From 'celluloid comrades' to 'digital video activism': queer filmmaking in postsocialist 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

Queer eye for Chinese women: Locating queer spaces in Shitou's film Women Fifty Minutes

This article offers a critical analysis of Chinese lesbian artist, filmmaker and activist Shitou's 2006 film Women Fifty Minutes (nüren wushi fenzhong). Focusing on the representation of queer women in the film, I discern the existence and conditions of queer subjectivities and spaces in a postsocialist Chinese context. This article aims to disentangle different discourses of women and feminism in contemporary China as represented in the film and, in so doing, unravel the importance of sexuality in understanding feminism and women's experiences. By looking at Chinese women through queer eyes, Shitou's film brings queer public space into existence through representational and activist strategies; it also introduces sexuality and queerness into feminist debates. Keywords Shitou Women Fifty Minutes women queer film art Chin

Queering/Querying Cosmopolitanism: Queer Spaces in Shanghai

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

Queering/Querying Cosmopolitanism: Queer Spaces in Shanghai

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

Queering/Querying Cosmopolitanism: Queer Spaces in Shanghai

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

The queer Global South: Transnational video activism between China and Africa

© The Author(s) 2020. In this article, I examine grassroots cinematic connections between China and Africa by using Queer University, short for the Queer University Video Capacity Building Training Program, a 3-year (2017–2019) participatory video production program between Chinese and African queer filmmakers and activists, as a case study. Through interviews with Queer University organizers and participants, I discuss the transnational politics and decolonial potentials underpinning these grassroots initiatives. Drawing on Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s critical term “minor transnationalism,” I study transnational queer grassroots collaborations in the Global South, and, in doing so, unravel the hopes, promises, and precariousness of emerging people-to-people exchanges taking place in the Global South

The 'Queer Generation': Queer Community Documentary in Contemporary China

In this article, I chart a brief history of the queer community documentary in the PRC since the 2000s by introducing its historical conditions of emergence and development. In doing so, I highlight the activist dimension of queer filmmaking and its transnational nature. I focus specifically on the aesthetics and politics, together with modes of production and circulation, of these queer community documentaries. I call the group of filmmakers working around the Beijing Queer Film Festival and the China Queer Film Festival Tour the ‘queer generation’. The ‘queer generation’ filmmakers use documentary films as a tool to engage in political and social activism. Their films and activist practices should be put in a transnational context and seen as part of the transnational cinema and international queer movements. As these filmmakers documented queer community histories, they also ‘queered’ Chinese documentaries and Chinese film industries at large. Their works represent grassroots, community-based and activist-oriented political engagements in contemporary China; these works also point to the political potential of queerness and documentary films in the world today

‘We Are Here’: the politics of memory in narrating China’s queer feminist history

© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article examines the politics of narrating feminist and queer histories in contemporary China. Focusing on Zhao Jing and Shi Tou’s 2015 film, We Are Here, a documentary made to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, I examine how the film represents queer women’s history in China and in what discourses such a representation is situated. I contend that the processes of remembrance and forgetting are intertwined in narrating queer women’s history in China. Indeed, while the film successfully recovers a hidden queer history, it also risks erasing the history of socialist and Marxist feminism, as well as China’s socialist legacies at large. I suggest that we should think about Chinese feminist and queer movements in terms of continuities and ruptures by paying attention to their articulations to different transnational discourses at specific historical conjunctures. While We Are Here convincingly addresses the transnational influence from liberal feminism, it is also necessary to call attention to the legacies of socialist and Marxist feminism in China and transnationally in contemporary feminist and queer historiography and mediated memories

Metamorphosis of a butterfly: Neo-liberal subjectivation and queer autonomy in Xiyadie's papercutting art

© 2019 Intellect Ltd Article. 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

‘Anti-domestic violence little vaccine’: A Wuhan-based feminist activist campaign during COVID-19

In this short essay, I introduce the ‘Anti-Domestic Violence Little Vaccine’ campaign in China during the COVID-19. After a brief introduction of the campaign by using first-person accounts from the organiser Guo Jing, I will then sum up some of the activist strategies used in the campaign. I will also discuss how the campaign engages with the quarantined public space. I hope that these strategies can inspire activists around the world to find strength and solidarity, and also to seek solutions to tackle the global pandemic. I also suggest that rather than seeing the pandemic as an obstacle to social movements, we can use the pandemic as a good opportunity to experiment with flexible and creative modes of social and political activism