New Queer Sinophone Cinema

Local Histories, Transnational Connections

Zoran Lee Pecic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349948819
• eBook ISBN: 9781349948826
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book looks closely at some of the most significant films within the field of queer Sinophone cinema. Examining queerness in films produced in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the book merges the Sinophone with the queer, theorising both concepts as local and global, homebound as well as diasporic. Queerness in this book not only problematises the positioning of non-normative desires within the Sinophone; it also challenges Eurocentric critical perspectives on filmic representation that are tied to the idea of the binary between East/West. New Queer Sinophone Cinema will appeal to scholars in Chinese and film studies, as well as to anyone who is interested in queer Chinese cinema.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Zoran Lee PecicNew Queer Sinophone Cinema10.1057/978-1-349-94882-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Zoran Lee Pecic¹

(1)

Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

Abstract

The introduction begins by outlining the various ways of investigating and theorising ‘Chineseness’ and Chinese cinema. Adding the most recent conceptualisations of the Sinophone to the idea of a decentralised queer studies, the introduction argues that New Queer Sinophone Cinema offers new ways of challenging both heteronormative ideas of a national Chinese cinema and Euro-American notions of queerness. The chapter offers an outline of the book’s aims and scope, highlighting its structure and methodology.

Keywords

Chinese cinemaSinophoneChinesenessQueer studiesThirdspaceQueerness

End Abstract

In her introduction to New Queer Chinese Cinema (2012), a designation for the recent emergence of queer-themed films across Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, Helen Hok-Sze Leung notes that the Chinese-language films that are coded as belonging to ‘queer cinema’ do not necessarily deal with the issues of gay representation on screen. In fact, the majority of these films do not even fulfil that most basic of expectations, namely, that they portray in detail the lives and times of its GLBT characters. Rather, Leung argues, these films deal with issues that go beyond the expected, as they ‘unsettle the parameters of heterosexuality and its kinship structure; confound expectations of coherence between gender identity, gender expression, and the sexed body; expand the possible configurations of sexual and emotional bonds; and subvert the aesthetic conventions and heterocentric presuppositions of mainstream cinema’ (2012, 519). In other words, the New Queer Chinese Cinema, much like its North American counterpart of the 1990s, the New Queer Cinema, queers both the heteronormative as well as the ‘gay’, challenging not only the hegemonic positioning of heterosexuality as ‘natural’ and homosexuality as the opposite, but also the mainstreaming and the assimilation of ‘gay’ culture into the realm of the ‘accepted’. For more on New Queer Cinema, see Aaron (2005) and Rich (2013). This is not to say, however, that Chinese cinema is merely a reproduction or a continuation of the kind of independent filmmaking that flourished in the cinemas of North America and Europe nearly three decades ago. This would invariably place it within what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the ‘imaginary waiting room’ of history (2000, 8), where modernity is constantly waiting to happen and where historicity is rooted deep within the Western liberal notions of development and ‘progress’. Rather, the New Queer Chinese Cinema, which spans genres, styles and geographies, is a diverse field that investigates in numerous ways the complexity of non-normative sexuality and desire in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong without consigning itself to a particular field of ‘gay cinema’ or gay representation. As Leung argues, ‘the contexts of [its] production and reception, thematic concerns, and aesthetic directions … are remarkably different from that of New Queer Cinema’ (519–520). What sets it apart is not only the transnationality of Chinese cinema, which is a direct result of the unprecedented internationalisation of Chinese film in the 1990s (Lu 1997). Nor is it that Chinese cinema reconceptualises the national by the means of the ‘Sinophone’ in areas outside of the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong triad (Shih 2007). Rather, in this book I argue that the New Queer Sinophone Cinema challenges both the notions of a ‘Queer Cinema’ as well as the ideas of a ‘Chinese Cinema’. ¹ In other words, the New Queer Sinophone Cinema is neither uniquely queer nor is it exclusively Chinese. Whilst the designation queer runs the risk of situating Chinese cinema within the dominantly Euro-American paradigms of gay and lesbian identity formations, the adjective ‘Chinese’ territorialises it within a geographical locale that restricts its translocal and transnational elements.

