Queer Disidentification: Or How to Cook Chinese Noodles in a Global Pandemic?

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.