Queer China

Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism

Hongwei Bao

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000069020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: LGBT Literaturkritik

This book analyses queer cultural production in contemporary China to map the broad social transformations in gender, sexuality and desire. It examines queer literature and visual cultures in China's post-Mao and postsocialist era to show how these diverse cultural forms and practices not only function as context-specific and culturally sensitive forms of social activism but also produce distinct types of gender and sexual subjectivities unique to China's postsocialist conditions.

From poetry to papercutting art, from 'comrade/gay literature' to girls' love fan fiction, from lesbian films to activist documentaries, and from a drag show in Shanghai to a public performance of a same-sex wedding in Beijing, the book reveals a queer China in all its ideological complexity and creative energy. Empirically rich and methodologically eclectic, Queer China skilfully weaves together historical and archival research, textual and discourse analysis, along with interviews and ethnography.

Breaking new ground and bringing a non-Western perspective to the fore, this transdisciplinary work contributes to multiple academic fields including literary and cultural studies, media and communication studies, film and screen studies, contemporary art, theatre and performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, China/Asia and Global South studies, cultural history and cultural geography, political theory and the study of social movements.

Part I

Queer emergence

1
Imagining modernity

The (re-)emergence of homosexuality

We cannot promise that every research we do can be directly applied to society, but we should guarantee that it is conducted out of our best will. In researching the subculture of homosexuality, we hold the sincerest attitude towards our fellow human beings, and we hope that our research can help them. We do not have ill intentions or see them as enemies. We interact with them with good will. This reflects the principle of humanism in conducting scientific research.

Li Yinhe and Wang Xiaobo, Their World (1992: 6)

A historical account is usually a good place to start a book. But if queer people’s stories have been denied from official historical narratives and collective memories in the PRC, how is a queer history, or a ‘genealogy’ in the Foucauldian (1984) sense, possible? How did gay identity and queer desire emerge in the postsocialist context? What types of discourses and ‘structures of feelings’ brought queer identities and desires into existence in postsocialist China’s public sphere?

This chapter offers a historical overview of the emergence of homosexuality in China’s postsocialist era. This ‘emergence’ should be more appropriately called ‘re-emergence’, as homosexuality first emerged in China in the Republican era (1912–49), with the translation of ‘sexual science’ from the West (Chiang 2010, 2018; Chou 2000; Hinsch 1990; Sang 2003; Kang 2009). It vanished for several decades in the Mao era (1949–76) before it re-emerged in the post-Mao period (1976 to the present). Popular discourse suggests that it is China’s ‘opening up’ to the West in the postsocialist era that has brought the gay identity, repressed in China’s socialist era, into being (CBC Doc Zone 2007; Ho 2010). While this insight is useful, as same-sex practices and discourses from the West do play an important role in shaping a specific type of gay identity in China, the narrative neglects the complex social and discursive changes inside China. In particular, it misses the role played by Chinese intellectuals in imagining a new society and creating a new understanding of sexuality and identity in the first two decades of China’s ‘reform and opening up’. In this chapter, I strive to reconstruct some historical materials – including academic publications, legal documents and media reports – to trace the emergence of gay identity in the 1980s and 1990s. Using a Foucauldian discursive approach, I suggest that a multiplicity of discourses in this period – primarily medical, sociological and media discourses – constructed homosexuality as a medical category and gays and lesbians as a distinct group of people. Furthermore, I argue that the emergence of gay identity in China can be understood as part of China’s imagination of modernity in the postsocialist era, which gives expression to the rhetoric of ‘truth’ and ‘science’ through a wide range of discourses. But this imagination is a precarious and even controversial one, as it is based on a violent rejection of China’s socialist legacy and an uncritical endorsement of neoliberal capitalism. The re-emergence of queer identities and homosexual desires in China thus participates in and reaffirms the legitimacy of a post-Cold War and postsocialist world order in which specific types of gender, sexuality and desire play a part.