Numerous scholars have questioned and challenged the essentialised notions of ‘Chineseness’. Rey Chow asks ‘What is Chinese about the Chinese language and Chinese literature?’ (1998, 9), and in his introduction to Chinese National Cinema (2004), Yingjin Zhang poses a similar question: ‘Is “Chinese” in “Chinese cinema” meant as an ethnic, cultural, linguistic, political or territorial marker?’ (4). The notion of a national cinema is highly contentious, given on the one hand the complex configurations of a national identity and on the other the transnational modes of film production. Yet, Lu’s consolidation of the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong cinemas into the term ‘transnational Chinese cinemas’, which does little to displace China as a ‘shared object’ and a ‘location of culture’ (1997, 12) is equally disputable. Lu and Yeh’s notion of the ‘Chinese-language cinema’ is equally problematic, which is seen in their acknowledgement that ‘if language is in part what lends unity to the Chinese nation-state and more broadly to a sense of Chineseness among the diasporic populations, it is also a force fraught with tension and contention’ (2004, 3). Citing ‘numerous Chinese dialects’ spoken by ‘nationals in China as well as by immigrants outside China’, the editors nonetheless argue that ‘[Chinese] language helps forge a fluid, deterritorialized, pan-Chinese identity among Chinese speakers across national boundaries’ (4). Here, we may object to the equation of dialects and minority languages, whilst the notion that Chinese language film is what binds Chinese speakers across national boundaries is further complicated by the work of directors such as Ang Lee’s film to the Filmography, whose films cross not only national but also linguistic and cultural borders. Although these numerous attempts to answer Chow’s initial question ‘what is Chinese?’ attest to the disparateness of ‘Chineseness’, Chow cautions against ‘speaking of Chineseness in the plural—as so many kinds of Chineseness-es, so many Chinese identities’ (1998, 24). Rather, she argues that instead of pluralising Chineseness, we must ‘carefully study … texts and media … even as such study is now ineluctably refracted by the awareness of the unfinished and untotalizable workings of ethnicity’ (24). Looking at these specific texts and the ways they are utilised in their own right provides means for deconstructing and problematising the monolithic construction of the Chinese nation. ‘Only with such close study … can Chineseness be productively put under erasure—not in the sense of being written out of existence but in the sense of being unpacked (Chow 1998, 24). Thus, by unpacking the conceptualisation, the construction and the utilisation of the term ‘Chinese’, we are able to recodify Chineseness in a way that challenges the unity of the nation without dismissing the close linguistic, cultural and ethnic links between the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the diaspora. One of the ways is to consider and utilise the concept of the Sinophone, as developed by Shih and Lu. Whilst Shih places heavy emphasis on its heteroglossia, that is, ‘a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several centuries’ (2007, 4), Lu’s Sinophone includes Greater China and takes on a more fluid positioning in terms of cultural and national affiliation. He writes: ‘There is no one dominant voice in the field. The multiple tongues and dialects used in varieties of Sinophone cinema testify to the fracturing of China and Chineseness’ (2007, 163). As a result, the Sinophone in this book employs both configurations in that the films discussed here are made by directors based in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, featuring translocal and transnational elements that go beyond national borders. These films are inherently local as well as transnational and global. They are, in effect, both here and there.

What can be said of the use of queerness in this book? Eng et al. have already questioned the utility of queer in the special issue What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now? (2005). Here, they argue that the ‘contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity … demands a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent’ (1). In particular, the editors note that when considered ‘outside its conventional relationship to francophone and Anglo-American literatures and literary studies’, queer studies exhibit the potential to denaturalise ‘various origin narratives, such as “home” and “nation”’ (7), simultaneously challenging the self-centricity of European and North American definition of what constitutes queer sexuality and culture and the ensuing supposition about the passivity of the non-Euro-American queerness.

My use of queerness in this book builds on these considerations by remaining vigilant to the assumptions of framing a ‘non-Western’ encounter with queer culture and politics as purely an imitation, a delayed repetition, of Euro-American discourses of gay/lesbian identity. In other words, this book challenges the notions that queer visibility is merely a Western import, a presumption that marginalises non-Western sexual practices and consigns them prefixes such as ‘pre-modern’ or ‘unliberated’. The films discussed in this book defy the codification of the practices that do not conform to the Western developmental notions of ‘coming out’ as homophobic or non-progressive. Similarly, they challenge the definition of sexuality in terms of temporality, where the closeted pre-gay subject becomes aware of his/her homosexuality and works his/her way to the recognition and liberation of his/her homosexual desire. Thus, queerness in this book is a decentralised paradigm, rooted not in the Euro-American White bourgeois assumptions and the transnational lesbian and gay movements, but in interdisciplinary, non-normative investigations of belonging, sexuality and desire which are not fixed by preordained cultural distinctiveness and constructed dimorphisms. Only by unfixing, provincializing, queerness can we begin to explore its full potential for producing new ideas, news ways of interrogation, and new domains for cultural, historical and social study of sexuality.

