to the non- West

that the phrase “Western culture as a whole” acquires any meaning and

coherence.

While 1990s’ US queer theory needed and reied the incongruity be-

tween cultures—and or the ounding critics, it is not the differences

between French and American cultures that matter—the historical ten-

dency to situate China as the paradigmatic Other served a number oimportant unctions in the development o queer theory. The argument


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that homosexuality was a modern invention (in contrast to, or exam-

ple, Greek pederasty) is among the most important claims o queer

theory. Some queer theorists have argued that the modern period is

dened by a newly available conception o homosexuality as the iden-

tity o a small and relatively xed group o people, in distinction roman earlier view o same-sex desire as a continuum o acts, experiences,

identities, and pleasures spanning the entire human spectrum. This

claim, sometimes known as the “beore sexuality thesis,” is commonly

associated with the work o Michel Foucault, who is quite specic in

his dating: Foucault writes that homosexuality as such was invented in

1870 in the West. But in making that claim about the constructedness

o homosexuality, Foucault also argues that two different histories, one

Western and one Eastern, must be careully distinguished rom each

other. Foucault maintains that sexuality is not a timeless, immutable

given because sexuality as we know it is absent in the East. The rst

history, which began somewhere in Greece and migrated to France to

produce “the homosexual” as a species in 1870, is called scientia sexu-

alis. Foucault’s denition o scientia sexualis does not include modern

Greece, but draws a line o continuity between modern French culture

and ancient Greek culture. The second history, o which Foucault citesChina as a primary example, encompasses all non- Western societies

without distinguishing their ancient and modern orms. The name

Foucault proposes or this second history is ars erotica (a term that em-

phasizes its lack o scientic and logical basis in comparison to scientia

sexualis).

Whereas Western civilization (rom Greece to France) enjoyed a sci-

ence o sexuality that discursively produced “the homosexual” as a

species in 1870 (in a manner similar to the production o the criminal,the vagabond, the prostitute, the blasphemer, and the insane Foucault

analyzes in Madness and Civilization), China remains mired in the stage

o ars erotica that has blocked the invention o homosexuality: “On the

one hand, the societies—and they are numerous: China, Japan, India,

Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies— which endowed themselves with

an ars erotica [sic] . . . Our civilization possesses no ars erotica. In return,

it is undoubtedly the only civilization to practice a scientia sexualis.” Fou-

cault urther insists that China’s ars erotica is precisely what “we” haveshed in order to achieve modernity: “Breaking with the traditions o the


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28 C H A P T E R 1

ars erotica, our society has equipped itsel with a scientia sexualis.” Here

China unctions as the constitutive outside o the modern European

homosexual’s sel-denition, as the negative space against which it be-

comes possible or individuals who are, presumably, genetically unrelated

to the Greeks to speak o a “we” and “our society.” While the culturaldifferences between ancient Greece and France o the 1870s are con-

strued as a historical advance, the distinction between ancient China

and modern China does not bother Foucault much. In act, the group-

ing o ancient Rome and unspecied periods o Chinese history as in-

terchangeable examples o ars erotica is justied precisely by the claim

that non- Western societies, due to the lack o scientia sexualis, display

a developmental stasis through the millennia. China’s ars erotica signi-

es an ossied cultural essence bearing a collective resemblance to the

ancient Mediterranean world. In act, what Foucault means by the ars

erotica o “China, Japan, India, Rome, [and] the Arabo-Moslem socie-

ties” is a code name or non-Christian societies, whereas Europe is de-

ned by “the development o conessional techniques” and “pastoral

care”—namely Christianity.

Noting the glaring absence o race in Foucault’s considerations o

the bourgeois sel in the History of Sexuality, Anne Stoler argues that Fou-cault’s Collège de France lectures present a more nuanced treatment o

racism and a “shif in analytic weight,” where “a discourse o races . . .

antedates nineteenth-century social taxonomies, appearing not as a

result o bourgeois orderings, but as constitutive o them.” I the his-

tory o sexuality has always been a history o race as well, Foucault’s

own insight indicates that European preoccupations with race do not

reect a negotiation o the boundaries between sel and other; rather,

the concepts o race and sexuality are parts o the metropole’s technol-ogy o managing social differences within a domestic setting, orming

part o the bourgeois state’s indispensable deense against itsel. The

conation between the global hierarchization o cultures and a liberal

pluralist understanding o race in domestic politics is indeed the major

problem conronting queer critics writing in the Foucauldian idiom.

The inuential scholarship o David Halperin is a case in point. In

his 2002 How to Do the History of Sexuality, Halperin restates the amous

thesis o his 1990 One Hundred Years of Homosexuality that “ ‘homosexuality’ was a modern cultural production and that there was no homosexual-

ity, properly speaking, in classical Greece, the ancient Mediterranean


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world, or indeed in most premodern or non- Western societies.” Like

Foucault, Halperin does not nd the distinction between ancient and

modern relevant to non- Western societies, and uses “most premodern”

and all “non- Western societies” as interchangeable examples. For both

Halperin and Foucault, modern China and other non- Western (that is,non-Christian) societies, precisely due to their lack o something that

can be called “sexuality,” experience an evolutionary stasis that makes

them similar to “classical Greece” and the “ancient Mediterranean

world.”

Writing one ull decade afer One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, how-

ever, Halperin acknowledges “the orce o [the] postcolonial critique”:

Constructionist discourse about the modernity o sexuality andthe historicity o premodern sexual ormations ofen has the effect

o aligning marginal or nonstandard sexual practices in postindus-

trial liberal societies with dominant sexual practices in developing

nations, thereby perpetuating the hoary colonialist notion that non-

European cultures represent the cultural childhood o a modern

Europe. . . . [However, this] irreducible epistemic and social privi-

lege” [o the Western historian] does not mean it’s wrong. There are

positive uses to be made o inequality and asymmetry, in history asin love.

Halperin is conscientious in his “positive” uses o this “inequality.” One

detects in his writing no pejorative descriptions o those erotic

experiences and expressions that supposedly characterize modern

non- Western and premodern Western societies. But one notices how

quickly an opportunity to learn rom understudied cultures is read as

an injunction to suspend moral judgment. Surreptitiously, an engage-ment with the “postcolonial critique” is replaced by a call to deend

and de-stigmatize “nonstandard practices” within modern Western

(here dened as “postindustrial” and “liberal”) societies themselves.

In other words, the intellectual critique o Eurocentrism in queer re-

search becomes a commitment to “diversity” as an American social

value, and the invitation to think sexuality “transnationally” is under-

stood as an argument or multiculturalism and tolerance or US

subjects’ alternative sexual practices. In this liberal version o thestor y, the problem o Orientalism becomes a “hoary colonialist notion”

that must be corrected by the enlightened Western historian. Translating


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30 C H A P T E R 1

the “inequality and asymmetry” between global cultures into the do-

mestic signication o race misses the opportunity to ask how the sup-

posedly “irreducible” “epistemic and social privilege” itsel should and

can be transormed. In the nal analysis, Halperin’s approach is a liberal

pluralist one whose primary concern lies with diversity in a domesticcontext instead o transnational dialogues. By contrast, I would insist

that transnational dialogues are both possible and necessary, and that

we have much to gain rom a consideration o the intellectual history

o queer China, which provides an important alternative to the liberal

pluralist emphasis on tolerance, respect, and diversity as the ethics in

dealing with “nonstandard practices.”

Que

queer marxism in two chinas by petrus liu

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