In this chapter, first, I engage with the ‘Great Paradigm Shift’ debate in studying the history of sexuality. I then examine narratives about homoeroticism in the socialist era in order to problematise the version of Foucault’s (1990) ‘repressive hypotheses’ common in the study of sex and sexuality in China. After reviewing the construction of gay identity in some medical books and articles published in the 1980s and 90s, I will discuss the rhetoric of ‘truth’ and ‘science’ prevalent in these narratives. I conclude this chapter by considering the relationship between modernity and gay identity, approaching modernity as a contingent and indeed an imaginary category. I suggest thinking of gay identity as an outcome of China’s postsocialist imagination of modernity.

The ‘Great Paradigm Shift’ in sexuality studies

In his discussion of the Foucauldian historicism in queer theorisation, Howard Chiang (2014) challenges the ‘great paradigm shifts’, or epistemological breaks between modern and premodern forms of sexuality, and between ‘sexual acts’ and ‘sexual identities’, in studying the history of sexuality. Chiang traces the divergence to an early debate between David Halperin (1989) and Eve Sedgwick (1990). In her Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick criticises Halperin for over-emphasising historical paradigm shifts in the Foucauldian historicisation and sets up the objective of her book as:

to show how issues of modern homo/heterosexual definition are structured, not by the supersession of one model and the consequent withering away of another, but instead by the relations enabled by the unrationalised coexistence of different modes during the times they do coexist.

(Sedgwick 1990: 47)

In other words, ‘overlapping and contradictory, universalising and minoritising forms of gender and sexual expression coexist at any given moment in time’ (Chiang 2014: 21). This insight is useful. The coxistence of different types of queer subjectivities in China, including tongxinglian (homosexual), tongzhi (‘comrade’), lala (lesbian), gay, LGBTQ and queer, clearly supports this understanding. Furthermore, these diverse types of sexual subjectivities are often linked to converging modes of economic production which constitute China’s postsocialist condition. A Marxist approach to the political economy of sexuality clearly deepens our understandings of why these sexual subjectivities coexist and converge with each other in each historical time and space.

This is not, however, to say that the Foucauldian perspective is not useful and should be readily dismissed. Acknowledging some problems in the Foucauldian ‘sexual acts/sexual identity’ dichotomy, Halperin still recognises the value of the Foucauldian interpretative framework as ‘acced[ing] through a calculated encounter with the otherness of the past, to an altered understanding of the present – a sense of our own-identity to ourselves – and thus to a new experience as sites of potential transformation’ (2004: 15). As Chiang remarks, ‘the potential alterity of the past and the strangeness of its regulatory norms invite us to reconsider our present-day assumptions about what is conceivable, possible and transformable’ (Chiang 2014: 23). Indeed, if we consider the study of sexuality a critique of the present, the Foucauldian genealogical approach can be extremely useful. In studying the emergence of gay identity in postsocialist China, I do not aim to discover or recover the ‘Great Paradigm Shift’; rather, I hope to reveal how sexuality, power and knowledge are closely intertwined not only in certain epistemological regimes, but also under specific material conditions. These material conditions and historical specificities should be given due attention in studying the history of sexuality.

Chiang’s research (2009, 2014) convincingly demonstrates the emergence of homosexuality (tongxing lian or tongxing ai), and furthermore, the establishment of scientia sexualis in Republican China at the beginning of the twentieth century with the introduction of Western medical science and psychotherapy. He also notes an important epistemic shift in characterising same-sex desires in China’s transition from empire to nation: from the ‘culturalistic style of argumentation’ to a ‘nationalistic style of argumentation’ (2009: 109–18). Chiang correctly traces the emergence of homosexuality (tongxing ai) to the Republican era, which is not at odds with the argument proposed by many Chinese queer studies scholars, including Rofel (2007), Ho (2010), Kong (2010) and myself, that the contemporary gay identity is the product of postsocialist China’s historical, social and discursive conditions. This is not, however, a reiteration of the sexual act/sexual identity dichotomy, or the ‘Great Paradigm Shift’; but a recognition that a modern sense of gay identity is situated at the intersections of neoliberal capitalism, the LGBTQ movement and transnational popular culture in the post-Cold War era; and this identity remarkably distinguishes itself from the Republican sexuality despite their obvious historical continuity.