Combining the notion of the Sinophone, as developed by both Lu and Shih, with that of decentralised queer studies offers exciting new ways of interrogating Chinese queer cultures that are both localised as well as transnational. By emphasising its transnational elements, we are able to position queer Sinophone cinema in a context that takes it beyond the borders of the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Queer Sinophone cinema is very much global, as it depends on the markets, circuits and modes of distribution that can only be found outside of China. Yet, these are films made by China-based filmmakers, whose contexts, themes and characters, if they are to appear intelligible, require localised and regional knowledges. The ‘New’ in New Queer Sinophone Cinema is an emphasis on the local and the global, the Sino-centric as well as the transnational. This, I argue, has the ability to challenge national heteronormative constructions of Chinese cinema and to defy global forces that deem queer Chinese cinema as that which is distinct from yet always aspiring to Western notions of queerness, cinema and identity formation. In fact, 2010 saw one of the early explorations of the interstices between queer studies and the transnationality of Chineseness. By the editors’ own admission, the special issue of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique entitled ‘Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics’ was ‘a provocation’ as it ‘both reflect[ed] and … provoke[ed] ongoing debates about the meanings, implications, usages, and effects of each of the terms in [the] title’ (Liu and Rofel 2010, 281). The editors also note that the heavy emphasis on transnationalism signals ‘a historical moment in which activities, identities, theories, and cultural productions self-consciously position themselves both within and beyond the nation-state’ (282). Emphasising the nation-state in terms of identity, politics and sexual affiliation, the contributors attempt to move ‘beyond’ it by the way of exposing the multiple queer connections and imaginaries between nation-states. Similarly, Howard Chiang’s and Ari Larissa Heinrich’s 2013 edited volume Queer Sinophone Cultures, which responds to the ‘challenge of juxtaposing the margins of gender and sexuality with the margins of China and Chineseness’, is another collection of essays that focuses on the ‘transnational’ or that which lies ‘outside of China’. By focusing on the ‘constructed “periphery” … of East Asian studies and queer studies as such’, their aim is to ‘add greater specificity to our understanding of what might constitute transnational Chinese queer studies’. The volume demonstrates ‘how the terms (transnational, Chinese, queer) become meaningful to, and through, each other in the context of a queer Sinophonicity’ (5). Whilst Queer Sinophone Cultures features chapters on film—most of the Sinophone critique up to this point has emphasised literature and other form of artistic output—Audrey Yue’s and Olivia Khoo’s edited collection Sinophone Cinemas (2014) is the first volume that focuses exclusively on Sinophone cinema. In addition to its aim of demonstrating ‘how Sinophone cinemas might extend or displace other models of Chinese cinema, centred on the nation-state and in particular a Mainland Chinese centre’ (5), the volume is significant in that it places just as significant an emphasis on the efforts to ‘“De-Westernize’” film studies’. This echoes Bâ and Higbee’s call for a critique of ‘the West and the Rest’ (2012) binary vis-à-vis film production and representation. Although the concept of diaspora has the potential to expose and overturn ethnic absolutism which lies at the forefront of nationalist projects, it also simultaneously affirms fixed origins, adhering to the ideas of cultural purity and authenticity, where diaspora is seen as ‘foreign’, an imitation of the originary homeland. Sinophone cinema defies the centrality of ‘China’ and ‘Chineseness’ in the same way as it challenges Eurocentrism, eschewing notions ethnicity and nationality for localised sites of production that are bound to their own historical and social contexts. As Yue and Khoo argue, Sinophone cinema ‘examine[s] the critical efficacy of a methodological shift from diasporic cinemas to Sinophone cinemas in order to re-engage new sites of localization, multilingualism and difference that have emerged in Chinese film studies but that are not easily contained by the notion of diaspora’ (5). Significantly, these localisations are not fixed geographically; rather, they are multidirectional, in that the aforementioned move to de-Westernize film studies entails not an inversion of the supposed fixed binary of West/East but its problematisation and decentring. Taking cue from the two above-mentioned volumes, this book emphasises New Queer Sinophone Cinema as a field of study that merges the Sinophone with the queer, investigating films produced in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong whose queer connections lie within as well as outside the PRC. Significantly, by theorising queerness and the Sinophone as that which is local as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Thirdspace of East Palace, West Palace
• 3. Crossing Time and Space: Female Desire in Yan Yan Mak’s Butterfly
• 4. Zero Chou’s Tongzhi Trilogy
• 5. Queer Auteurs of Hong Kong Cinema
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter