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This article focuses on the politics of representing HIV/AIDS in the 2011 documentary The Lucky One (宠儿), jointly made by Chinese filmmaker and queer activist He Xiaopei and Zhang Xi, a woman livin...

This article focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the newly emerged pan-Asian political identity following the recent transnational ‘Stop Asian Hate’ movement. Using the recent ‘Stop Asian Hate’ Birmingham rally as a case study, this article contends that the pan-Asian identity enacted in the ‘Stop Asian Hate’ movement has the potential to forge new forms of racial and ethnic solidarities.

Celebrated as 'China's Tom of Finland', Xiyadie is probably one of the best-known queer artists living in China today. His identity as a gay man from rural China and his method of using the Chinese folk art of papercutting for queer artistic expression make him a unique figure in contemporary Chinese art. As the first academic article on the artist and his works, this article examines Xiyadie's transformation of identity in life and his representation of queer experiences through the art of papercutting. Using a critical biographical approach, in tandem with an analysis of his representative artworks, I examine the transformation of Xiyadie's identity from a folk artist to a queer artist. In doing so, I delineate the transformation and reification of human subjectivity and creativity under transnational capitalism. Meanwhile, I also seek possible means of desubjectivation and human agency under neo-liberal capitalism by considering the role of art in this picture. This article situates Xiyadie's life and artworks in a postsocialist context where class politics gave way to identity politics in cultural production. It calls for a reinvigoration of Marxist and socialist perspectives for a nuanced critical understanding of contemporary art production and social identities.

In an online research seminar titled ‘Intimacies in Asia in a Time of Pandemics’ (GCS Sydney 2020), Hans Tao-Ming Huang, a queer studies scholar from National Central University, Taiwan, compares the geopolitics in the current COVID-19 pandemic to a ‘new Cold War’. This war is characterised by an intense political and ideological antagonism between communist China and the liberal, democratic world led by the United States. In this antagonism, national borders are redrawn; political and ideological affiliations are re-enforced. As was the case with the last Cold War, the political and ideological affiliation of queer-identified people are under constant scrutiny. Queer people from China are often forced to take a stance by making a choice between China and the rest of the world, and between a country where LGBTQ rights are not recognised and the part of the world where same-sex marriages have been legalised and gay people can be ‘out and proud’, and between illiberal neoliberalism and liberal neoliberalism. This is a choice easier for some than others. As a queer-identified person born in the People’s Republic of China and currently living in the UK, I constantly feel the pressure to declare my own political and ideological allegiances. The ‘new Cold War’ accompanying the global pandemic has only exacerbated the pressure.

About My Parents and Their Child is a play commissioned by Ibsen International, directed by Matthias Jochmann and performed in Beijing and Shanghai in 2016 and 2017. It was one of the first times that documentary theatre as an art form appeared in China. This chapter uses the play as an example to demonstrate how creative individuals and groups in China use intermediality and transmedia storytelling to explore critical social issues such as sexual minority rights, historical trauma, as well as inter-generational and cross-cultural communication. Assembling together photos, videos and writings surrounding the play, in tandem with interviews with the production team, this chapter argues for the positive role played by transmedia storytelling in the construction of a public sphere in China.

This chapter examines health activism in the People’s Republic of China by focusing on China’s LGBTQ communities. Using Queer Comrades (Tongzhi yi fanren 同志亦凡人), a Beijing-based queer community video streaming website, as a case study, I discuss some of the tactics that China’s LGBTQ communities use for health communication, represented by the strategic use of digital video (DV) documentaries by a community NGO and video streaming website. In doing so, I examine how health activism effectively combined with media and community activism helps to build communities and promote LGBTQ and community rights while at the same time educating the public. This chapter suggests that health issues are not simply individual problems that can be solved by medical, psychological, and psychiatric interventions; they are political and social issues that involve citizenship rights and societal support.

Review of the book "Translation and Travelling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China".

Although homosexuality was decriminalised in 1997 and partially depathologised in 2001, LGBTQ issues are still strictly censored in Chinese media. With the rapid growth of China’s LGBTQ community, an increasing number of independent films featuring LGBTQ issues have emerged in the past two decades. In this article, I trace a brief history of queer cinema in the People’s Republic of China in the postsocialist era (1978 to present). In particular, I chart the significant turn from ‘celluloid comrades’, i.e. queer people being represented by heterosexual identified filmmakers in an ambiguous way, to what leading Chinese queer filmmaker Cui Zi’en calls ‘digital video activism’, in which LGBTQ identified individuals and groups have picked up cameras and made films about their own lives. In doing so, I unravel the politics of representation, the dynamics of mediated queer politics and the political potential of queer filmmaking in China. I suggest that in a country where public expressions of sexualities and demands for sexual rights are not possible, queer filmmaking has become an important form of queer activism that constantly negotiates with government censorship and the market force of commercialisation. Rather than representing a pre-existing identity and community, queer films and filmmaking practices have brought Chinese gay identities and communities into existence.

Using ‘auto-ethnography’ I critically analyse my experience of changing cultural and sexual identities as a result of cultural dislocation. I relate the changing attitudes towards identities to broader historical and social issues in a transnational context, including the continuing existence of colonialism and the Cold War in the postcolonial and postsocialist present, and thus conduct a critique of both nationalism and transnational elitism. By using the term ‘homonationalism’ I unravel the complicated cultural positions of the ‘queer diaspora’.

In this article, through a critical reading of the published diaries written by gay ‘patients’ who received aversion therapy in south China in the 1990s, I examine how the transformation of subjectivities from gay to straight was made possible by such ‘self-technologizing’ practices as writing and communication. I also consider the centrality of the body and affect in the process of subject (trans)formation, and ask how a new, coherent and authentic ‘self’ was fabricated through bodily and affective experiences. This discussion not only reveals the social construction of the self as central to China’s postsocialist governmentality, but also the central role that gender and sexuality play in processes of self-formation.

This article examines different types of queer spaces in contemporary Shanghai together with the various same-sex subjects that inhabit these spaces. In doing so, it discusses the impact of transnational capitalism, the nation state and local histories on the construction of urban spaces and identities. Combining queer studies and urban ethnography, this article points to the increasing social inequalities hidden behind the notion of urban cosmopolitanism created by the deterritorializing and meanwhile territorializing forces of transnational capital and the state. It also sheds light on how these various identities and spaces are lived and experienced by ordinary people, as well as possible ways of resistance to the dominant narratives.