The ‘repressive hypothesis’ in socialist China

Inspired by the insights of Foucault, historians often associate sexuality and modernity in their writings. Foucault’s work (1990) demonstrates that the invention of sexuality and, in particular, homosexual identity, was associated with the proliferation of discourses on sex from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century and that it was produced by, and indeed crucial to, a modern form of biopower. This counters what he refers to as the ‘repressive hypothesis’ common in the twentieth century which imagined sexuality as something repressed by earlier periods and liberated in recent times. Many scholars in China studies have contributed to this analysis. Frank Dikötter (1995) has examined how the efforts of Chinese intellectuals to introduce Western medical science to China contributed to the construction of sexual identities in the early Republican period. Harriet Evans (1997) has discussed the scientific construction of sexuality in China from 1949, focusing on the construction of women’s sexual differences. Tze-lan Sang (2003) has explored the emergence of lesbian sexuality from premodern China to postsocialist China. Howard Chiang (2018) has traced the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality; in doing so, he shows the centrality of new epistemes to the formation of Chinese modernity. In all these accounts, sexuality, medical science and modernity seem inseparable for contemporary social and cultural research in both global and local contexts.

Foucault’s ‘repressive hypothesis’ has influentially informed writings on homosexuality, as well as gender and sexuality in general. As it applies to China, it is believed that there was a time when Chinese homoeroticism was poetically depicted as the ‘passions of the cut sleeve’ (Hinsch 1990) and, it seems, was widely tolerated for more than three thousand years before the advent of ‘modernity’, coincided with the demise of the imperial Manchu dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is thought that the devastating military power and the medical science from the West dismantled an empire, disrupted a civilisation and ended a tradition. In representations of homoeroticism, ars erotica gave way to scientia sexualis, the latter of which primarily refers to scientific medicine as it pertains to sex and psychology in face of the sweeping forces of ‘global modernity’. Sex and sexuality became repressed.¹ This repression reached a peak when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949 (Chou 2000; Dikötter 1995; Evans 1997; Hinsch 1990; Ruan 1991; Sang 2003). The CCP took an ‘anti-body, anti-flesh, anti-sexuality attitude’ (Zha 1996: 139) and homosexuality was considered to be among China’s ‘feudal remnants’ or else to be a sign of ‘Western decadence’.² It was deemed to be something that should be eradicated from socialist China, together with other practices such as prostitution and polygamy which were all deemed incompatible with the revolutionary hegemony.

According to this version of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, the postsocialist era has allowed people new hopes, desires and aspirations: ‘true’ humanity is rediscovered; sex and sexuality are liberated; and gays and lesbians joyfully celebrate their emancipation, enjoying the ‘global gayness’ (Altman 1997) that is only possible in the postsocialist era. In short, gays and lesbians, seen as autonomous subjects with free will defined by their sexuality, are presumed to have been liberated by China’s exposure to global capitalism and neoliberalism. Tomorrow might be even better for queer people in China, subscribers to the ‘repressive hypothesis’ believe. However, the continued existence of the ‘totalitarian CCP’ (Ruan 1991) may still lead to queer people’s ‘self-censorship’ under this political regime (Ho 2010: 99).

Popular as it is, this version of the ‘repressive hypothesis’ is too simplistic to account for the complexities of homoeroticism in modern China. Drawing on Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, in which he outlines the ‘repressive hypothesis’, I hope to cast doubt on the enlightenment notion of the free and coherent human subject on which such a narrative depends. I am also wary of the Freudian conception of sex and sexuality as the product of natural drives repressed by civilisation and society. I do not subscribe to the traditional Marxist notion of progressive social development; nor do I share the Marcusian passion for non-normative sexuality as resistance to the procreative social order and potential for social revoluti...