Queer Sinophone Cultures

Howard Chiang, Ari Larissa Heinrich, Howard Chiang, Ari Larissa Heinrich

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415622943
• eBook ISBN: 9781135069773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Sinophone framework emphasises the diversity of Chinese-speaking communities and cultures, and seeks to move beyond a binary model of China and the West. Indeed, this strikingly resembles attempts within the queer studies movement to challenge the dimorphisms of sex and gender.

Bringing together two areas of study that tend to be marginalised within their home disciplines Queer Sinophone Cultures innovatively advances both Sinophone studies and queer studies. It not only examines film and literature from Mainland China but expands its scope to encompass the underrepresented 'Sinophone' world at large (in this case Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and beyond). Further, where queer studies in the U.S., Europe, and Australia often ignore non-Western cultural phenomena, this book focuses squarely on Sinophone queerness, providing fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from works by the famous director Tsai Ming-Liang to the history of same-sex soft-core pornography made by the renowned Shaw Brothers Studios.

By instigating a dialogue between Sinophone studies and queer studies, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars of modern and contemporary China studies, particularly to those interested in film, literature, media, and performance. It will also be of great interest to those interested in queer studies more broadly.

Part I

Introduction

1

“A volatile alliance”

Queer Sinophone synergies across literature, film, and culture

Ari Larissa Heinrich

For fields that have been struggling famously for decades with the problem of “China”—how to define it, how to define “modern,” what to make of the shifting sands of disciplinary affiliation and access to archives, what to teach students— Shih Shu-mei’s development of the idea of the Sinophone has provided a much-needed critical solution. As a scholar with a background in nineteenth-century medical and visual cultural history, I was initially attracted to the idea of the Sinophone because it provided a flexible alternative to the clunky amalgam of postcolonial theory and qualified “transnationalism” that had evolved to accommodate shifting understandings about the meaning of “China” in late imperial interactions with (Western) science and cultures. Shih’s notion of the Sinophone could accommodate a diversity of research materials regardless of geography; it exploded once and for all the possibility of any binary model of “China and the West” while sidestepping the trap of accidentally reifying these terms even as it seeks to undermine them. If attempts to unseat this powerful dimorphism bear a resemblance to attempts to challenge the insistent dimorphisms of sex and gender—and if we allow that the idea of the Sinophone, despite or even because of the questions it raises, has enabled works and concepts to be placed productively in dialogue without restriction by category, discipline, location, and convention—perhaps we could argue that Shih’s project succeeds, at least in part, in “queering” Chinese studies. As Andrea Bachner observes in this volume, “‘Sinophone,’ not unlike ‘queer’ … both contests identitarian formations … and signifies as a contestation of essentialism itself.” Sinophone as a critical framework may not have set out specifically to address questions of gender and sexuality, but as part of larger movements in postcoloniality, and as something that has been essentially coeval with the emergence of queer studies, it certainly has a critical affinity for (or even debt to) these questions; Sinophone studies, lacking a “queer” focus, is an inherently queer project.

If the idea of the Sinophone has provided a workaround for long-standing challenges to defining “China” across the spectrum of fields related to Chinese studies, perhaps queer studies can offer non-specialists (such as Chinese studies scholars) a means of assimilating a complex theoretical vocabulary of gender and sexuality that might otherwise remain inaccessible behind a firewall of disciplinary and area studies divisions. A value of queer studies may be that by definition it is not, or does not have to be, provincial, bound to discipline; rather it “stands in opposition to the very notions of dualism, clear-cut boundaries, and categorical purity” (Bachner, this volume). However, just as gender and sexuality have yet to take on an authorial role within Sinophone studies, so too has it been difficult to home the Sinophone within queer studies frameworks without reproducing the freeze and thaw of a China/West dimorphism and its subsequent deconstruction. As Chiang writes in this volume, when a given academic project either

labels some form of queerness [as] distinctively Chinese, or [by contrast] identifies some aspects of Chinese culture as distinctively queer yet not in any Western sense of the word, [paradoxically it only] unveils the very constructive nature of queerness and Chineseness by fixing [these terms to an] analytical presumption. Like the way Sinologists can (and often do) romanticize a preordained fact of Chineseness, queer scholars can (and often do) easily re-essentialize the very object of their analysis, queerness.

A solution, Chiang argues—and what is at the heart of this volume—is to work toward the possibility of creating a dynamic hybridizing theoretical praxis that “approach[es] anti-normative transnational practices and identities from an angle that crystallizes Chineseness and queerness as cultural constructions that are more mutually generative than different, as open processes that are more historically co-produced than additive.” The utopian potential of a queer Sinophone cultural studies practice is to transcend familiar disciplinary boundaries in a way that can nourish, and create, all sides. The structural affinity of the Sinophone for the queer—including of course the ways in which the two categories are mutually constitutive—holds out the hope of creating an alternative theoretical model that is more than the sum of its parts, and that can expand to accommodate, and to interrogate more accurately, the rhizomatic expansion of information and connections that characterizes our age.

Multiple moving targets

It was this structural affinity between the ideas of the Sinophone and the queer— including their shared and complementary blind spots, but also the subversively constructive potential of combining them—that inspired Howard and I to solicit essays for this volume. Though Sinophone studies has, as Howard has noted, “taken the field by storm,” still “to date, [very few] of the many ensuing critical discussions of ‘Sinophonicity’ have addressed its interplay with queer subcultural formations.” Similarly, in the proliferation of queer studies research in Chinese studies contexts over the last decade there has not yet been a dedicated engagement with the Sinophone as a potentially fruitful applied theoretical rubric. What would happen if we brought the two into conversation with each other? What kind of praxis would it yield, what common points? The provocative 2010 special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique on “Beyond the strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics,” was perhaps the first-ever concerted inquiry into how non-Sinocentric iterations of Chinese identity might intersect and overlap with queer studies at large; as the title indicates, the umbrella rubric for the volume was the transnational rather than the Sinophone, and, as such, theoretical discussions were oriented primarily toward cultural production vis-à-vis the nation-state.¹ Audrey Yue’s and Olivia Khoo’s pioneering edited special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, meanwhile, argues both for the “critical efficacy of a methodological shift from diasporic cinemas to Sinophone cinemas” and, in the case of Yue’s individual contribution to the special issue on work by the Mainland queer auteur Cui Zi’en, for “the beginnings of a critical formulation of queer Sinophone cinema.” Here Yue’s essay already breaks new ground in its advocacy for the opening of a space in film theory for queer Sinophone critique (as opposed for instance to queer diasporic critique, or transnational queer critique). Yue takes things one step further by arguing preemptively that such a critique must accommodate “not only queer Chinese cinemas outside of China, but … queer Chinese films in China that are beneficiaries of peripheral Chinese and global Western queer film markets.”² Working backward from this point, then, what Howard and I hope to accomplish in compiling this volume is to flesh out what a queer Sinophone critique might look like from these areas “outside of China.”

How then to account for the many moving targets involved—for multiple disciplines; divergent and complex theoretical approaches, languages, and geographies; diverse media formations; different time periods?³ Which intersections might we cultivate or exploit, and which should we take care not to overlook? How to avoid imposing an overarching model on materials that by definition resist being essentialized? Like trapeze artists flying toward each other across multiple dimensions, what may count conditionally as “queer” might never meet in mid-air with the highly amorphous and still-evolving category of the “Sinophone” long enough to produce the terms of a legible theoretical praxis. This volume therefore aims to achieve three more modest goals. First, it aims to present works from both junior and more established scholars responding to the challenge of juxtaposing the margins of gender and sexuality with the margins of China and Chineseness—works that, individually and collectively, advance both Sinophone studies and queer studies by focusing on the constructed “periphery” (the national, ethnic, gendered, and indeed disciplinary margins of East Asian studies and queer studies as such) in materials involving Sinitic-language groups in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Second, the volume aims, as a collective project, to add greater specificity to our understanding of what might constitute transnational Chinese queer studies by demonstrating how the terms (transnational, Chinese, queer) become meaningful to, and through, each other in the context of a queer Sinophonicity. Finally, this book suggests some conditions of a queer Sinophone interrogative praxis. Although any praxis that aims first to hypothesize and then to explore the intersection of constructed margins will inevitably be unstable, some of the recurring themes emerging over the course of the volume nonetheless provide a preliminary key to identifying queer Sinophone cultural production in the wild, along with some ideas about possible analytical approaches to such material/s. These emergent themes include (among others, naturally): challenging conventional historiographies, and its corollary, reimagining histories; queering kinship; decentering and diffusing embodiment; and last but not least, allowing for uncomfortable alliances.

Rendering the queer Sinophone, and the Sinophone queer: challenging conventional historiographies

For Sinophone studies to ‘queer’ Chinese studies by foregrounding geographically diverse publics and cultural production, it must begin by queering time; it must re-examine those chronologies, like the structural imperatives of diaspora, in which China is always already the point of origin or that place where a point of origin must be identified. This volume gestures toward a chronology adjusted for queer Sinophonicities first by complicating received historical epistemologies related to how we tell the stories of the queer and the Sinophone, and next by exploring ways in which queer Sinophonicity can imagine its own history. Howard Chiang’s chapter on “(De)Provincializing China: queer historicism and Sinophone postcolonial critique” grounds the volume by questioning those mythologies of queer and Chinese identities that would trace the genealogy of contemporary “queerness” in Sinophone settings back to the introduction of “Western” ideas, suggesting instead a more heterogeneous, axial model in which queer theory need not reproduce false dichotomies of “China” and the “West,” even as Sinophone theory emerges to account for identities, histories, and contexts glossed over by “the familiar analytical framework of colonial modernity” and “semi-colonialism” before it. For Chiang, both “queerness” and “Chineseness” too often are viewed essentially and ahistorically, as the hermetically distinct and spontaneous products of certain historical moments or locales rather than of historically grounded phenomena with complex sources. Thus he begins by outlining some of the tensions and trajectories within and among the epistemologies of queer and Chinese studies; reviews the timeline for the emergence of “gay identity” in China; and emphasizes the importance of an awareness of “the historical parameters of queer Sinophonicity.” Chiang concludes with a new reading of the well-known film Lan Yu that highlights the value of a queer Sinophone approach. “If ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’ had indeed evolved over the course of the history of (homo)sexuality from sexological discourse to the growing influence of late capitalist archetypes of biopolitics,” he ultimately argues, “the changes over time we witness in this history have less to do with the ‘coming out’ of sexual minorities per se, than with the shifting transnationalism of queer Chinese cultures.”

Yin Wang’s chapter on “Queer engagements with the nation-state in post-martial law Taiwan,” like Chiang’s, also challenges received chronologies of the queer and the Sinophone, this time by complicating conventional readings of subject-formation and national identity in a well-known novella from Taiwan in the late 1990s. The work in question is Zhu Tianxin’s [Chu T’ien-hsin] “The Ancient Capital,”⁴ which follows the stream-of-consciousness narration of a middle-aged Taiwanese woman as she travels in Kyoto and Taipei. Where many appraisals of “The Ancient Capital” read the narrative straightforwardly as an expression of “a second generation Chinese mainlander’s frustration with nativist political campaigns,” Yin Wang’s critical intervention is to draw out queer subtexts or subthemes in the work—in this case, the pretext in which the narrator continually seeks, but fails to find, a certain old female friend in Kyoto—to expose the deep-structural relationship between “marital hetero-hegemony and orthodox nationhood” in the novella, and thus by extension to offer a more nuanced interpretation of the novella’s historical and political significance than discourses of region and origin alone allow. Like Chiang, Wang resists a reading whereby the story begins and ends with a monochromatic focus on nationalisms and chronological time by drawing instead on Taiwanese authors’ own technicolor understandings of multiple cultural resources and agency (or what Wang refers to as “asymmetrical cultural traffic”) in appropriating different forms of nostalgia to construct a complex, queer, and Sinophone political identity. Together, Howard Chiang’s and Yin Wang’s essays shrug off the reductive national-allegorical assumptions about narrative that are often imposed on film and fiction in politically turbulent times, demonstrating instead the power of Sinophone readings of queer texts, and queer readings of Sinophone texts, to enrich understandings of late twentieth-century identity in China, Taiwan, and beyond.

The remake: queer Sinophonicity imagines itself

If Howard Chiang’s and Yin Wang’s chapters challenge the assumptions underlying conventional historiographies both of the queer in Sinophone cultures and of the Sinophone in queer cultures, Tze-lan D. Sang’s and Lily Wong’s pieces in turn ask how queer Sinophonicity might imagine its own history. Deploying the device of “before and after,” both authors investigate ways in which new versions of old materials—“remakes” of novels and films—reveal transformations in identity and in culture at large. Sang’s piece on “Queer Adaptation” in Wu Jiwen’s 1996 novel The Fin-de-siècle Boy Love Reader, for example, links more recent political, historiographic, and cultural discourses of queerness and Sinophonicity backward to late imperial cultural figurations by illustrating how the contemporary Taiwanese author Wu Jiwen (b. 1955)—against the backdrop of the efflorescence of queer fiction and imported critical theory in post-martial law Taiwan—appropriates late imperial sources for queerness in his novel. Like Chiang’s chapter, an important structural contribution of Sang’s piece to this volume is that it preempts a popular suggestion that queerness and Sinophonicity in contemporary Taiwan (for example) derive primarily from engagement with and awareness of post-1987 translations of “Western social and cultural theories such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonial theory, gender studies, queer studies” and “queer fiction,” instead outlining far more heterogeneous roots. Sang’s close reading of Wu’s novel addresses the intersection of the queer and the Sinophone on multiple levels. First, she demonstrates how one Taiwanese author uses late imperial Chinese literary sources (rather than “imported” contemporary Western ones) for his new queer fiction, arguing that “Wu tries to make use of an unusable past to construct icons that prefigure late twentieth-century gay identities.” Second, Sang illustrates the diversity of the actual sources for queer thinking in Taiwan post-1987 by showing, for example, how the novel appropriates modern Japanese literary idealized models—themselves linked to earlier literary models—for shonen ai (love between adolescent boys) and bishonen (beautiful adolescent boys) in constructing its central themes. Sang sets the stage for a critical engagement with constructions of identity in this period that are independent of, or even deliberately violate, the kind of binaristic hermeneutics of Chinese identity that “Sinophone” critique targets.

Lily Wong’s chapter on “Sinophone erotohistories” likewise reminds us of the diverse sources of queer Sinophonicity by looking at the production of both queer desire and Chinese identity for a global market in 1970s and 1980s soft-core pornography by the Shaw Brothers Studio. The Shaw Brothers Studio, Wong reminds us, is “arguably one of the most successfully marketed Sinitic-language film empires of its time” and also a “rich archive for tracing a transnational genealogy of Sinophone publics in flux.” Earlier studies have focused on the diasporic aspects of the Shaw Brothers’ marketing—for example in their construction of a “Chinese dream” whereby Chinese identity and tradition are characterized in their films as essentially static through time and space, no matter where an audience member may be. By contrast, Wong sees the Shaw Brothers’ deployment of the “Chinese dream” as a “strategic reinvention of ‘China’ as sign for a globalizing future.” As Tze-lan D. Sang did with Wu Jiwen’s reworking of the late imperial A Precious Mirror for Ranking Flowers, Wong uses as a key analytical device the comparison of an original soft-core pornographic work featuring a relationship between two female characters (the Shaw Brothers’ 1972 box office hit Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan) and its 1984 remake (Lust for Love of a Chinese Courtesan, also Shaw Brothers) to track changes in marketing, distribution, and the impact of Hollywood trends. Comparing the representation of the women’s relationship in the earlier and later films, Wong argues that the later film represents a kind of “heteronormative reframing of the original [film’s] depiction of queer attachment” (and foreclosure of any extra-patriarchal unity), and moreover that this later remake represents, commercially speaking, an attempt to “navigate overall trends in both international soft-core production and [in] its transforming Sinophone audience.” Here the demise of the queer, as seen in the heteronormativizing of the film’s central subjects between the earlier and later productions, indexes the immanent demise of the Shaw Brothers’ film empire itself. Lily Wong thus reads “erotohistory,” or in this case the changing representations of desire in period soft-core pornography, as an indicator of changing cultural and market conditions both locally and globally. Her chapter ultimately demonstrates how a focus on either queer or Sinophone themes alone risks eliding important understandings of cinematic and cultural history; only when read in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge contemporary China series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II New chronotopes
• Part III The remake
• Part IV Queering kinship
• Part V Tsai Ming-liang
• Part VI A volatile alliance
• Part VII Afterword
• Index