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QUEERING
CHINESE KINSHIP

QUEERING CHINESE KINSHIP

Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China
“The book makes a strong contribution to Asian queer studies through an in-depth theorization
of queer kinship in the Chinese context, a comprehensive coverage of different types of queer
media and popular culture, and an innovative discussion of homonormativity in the context
of contemporary China. In a fast-developing and very competitive academic field, this book
stands out as an important contribution.”
—Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham
“Queering Chinese Kinship represents the cutting edge of Chinese queer studies. Its
sophisticated media analyses and provocative theoretical contentions reveal two central
paradoxes: the interdependence of queerness and kinship despite China’s notoriously
homophobic patriarchal familism, and the flourishing of queer public culture in spite of its
infamously restrictive media environment. Brilliantly demonstrating how queer possibility
emerges through a confluence of familial, media, state, and market forces, this book is a joy to
read and a major contribution to the field.”
—Fran Martin, University of Melbourne

What does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies
are of such great importance? This book makes sense of queer cultures in China—a country
with one of the largest queer populations in the world—and offers an alternative to Euro-

235mm
American blueprints of queer individual identity. This book contends that kinship relations must
be understood as central to any expression of queer selfhood and culture in contemporary
cultural production in China. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song
scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, and questions Eurocentric

Globalizing China
Queer Public Culture in
queer culture’s frequent assumption of the separation of queerness from blood family.
Offering five case studies of queer representations across a range of media genres, this book
also challenges the tendency in current scholarship on Chinese and East Asian queerness to
understand queer cultures as predominantly counter-mainstream, marginal, and underground.
Shedding light on the representations of queerness and kinship in independent and subcultural
as well as commercial and popular cultural products, the book presents a more comprehensive
picture of queerness and kinship in flux and highlights queer politics as an integral part of
contemporary Chinese public culture.

Lin Song is a lecturer in the School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University in
Guangzhou, China.

Cover image: Chi Zhe Wan Li De, Kan Zhe Guo Li De

[Eyeing what’s in the pot while eating from the bowl]. © 2008 by Xiyadie
. Reproduced with permission of Xiyadie.
Gender Studies / China
Lin Song

Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China

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5mm
15mm
Queering Chinese Kinship

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Queer Asia
The Queer Asia series opens a space for monographs and anthologies in all disciplines focusing
on nonnormative sexuality and gender cultures, identities, and practices across all regions of Asia.
Queer studies, queer theory, and transgender studies originated in, and remain dominated by, North
American and European academic circles. Yet the separation between sexual orientation and gender
identity, while relevant in the West, does not neatly apply to all Asian contexts, which are themselves
complex and diverse. Growing numbers of scholars inside and beyond Asia are producing exciting
and challenging work that studies Asian histories and cultures of trans and queer phenomena. The
Queer Asia series—the first of its kind in publishing—provides a valuable opportunity for developing
and sustaining these initiatives.
Selected titles in the series:
Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
Edited by Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao
Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male-Queer Cultures
Katsuhiko Suganuma
Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia
Evelyn Blackwood
First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys
Peter A. Jackson
Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders
Edited by Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff
Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires
Francisca Yuenki Lai
Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950
Wenqing Kang
Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten
Travis S. K. Kong
Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes
John Wei
Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan
Hans Tao-Ming Huang
Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures
Edited by Audrey Yue and Jun Zubillaga-Pow
Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China
Lucetta Yip Lo Kam
Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong
Helen Hok-Sze Leung
Editorial Collective
Chris Berry (King’s College London, UK), John Nguyet Erni (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong
Kong), Peter Jackson (Australian National University, Australia), Helen Hok-Sze Leung (Simon Fraser
University, Canada), and Shawna Tang (University of Sydney, Australia)
International Editorial Board
Dennis Altman (La Trobe University, Australia), Hongwei Bao (University of Nottingham, United
Kingdom), Tom Boellstorff (University of California, Irvine, USA), Judith Butler (University of
California, Berkeley, USA), Chow Yiu Fai (Hong Kong Baptist University), Lynette Chua (National
University of Singapore), Ding Naifei (National Central University, Taiwan), David Eng (University
of Pennsylvania, USA), J. Neil Garcia (University of the Philippines, Diliman), Joseph Goh (Monash
University Malaysia), Meena Gopal (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India), Thomas
Guadamuz (Mahidol University, Thailand), David Halperin (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
USA), Josephine Chuen-juei Ho (National Central University, Taiwan), Annamarie Jagose (University
of Sydney, Australia), Travis Kong (University of Hong Kong), Song Hwee Lim (Chinese University of
Hong Kong), Kam Louie (University of Hong Kong), Lenore Manderson (University of Witwatersrand,
South Africa), Fran Martin (University of Melbourne, Australia), Meaghan Morris (University of
Sydney, Australia), Dede Oetomo (University of Surabaya, Indonesia), Natalie Oswin (University
of Toronto, Canada), Cindy Patton (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Ken Plummer (University of
Essex, United Kingdom), Elspeth Probyn (University of Sydney, Australia), Lisa Rofel (University
of California, Santa Cruz, USA), Vaibhav Saria (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Megan Sinnott
(Georgia State University, USA), John Treat (Yale University, USA) Carol Vance (Yale University,
USA), Meredith L. Weiss (State University of New York at Albany, USA), and Audrey Yue (National
University of Singapore)
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Queering Chinese Kinship

Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China

Lin Song

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Hong Kong University Press
The University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
https://hkupress.hku.hk

© 2022 Hong Kong University Press

ISBN 978-988-8528-73-8 (Hardback)

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from
the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound by Hang Tai Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

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 For my family

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Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgments ix
Guide to Romanization xi
1. Introduction: Queering Chinese Kinship 1

Part I: Cinematic Cultures

2. Going Public: The Familial and the Political in New Chinese

Documentaries 31
3. Localizing the Transnational: Spring Fever as a Queer Sinophone Film 50

Part II: Popular Cultures

4. Entertainingly Queer? Illiberal Homonormativity and Transcultural

Queer Politics in Q Dadao 73
5. Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans: Digital Self-Making, Carnivalesque
Consumption, and Queer Vloggers on Bilibili 91
6. Rerouting Queerness: Qipa Shuo in the Rise of Chinese Online Video 110
7. Closing Remarks 126
Filmography 137
References 139
Index 156

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Illustrations

Figure 2.1: Mama Xuan wiping tears in Mama Rainbow 41

Figure 2.2: Family portrait shot in Pink Dads 41
Figure 2.3: Meiyi talking to the camera in Mama Rainbow 43
Figure 2.4: Interview scene in Pink Dads 44
Figure 4.1: Q Dadao’s main poster 81
Figure 4.2: Q Dadao’s promotional poster 82
Figure 4.3: Q Dadao’s promotional poster 82
Figure 5.1: “Bullet curtain” comments from LJZ’s vlog 105
Figure 5.2: “Bullet curtain” comments from CYL10’s vlog 107

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Acknowledgments

This book is based on my PhD research initially undertaken in the Gender

Studies Program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) between
2013 and 2017. My research activities during this time were made possible by
CUHK’s Postgraduate Studentship and Research Postgraduate Student Grant
for Overseas Academic Activities. I was also able to spend time in the School of
Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne as a visiting PhD
student in 2016, thanks to CUHK’s Global Scholarship for Research Excellence. I
am thankful for CUHK’s financial support and UniMelb’s hospitality. The prepa-
ration for the book manuscript was done during my tenure as a postdoctoral
fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Macau, whose
support I gratefully acknowledge.
This interdisciplinary project has been unconventional and challenging from
the start, and I would not have had the courage and confidence to undertake
it without the guidance and help of my PhD supervisors, Michael O’Sullivan
and Benzi Zhang. I am particularly grateful to Michael’s generous encourage-
ments and unfailing support throughout my PhD studies. During my time in
Melbourne, I had the privilege of working closely with Audrey Yue on my disser-
tation. Her intellectual energies, enabling criticism, and interdisciplinary outlook
have been key to the formation of this book. I am also indebted to other members
of my PhD committee—Fran Martin, Evelyn Chan, and Eli Park Sorenson—for
their constructive comments. Fran’s book on Taiwanese queer cultures is a major
source of inspiration for this project, and it was an honor and pleasure to have
her as an external examiner for my dissertation.
I am grateful to have had CUHK Gender Studies as my academic home. I
have learned so much from the lively intellectual exchanges there and have thor-
oughly enjoyed discussing gender issues with my peers from diverse academic
backgrounds. I would like to thank Haiping Liu, Phoebe Ip, Kecheng Zhang,
Carol Mai, Jamie J. Zhao, Svetlana Ilinskaya, Ting-Fai Yu, Alison So, and Benny
Lu; my discussions with them have shaped the content of this book in direct

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x Acknowledgments

and indirect ways. I also remain indebted to the administrative staff at Gender
Studies, especially Sandy Chan and Lolita Chan, for making the place so wel-
coming and homey. Sadly, Lolita passed away in 2020, but her warm smiles will
always be dear to my heart.
The greatest pleasure of undertaking this project has been the opportunity
to meet brilliant scholars, many of whom offered generous comments, advice,
and critiques that helped me tremendously in developing this book. My heartfelt
thanks go to Hongwei Bao, Chris K. K. Tan, Chris Berry, Geng Song, Le Cui,
Helen Leung, Bee Scherer, Alan Williams, Shanna Ye, and Thomas Baudinette,
as well as the anonymous readers engaged by Hong Kong University Press. An
earlier draft of Chapter 6 was presented at the Global Asias Summer Institute
at Pennsylvania State University. I thank all participants for their insight-
ful feedback, particularly Joseph Jeon and Jonathan Abel for their helpful
suggestions.
An earlier version of Chapter 4 of this book appeared in Feminist Media Studies
21 (1), and I thank Taylor and Francis for permission to use it here. My thanks
also go to Fan Popo for allowing me to reproduce the film stills that appear
in Chapter 2, to Seven Ages (七幕人生) for permission to use the promotional
posters in Chapter 4, and especially to queer artist Xiyadie for allowing me to
use a photo of his brilliant papercutting work as the cover image of the book.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my MA supervisor Liu Yan
and postdoctoral research advisor Liu Shih-Diing, whose continuous support
has given me strength throughout my research journey. My thanks also go to
the capable editorial team at Hong Kong University Press—this book would be
impossible without their hard work.

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Guide to Romanization

This book uses the Hanyu Pinyin system of romanization for Chinese words,
names, and phrases, except when a different conventional or preferred spelling
exists, as in Hong Kong and Taiwanese personal names (for example, Wong
Kar-wai) and place names (for example, Taipei).
The ordering of Chinese names generally follows the Chinese convention;
that is, family names precede personal names. In cases where a person is known
internationally by an Anglicized form of their names, this form is followed here
(for example, Kevin Tsai). The form also applies to names of Chinese scholars
who publish mainly in English, for example, Hongwei Bao, Shu-mei Shih,
Howard Chiang, and Sheldon Lu.
All English translations from Chinese material that appear in this book are my
own unless otherwise specified.

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1
Introduction: Queering Chinese Kinship

It was a cool Saturday night in Shenzhen in October 2014 as I entered a theater in

the Huaxia Arts Center. Built in 1991, the Nanshan District arts center is in one of
the city’s most affluent neighborhoods and has been home to various artistic and
cultural events since its establishment. Although I had frequented the fishing-
village-turned-metropolis before, it was my first visit to the arts center. Looking
around, I was surprised to find that the 700-seat theater was nearly full. Most
of the audience were in their twenties. As the theater filled up and started to
bustle with excitement for the imminent opening of the musical Q Dadao Q 大
道, I began to wonder how many members of the audience were attracted, like
me, by the gay character and plot advertised in the posters for the show. About
a month ago, I had stumbled across a flyer about the show on Zank, a gay online
social network in China. On the flyer, the Chinese musical adaptation of the Tony
Award-winning Broadway hit Avenue Q was described as “explicit, bold, and
pro-gay,” exploring topics such as coming out and social prejudice. The flyer also
offered an exclusive 25% discount for Zank users. I was intrigued by the flyer’s
explicit reference to homosexuality and targeting of gay audiences. In contem-
porary mainland China, queerness remains stigmatized and inhabits a generally
unwelcoming social environment. It is also subject to vigorous censorship in the
Chinese media, which is under constant state surveillance and control. It thus
came as a surprise to me that a mainstream musical claimed not only to stage
homosexuality but also to stage it in a positive light. Was it a marketing stunt to
capitalize on Chinese queers’ thirst for media representations? If not, what kind
of queer identities would be imagined by the show?
At the curtain call two hours later, I was impressed and even more intrigued:
the musical fulfilled its promise. It presented a sustained storyline about a
character’s struggle with his sexual orientation, which culminated in his final
decision to come out on the stage. The gay character was also represented quite
affirmatively as one of the show’s leading characters. The highlights of the show
included two moments. One was the performance of the number “Ruguo Ni Shi

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2 Queering Chinese Kinship

Gay” 如果你是 Gay (“If You Were Gay”), in which the gay character’s straight
roommate repeatedly assures him “if you were gay, it’d be okay”; the other was
the gay character’s spectacular coming out scene toward the end of the musical,
where he declared proudly on the stage, “I’m not afraid any more. I’m gay!”
These two moments provided me with a sense of empowerment and validation
that had been rare in Chinese mainstream cultural products, but my attention
was caught by an announcement at the end of the show, introducing Parents,
Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays China (PFLAG China) as one of the
show’s official partners. The production team revealed that part of its revenue
would be donated to this nongovernmental organization (NGO) dedicated to
fostering a more tolerant environment for Chinese LGBTQ subjects within their
families.
The performance of Q Dadao, which I explore in detail in Chapter 4, brings
together several interrelated issues central to this book. Situated at the intersec-
tion of transnational media encounter; local conditions of media control and
market-oriented liberalization; globalized, West-originated identity politics; and
the ubiquitous presence of Chinese blood kinship relations and ideologies, the
Chinese musical reveals a complex picture of new modes of queer becoming in
the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC). Importantly, contrary to the
popular belief that queerness does not exist in the authoritarian party-state, or if
it does, it must be privatized and underground, these modes of queer becoming
take a distinctly public form: not only is queerness publicly represented, its
engagements and negotiations with blood kinship values are also very much
public in multiple senses of the word.
I argue that queerness constitutes a key dimension of public culture in the
PRC today, and that it does so by negotiating, appropriating, and transform-
ing the supposedly private domain of blood kinship relations and ideologies.
The apparently oxymoronic combination of “queer” and “public culture” in
the book’s title carries two important theoretical orientations. First, it alludes to
Sedgwick’s (1990) seminal distinction between the minoritizing versus universal-
izing tendencies in queer analysis and insists on a universalizing approach. The
book examines queerness and Chinese kinship in a process of mutual construc-
tion and cross-fertilization. The various modes of queer becoming it explores
show not only how queer existence is enabled through continuous negotiation
and appropriation of kinship relations and values, but also how interactions
with queerness reveal Chinese kinship to be an unstable and potentially capa-
cious site. The dynamics between queerness and Chinese kinship, therefore, are
not only relevant to a small queer population, but also address a larger issue of
“continuing, determinative importance to the lives of people across the spectrum
of sexualities” (Sedgwick 1990, 2). Second, by marrying “queer” with “public
culture,” I also evoke Appadurai and Breckenridge’s (1988) idea of public
culture as a contestatory zone of cultural debate, where various types, forms,

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Introduction 3

and domains of culture encounter and interrogate each other to form a hetero-
geneous and heteroglossic discursive space (6). I argue that such a discursive
space exists in China in tandem with persistent state intervention and censor-
ship. The economic-driven growth of the country’s media sector and the prolif-
eration of networked communication technologies have given rise to creative
and resilient ways for expressing queerness and envisioning queer politics. By
exploring how queerness is articulated through a negotiation of blood kinship
in post-2008 Chinese media products, this book unpacks the complexity of a
globalizing China and the opportunities such a complexity affords for queer
subjects.
Evoking the term “queer” to describe nonnormative sexualities and practices
in China inevitably raises the interrelated questions of authenticity and trans-
latability (S. Lim 2009). When researching Chinese queerness, I was often con-
fronted by the question—both from other scholars and from myself, and from
China and beyond—of whether the case I describe is “truly queer” or “queer
enough,” or if it is “just gay.” The difficulty in theorizing Chinese queerness
without being haunted by questions of authenticity and difference partly derives
from the politics of the location in knowledge production, discussed later in this
chapter. Moreover, it is largely engendered by tensions between the narrow and
broad definitions of “queer.” In a narrow sense, “queer” functions as an umbrella
term referring to a spectrum of gender and sexual orientations, representa-
tions, and identities that include, for instance, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-
der, intersex, two-spirited, and questioning (Kumashiro 2001; Yep 2003). What
sets the definition of “queer” apart from sedimented labels such as “gay” and
“lesbian” is its “capacious and deliberately inclusive” nature (Yep 2003, 61). In a
broad sense, and particularly as a critical concept, “queer” signifies an anti-nor-
mative positionality that rejects categorization (Halperin 1997; M. Warner 1993).
Anything that protests and challenges the normal can be regarded as “queer.”
The narrow and broad definitions of the term “queer” are in a contentious rela-
tionship: whereas “queer” can describe an array of sexual identities, its invoca-
tion of an anti-normative positionality decides that, to quote Sedgwick, “there
are a lot of people that are gay that aren’t queer . . . [and] there are probably a
lot of people that are truly queer that aren’t gay” (quoted in Yep 2003, 36). This
tension denotes the complex dynamics between recognition and assimilation,
and between survival and normalization. Indeed, conceptualizing queerness as
an anti-normative form of sexual (non)identity begs the question of how nor-
mativity itself should be defined in the first place, and how anti-normative one
needs to be in order to qualify as “queer.”
As far as translatability is concerned, studies of queerness in Chinese-speaking
societies have yielded meaningful local terms for Chinese homosexualities in
English-language academia. The term tongzhi 同志, for instance, is favored by
some scholars for its ability to foreground a local genealogy of homosexuality

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4 Queering Chinese Kinship

characterized by the convergence between China’s socialist and postsocialist

histories (Chou 2000; Kong 2010; Zheng 2015). Although the use of this term
suggests a much-needed insistence on local specificity, Howard Chiang (2014b,
354–55) and Hongwei Bao (2018, 31) insightfully observe that an “obsession”
with indigenous terms risks missing the opportunity to bring into dialogue
studies of queer cultures in different locales by evoking an orientalized and par-
ticularist vision of Chinese queerness.
My choice to use “queer” in this book as a signifier and as an analytical optic
reflects two intentions. First, I wish to highlight and explore the connections
between globalized queer knowledge, identities, and politics and local articula-
tions of queerness. Second, I set out to displace Euro-American conceptualiza-
tions of queerness by unveiling and challenging their presumed universality.
In discussing articulations of queerness vis-à-vis blood kinship relations in
China, this book does not seek to offer a definition for a quintessential “Chinese
queerness” or a case study of “queerness in China.” On the contrary, it rejects
sedimented understandings of queerness by looking at how nonnormative sexu-
alities take multifarious forms and how these forms are enabled by both local
and transnational material and cultural conditions. “Queer,” therefore, is used as
a deliberately open and capacious term here. As David Halperin (1997) beauti-
fully put it:

Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate,

the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. . . . [It]
demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative. . . . [It]
does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions;
rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and hetero-
geneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. (62, emphasis in
original)

The interactions between queerness and normality and the way in which
these interactions open horizons of hope and possibility are key themes of the
book. The book effectuates a theoretical intervention in conceptualizing queer-
ness by demonstrating the multifarious and ambivalent ways in which queer-
ness is imagined vis-à-vis normality. I ground the theorization of queerness in
lived experiences and contextualized cultural representations in contemporary
China to challenge the ideological deadlock between queerness and family-and-
kinship as an institution. The dichotomous formulation of queerness as radically
oppositional toward blood kinship leads to an overgeneralized understanding of
normativity, often used as a flattened label that escapes critical scrutiny. I insist
that normativity cannot be reduced to a single representative institution; instead,
it should be unpacked as a complex field of relations. In the same vein, queerness
is not a competition regarding who is more radical, not least because radicality
itself is historically and culturally specific and presumes certain social and politi-
cal privileges. By situating the interactions between queerness and blood kinship

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Introduction 5

in specific social, cultural, political, and historical contexts, this book shows
how “queer is constantly expanded, supplemented, and revised” (Liu 2010, 297)
outside the Euro-American axis of knowledge production. Thus, this book is a
contribution to the growing literature on queer China that examines how queer-
ness is complexly and simultaneously shaped by global capitalist imaginaries
and local conditions of postsocialism (Bao 2020b; Zhao 2020; Zhao and Wong
2020). As Bao (2020a) points out, it is impossible to offer a neat, linear historiog-
raphy of Chinese queerness as it is characterized by contradictory articulations
of identification and disidentification, and becoming and unbecoming (5–6).
These intricacies offer a point of entry to rethink the manifestations and potenti-
alities of queerness.
Another central subject matter in this book is “Chinese kinship,” a term I use
to refer to Confucian blood kinship relations that function as the hegemonic form
of relatedness in the PRC today. I write with full awareness of how a discus-
sion of queerness and blood kinship might appear asynchronous at a time when
alternative kinship formations, such as same-sex marriage and assisted-repro-
ductive-technology-enabled queer families, are mushrooming around the world.
The global phenomenon of same-sex marriage or partnership legalization in the
United States, Ireland, Australia, districts of Tokyo, and recently Taiwan has chal-
lenged heteronormative definitions of marriage and family in profound ways.
The steadily growing interdisciplinary field of queer kinship studies has also
produced important scholarship on nonnormative kinship in North American
(Weston 1991; Walters 2012), European (Andreassen 2018; Dahl 2018; Petersen
2016; Sullivan and Davidmann 2016), and Asia-Pacific (Bao 2018; Brainer 2019; S.
Huang and Brouwer 2018) contexts, all of which expanded the purview of schol-
arly discussions of kinship relations and ideologies. Nevertheless, the liberal
pluralist campaign for marriage equality also entails limitations and poses new
challenges for imagining queer politics. Dreher (2016) identifies three major
concerns arising from same-sex marriage victories. The first is the narrowing of
representations around sexual citizenship and the risks of normalization of queer
lives and intimacy. In a context where conventional marriage is valorized as the
most desirable form of kinship structure and imagined as the ultimate goal of
sexual politics, the diversity and complexity of queer lives and queer politics
is in danger of being “narrowed or even erased,” replaced by “privatized and
depoliticized family values” (189). Second, this development of a narrow sexual
politics may be accompanied by an emergent “homonationalism” that “positions
Western nations as guarantors of sexual freedom” (190). The term homona-
tionalism is put forward by Puar (2007) as a critique of a sexual exceptionalism
where queerness becomes complicit in the construction of a national imaginary
in which racialized and sexualized others are disavowed. The surfacing of a
regulatory queerness, as Dreher (2016) remarks, prompts “intersectional and
coalitional approaches” outside the rhetoric of liberal sexual politics in order to

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6 Queering Chinese Kinship

represent the complexity and heterogeneity of queer lives in different locales and
cultures (189–90). Third, Dreher warns against the prevalence of a “triumphalist
narrative” that sees same-sex marriage campaigns as certain and inevitable, and
calls for continuous efforts that “positio[n] marriage equality as a starting point
for conversation and contestation rather than a final goal or end of debate” (190).
This book, then, takes up the timely task of revisiting and rethinking blood
kinship, which is an often-neglected site of inquiry in Euro-American theoriza-
tions of queer kinship. By doing so, the book reflects on the in/effectiveness of
global queer liberalism and its choreographed progressive politics. Queer theory
and queer kinship studies have much to gain from a careful consideration of the
dynamics between queerness and families of origin, through which heteronor-
mative assumptions about blood kinship can be productively problematized
and redefined. In the Chinese context, destabilizing the ideological antagonism
between queerness and kinship is not just a queer analytical perspective, but
an essential condition for queer survival. Chinese cultural manifestations of
queer negotiations within blood kinship offer a rich archive for recalibrating
and expanding the concepts of both “queerness” and “kinship,” which are in
constant contention and negotiation with each other. I underpin this mutually
constitutive nature of the two concepts with the paradigm “queering Chinese
kinship.” By using “queer” as a verb instead of a static adjective, I lay emphasis
on the motions, processes, and transformations that are constantly occurring in
the cultural production of queerness and kinship. In other words, in this book,
“queerness” and “kinship” are not used as concepts with fixed meanings—
instead, they are treated as open signifiers that acquire meanings in the process of
discursive construction.
This book focuses on articulations of queerness vis-à-vis blood kinship rela-
tions in post-2008 Chinese media cultures. This is a particularly intricate and
dynamic terrain, first from the commercialization of Chinese media sectors in
1979 as part and parcel of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s economic lib-
eralization policy, and later from the state-led development project for internet
and communication technology that has fundamentally transformed how media
is produced and consumed. Although Chinese media share a pronounced
economic drive with their Western counterparts, they are distinguished by the
authoritarian political and cultural environment in which they exist and indeed
flourish. This condition of economic-driven cultural liberalization and persis-
tent state censorship and control significantly shapes China’s cultural produc-
tion of media. Lewis, Martin, and Sun (2016, 259) succinctly describe Chinese
media cultures as characterized by a complex intertwining of socialist structural
legacies and neoliberal logics. Moving from the more conventional media genre
of cinema to emergent genres of musical and online video, this book shows how
queerness is imagined vis-à-vis blood kinship in diverse and creative ways,
and how the re-imagining and queering of Chinese kinship are simultaneously

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Introduction 7

enabled and restrained by complex media ecologies. By doing so, the book high-
lights the unevenness of global sexual modernities and neoliberal subjectivities,
and the necessity of thinking outside the liberal pluralist vision of queer politics.
This book assumes a universalizing point of view in its analyses of Chinese
queer media cultures as public culture, and I have chosen to focus on publicly
accessible, popular, and commercial media products. Meanwhile, it is important
to note that a plethora of subcultural and underground queer media productions
exist in China, the significance of which has been well explored in recent scholar-
ship (Bao 2018; J. Tan 2016; Yue 2012; Jie Zhang 2012).
As one of the first systematic accounts of cultural articulations of queer
kinship in non-Western contexts, this book brings together a number of fields
of inquiry including queer theory, Asian and China studies, film and media
studies, Sinophone studies, and queer kinship studies, and draws on critical
theories across disciplinary boundaries in literary analysis, media studies, politi-
cal science, cultural anthropology, and sociology. In this introductory chapter, I
delineate this interdisciplinary research project by first presenting its theoretical
and methodological approaches before situating my discussions in the contem-
porary Chinese context and specifying how the book contributes to relevant
fields. To close this chapter, I outline the structure of the book and the arguments
in each chapter to come.

Global Queer China

This book is born out of the intellectual tradition of queer Asian studies, a vibrant
field brought together by a shared concern over the hegemony and insufficiency
of Euro-American paradigms of queer knowledge production. As Petrus Liu
(2010) famously argues in his essay “Why Does Queer Theory Need China?”:

The political success of U.S. queer theory is rhetorically derived from the
imagination of the East as a civilization sealed off from the rest of the world.
This binary opposition is not only implied by, but actually constitutive of, the
major claims of poststructuralist queer theory. (300)

P. Liu’s assertion is based on a careful re-reading of the founding works of Euro-

American queer theory, including Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Sedgwick’s
Epistemology of the Closet, exploring how their vision of a universal theory of sex-
uality is premised upon a misunderstanding, if not dismissal, of “the East” as an
otherized, homogeneous, and unfathomable entity. Queer theory needs China, P.
Liu argues, because only through examination of non-Western cultures as refer-
ence points in queer knowledge production (rather than sites of difference) can
an anti-universalist and global queer theory start to emerge.
P. Liu’s argument is emblematic of a collective endeavor to provincialize
Euro-American queer theory in a global age. Scholars in queer Asian studies
pay special attention to the movements, contentions, and resignification of

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8 Queering Chinese Kinship

queerness in a world that is both increasingly connected and fundamentally

uneven. In the introduction to their edited book AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking
Genders and Sexualities, members of the AsiaPacifiQueer network challenge the
binary view that regards non-Western manifestations of nonconforming genders
and sexualities either as proofs for “sexual Westernization” or as repositories for
“local essentialism” (Martin et al. 2008, 6). They offer a critical model of queer
hybridization to “explore the complex processes of localization and interregional
borrowing that shape sexual cultures in an increasingly networked world” (6).
Further developing this transnational approach to Asian queerness, Chiang
and Wong (2016) suggest that since “queer cultural formations do not merely
follow the vertical logics of colonial modernity,” greater attention is needed on
“less orderly, bilateral, and horizontal intra-regional traffics of queerness across
different countries and regions” (1645). This decentering strategy is echoed by
Audrey Yue’s critical paradigm of “Queer Asia as method,” in which she argues
for a sustained focus on “practices that decenter the globalized formation of
‘queer’” in order to initiate “critical conversations on intra-regional cultural
flows that are local and international” (Yue 2017, 21, emphasis in original). In
his endeavor to bridge sociology and queer theory, Travis Kong (2019) also calls
for attention to “the queer flows of circulation among and within non-Western
societies that shape queer desires, identities and practices” (2), and proposes a
transnational queer sociology that addresses “the asymmetries of the globali-
zation process” and seeks to understand “the hybridity of contemporary non-
Western experiences” (5). These theoretical positionalities have given rise
to vibrant and fruitful discussions on queer Asia across different localities,
including Japan (e.g., McLelland, Suganuma, and Welker 2007), Taiwan (e.g.,
H. Huang 2011), Singapore (e.g., Yue and Zubillaga-Pow 2012), Thailand (e.g.,
Jackson 2016), Korea (e.g., Henry 2020), Indonesia (e.g., Wijaya 2020), India (e.g.,
Chatterjee 2018), and Malaysia (e.g., Goh 2018).
In the study of queerness in Chinese-speaking societies more specifically,
recent years have witnessed a burgeoning body of research exploring various
facets of queer experiences, identities, strategies, and cultures. These studies
cover a range of topics including intra- and international queer migration (Kam
2020; J. Wei 2020; T.-F. Yu 2020); gay and lesbian identities and queer activism
(Bao 2018; Engebretsen 2013; Engebretsen, Schroeder, and Bao 2015; Kam 2012);
kinship arrangements and negotiations (S. Huang and Brouwer 2018; Yingyi
Wang 2019; J. Wei 2020; Zhu 2018); and queer intervention in underground,
popular, and digital cultures (Bao 2020b; Chao 2020; S. Wang 2020; J. Zhao 2020;
J. Zhao and Wong 2020). Collectively, this growing corpus of literature on global
queer China captures what Bao (2020b) calls “postsocialist metamorphosis”: “a
simultaneous and yet contradictory process” of envisioning and embodying
queerness (5). In doing so, these scholars convincingly and insightfully dem-
onstrate the situatedness of queer identities, politics, cultures, and knowledges,

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Introduction 9

and underline the urgency to contest, decenter, and re-imagine queer liberalism.
Although a concern with Chinese blood kinship notably underpins most of the
existing literature on queer China, there is yet to be a systematic study of the
relationship between queerness and Chinese blood kinship in the context of
the PRC. This book addresses this gap by exploring how interactions between
queerness and blood kinship relations play a central role in the articulation of
queer selfhood and culture in globalizing China .
Although this book focuses on the geographical location of the PRC, it also
adopts a transnational approach that rejects seeing China as a static entity
defined only by its national borders. In fact, as these chapters will show, contem-
porary China is always already global. The Western-centric notion of the word
global plays a part—that is, China has been penetrated by transnational corpora-
tions and the capitalist logics of free trade and free market. More importantly,
however, China is global in a far more complex, messy, and disjunctive sense.
First and foremost, China is global in its self-positioning as a socialist country
with “Chinese characteristics,” which denotes a developmentalist outlook that
instrumentalizes global capitalism as a means to boost the domestic economy.
As Rofel (2007) shows, China’s globalization in the 1990s and 2000s is charac-
terized by a series of experiments in neoliberalism as the country transformed
itself into a postsocialist state. This increasingly cosmopolitan outlook, fueled
by the country’s aspiration to “connect tracks” (jiegui 接軌) with the world,
has engendered a sea change in subject-making and cultural production.
Importantly, the intertwining of socialist legacies and globalist and capitalist
logics has determined that globalization in China is not a seamless process, but
one characterized by asymmetries and frictions. The analysis of China offered
here takes into consideration both the strong influence of global knowledge and
cultural exchange traffic and the disjunctive processes of hybridization. Second,
China is also global because in an age of accelerated flows of ideas and people,
Chineseness inevitably spills over into more capacious, fluid, and heterogenous
definitions. Sinophone studies scholars have long contended China-centrism
by stressing the significance of articulations of Chineseness at the geographi-
cal margins of China, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and
other Chinese diasporic communities (Shih 2007). By investigating “a historical
process of heterogenenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture” (4),
Sinophone studies reveal the complexities of history, geography, and identity
in the making of China and Chineseness. Building on Shih’s pioneering work,
several scholars have explored the cross-fertilization between queer studies
and Sinophone studies. For example, Pecic (2016) suggests that combining the
notion of the Sinophone with decentralized studies of non-Western queerness
offers “exciting new ways of interrogating Chinese queer cultures that are both
localised as well as transnational” (5). Chiang and Wong (2020) further argue for
conceptualizing “queer Sinophone studies” as a critical field of inquiry aimed

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10 Queering Chinese Kinship

at de-essentializing both Chineseness and queerness by analyzing how they

are articulated in and through one another. Whereas Sinophone studies and
queer Sinophone studies focus more heavily on non-PRC locales in their efforts
to challenge China-centrism, this book seeks to engage both fields by teasing
out the same complexities and heterogeneity that underlie Chineseness in the
contemporary PRC. As I will show, intensifying regional and global exchanges
have enabled expressions of nonnormative sexualities that constantly challenge
official definitions of Chineseness. The imagining of queerness as integral to,
instead of incompatible with, Chinese kinship ideology redefines the contours
of Chineseness. The intersection with queerness thus productively destabilizes
the heteronormative and hegemonic construction of Chineseness in the PRC.
A scrutiny of the cultural politics of Chineseness inside China contributes to
Sinophone studies’ anti-hegemonic and anti-imperial project by revealing the
fundamental heterogeneity of Chineseness.
This book’s study of queerness in contemporary China, in short, evokes a
global framework of analysis. On the one hand, it examines how asymmetrical
and disjunctive forces of globalization give rise to fundamentally new manifesta-
tions of queerness in China that challenge the presumed universality of Western
queer experiences and politics. On the other hand, it also explores how Chinese
queerness complicates state-promoted, nationalistic definitions of Chineseness
through connections with transnational and intraregional circuits of queer
knowledge. By doing so, this book contributes to envisioning a truly global
queer theory that regards Euro-American queer formations as one of many refer-
ence points for conceptualizing queerness, rather than the center.

Thinking through Kinship: Queer Representations,

Queer Becoming

Family and kinship have always been a central concern in queer representations
and queer becoming in Chinese societies. Commenting on the emergence of gay
and lesbian culture in China at the turn of the twentieth century, Chris Berry
(2001) noted how increased film and video representation of gay men, lesbians,
and other queer characters is characterized by “the social mapping of gay identity
in relation to family and kinship” (213). He identifies two dominant ways in
which queerness is defined and socially positioned: first, queerness “appears as
a problem within the networks of kinship obligations that constitute the family
and bind the individual into it” (213). The problem posed by queerness for the
family in these representations, in other words, is not sexual behavior in and
of itself, but is instead a dramatized conflict between “two different models
of selfhood”—one based on “an exclusive sexual and social identity” and one
closely linked to the performance of one’s role in the family (215–16). In this
sense, Berry suggests, situating queerness as a family problem opens discussions

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Introduction 11

about the divide between “a local relational self and a foreign-originated psy-
chological self,” which further constitute a ground for observations of “ongoing
hybridity and contradiction” (217–18). Second, in both mainstream and queer
models of film production, queerness is represented with a heavy reference to
the family. Differing markedly from the post-Stonewall Anglo-American model
that imagines queerness as “a matter of self-expression” based on the breakup
with blood families and joining of alternative queer communities, East Asian
representations of queerness are either integrated with the obligations of tradi-
tional family roles or “located in and defined by the hazy amorphous spaces
of marginality” (224–25). Such a mode of representation, Berry posits, reveals
the possibility for “challenge, review, renegotiation, and renewal” against the
historical and cultural specificities of Anglo-American models, and showcases
how “international circulation of cinema and video from East Asia enables . . .
emergent . . . queer identities to participate in the constitution of an increasingly
globalized gay culture” (213).
Similarly, in her discussion of the family in Taiwanese queer literature and
film, Fran Martin (2003) remarks that “the idea of ‘gayness’ bears a necessary
relation to the idea of ‘family’, albeit a tense and ambivalent one” (119). Rejecting
the essentialist approaches that configure queerness as either a sexual subject
grounded in Euro-American psychoanalytic traditions or a cultural subject
grown out of “the Chinese family” as a stable, self-sufficient, and general-
ized organization, Martin understands “queerness” (tongxinglian 同性戀) and
“family” (jia 家) as discursive products situated in complex relations (119–20).
Jia, Martin argues, is a “discursive and ideological site that produces effects for
the production of tongxinglian, which is itself . . . a similarly shifting and unstable
site, incessantly made and remade in the circuits of contemporary culture” (120).
She situates this intricate relationship between “sexuality” and “family” in the
“transcultural mobilities of the knowledge-systems that inform them” (143).
Local queers’ engagements with the family, she suggests, both appropriate Euro-
American queer theories’ critiques on essentialized sexuality and gender catego-
ries, and simultaneously displace the sign of “queer” from these conditioning
contexts by way of hybridizing global and local sexual knowledges. As a result,
“fundamentally new formations of culture and sexuality” (24) are produced,
whose intricacies and heterogeneity exceed the scope of any single model, be it
“a Euro-American psychoanalytic or medical model, a contemporary model of
a global ‘gay identity’, or a ‘Chinese’ model based on the centrality of reproduc-
tive familiality” (17).
Berry’s (2001) and Martin’s (2003) discussions of queerness in Chinese-
speaking societies foreground family and kinship as a pivotal site where queer
selfhood and culture are imagined and embodied. Importantly, “the Chinese
family” is not essentialized as a generalized and inelastic institution, but as a dis-
cursive sign that acquires meaning in its contentious yet productive relationship

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12 Queering Chinese Kinship

with queerness. As both authors have pointed out, kinship is a site of complex
encounters of global queer knowledge, identities, and politics, as well as a site
of constant transformation, appropriation, and resignification. A careful study
of family and kinship is thus of particular importance in Chinese contexts as
it informs understandings of global queerness and queer cultural production.
Accordingly, I next engage with theories in kinship and queer kinship studies,
most of which are born out of the Euro-American context, to devise a critical
approach to theorize the interactions between queerness and kinship in contem-
porary China.
Most commonly associated with anthropology, “kinship” as an analytical
concept has been deployed to investigate and understand domestic and genera-
tional relationships that constitute the fundamental ways through which people
become socially related. In the mid-twentieth century, kinship studies became
a central field in anthropology, focusing strongly on the typology of lineage
systems and descent groups. Directing attention to the emerging nuclear family,
early kinship studies bore a strong gender bias with an exclusive focus on men.
The notion of natural reproduction as the foundation of kinship also remained
unchallenged (Carsten 2000, 10–11). Claude Lévi-Strauss’s milestone work
Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969), for example, offers a structuralist account
of marriage and alliance based on an examination of the incest taboo as the first
and most important cultural imprint of human society. The prohibition of incest,
Lévi-Strauss explains, functions both to establish the family as the basic human
unit by preventing the formation of sub-units of sexual partners within a group,
and to facilitate the further constitution of larger units such as clans, tribes, and
eventually societies by necessitating marriages (29–41). Surveying various forms
of marriage in “primitive” human societies, Lévi-Strauss points out that the rules
of exogamy and endogamy in marriage are decided by the need to exchange
women as reproductive persons among different groups. Different rules of
marriage, on the other hand, set up different relations of reciprocity and soci-
ality among intermarrying groups (42–55). Situating elementary kinship in the
context of cultural and social exchange, Lévi-Strauss’s account demonstrates that
kinship relations are distinctly cultural. This point of view powerfully challenges
the Aristotelian understanding of the family as a natural and self-generated
entity and has inspired later scholars focusing on the cultural politics of kinship
and gender. Notably, in her seminal essay “The Traffic in Women,” Marxist
feminist Gayle Rubin (1997) engages with Lévi-Straussian theory through a
problematization of his central idea of “the exchange of women.” Highlighting
the gendered power relations implied by the concept, Rubin argues that instead
of being regarded as a “cultural necessity,” “the exchange of women” should be
seen as a “profound perception” of an unbalanced social system that calls for
an analysis of the “political economy of sexual systems” (39). Rubin’s response
reveals that Lévi-Strauss’s initial aim to account for rather than reflect on the

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Introduction 13

genesis of kinship has largely limited his book’s analytical potential to abstract-
ing a set of universal rules of kinship, instead of scrutinizing the power mecha-
nisms behind these rules.
American anthropologist David Schneider (1968) powerfully critiques such
a function-oriented analysis of kinship in his groundbreaking work American
Kinship: A Cultural Account. Schneider negates the biogenetic undertone of
earlier kinship studies and identifies American kinship as “a cultural universe
of relatives” that revolves around two orders: “the order of nature” and “the
order of law” (27). The core symbol of “blood” in American kinship, for instance,
may be derived in natural terms through the sharing of “the stuff of a particular
heredity,” or may also be enshrined in law “imposed by man and [consisting]
of rules and regulations, customs and traditions” (27). Schneider’s approach
to kinship highlights the complex relationship between the biological and the
social, opening up a whole new field of enquiry for later scholars (Carsten 2000,
22). In a more recent account, Carsten (2000), arguing from a Schneiderian tradi-
tion, configures kinship not as a single, unified site of inquiry, but as plural and
heterogeneous “cultures of relatedness” (34). In Carsten’s edited book, Charles
Stafford (2000) offers an interesting case study of Chinese kinship and patriliny
by describing “the cycle of yang” (養) as a system through which relatedness is
generated. Distinguishing the cycle of yang from the paradigm of lineage and
descent, Stafford suggests that in the Chinese context, the provision of a kind
of “all-encompassing nurturance” from the parents establishes a complex and
“almost inescapable obligation” for the children to care for them in old age
(41). This elaborate system of debt and return of yang is intriguing particularly
because (a) it entails the possibility of producing relatedness between foster
parents and children without a “natural” tie of descent; (b) it can be enacted
without consideration for a descendant, as opposed to the popular belief about
Chinese kinship as descendent-oriented; and (c) a failure in the “cycle of yang”
may provoke a termination of relations of descent on itself, indicating that socio-
economic instead of biological concerns may independently encompass related-
ness (42–43). Combined with Carsten’s theoretical contemplations, Strafford’s
observations invoke a reconceptualization of kinship as a multifaceted, intersect-
ing site shaped by various cultural practices. In other words, instead of being
biologically determined or socially coded, kinship may be understood as a
process of relatedness-building and meaning-making.
From its earlier focus on descent and lineage based on the presumption of
universal heterosexual procreation to its more recent emphasis on symbolic and
cultural meanings, kinship studies in anthropology is increasingly adopting a
cultural constructivist stance, scrutinizing the power mechanisms behind par-
ticular models of kinship. This culturalist approach to kinship shares similar
concerns with queer studies in examining and interrogating normalization and
cultural supremacy. Furthermore, a steadily growing body of works in queer

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14 Queering Chinese Kinship

kinship studies has also begun to emerge in Euro-American academia. The

founding work in the field is Kath Weston’s (1991) Families We Choose: Lesbians,
Gays, Kinship. Based on her observations of gay and lesbian communities in
1980s San Francisco, Weston challenges the epistemological dominance of
nuclear families as the only cultural framework for configuring kinship (7). The
powerful opposition between “gay people” and “the family,” Weston contends,
is problematically premised upon “a view of family grounded in heterosexual
relations, combined with the conviction that gay men and lesbians are incapable
of procreation, parenting and establishing kinship ties” (25). Gay people, there-
fore, are exiled into a status of “no family” in such an exclusively biogenetic
configuration of kinship (27). Confronting “the reduction of lesbian and gay men
to sexual identity, and sexual identity to sex alone”(22), Weston argues that the
act of coming out to blood family both establishes a “common cultural ground”
for “the lesbian- and gay-identified people of all colors and classes” (60) in their
questioning of the supposedly enduring solidarity associated with blood rela-
tions (67), and also provides them with an opportunity to “create kinship ties
out of relationships which are originally ties of friendship” (108). Weston posits
that these new kinship formations outside families of origin are “a key historical
development that paved the way for the emergence of lesbian and gay ‘com-
munity’ . . . and for the later appearance of the ideological opposition between
biological family and families we choose” (118).
Weston’s (1991) theorization of nonnormative families initiates a complete
reimagining of kinship by displacing the epistemological hegemony of the blood
family, thereby opening up possibilities to theorize alternative kinship forma-
tions outside the biogenetic rhetoric. But such a coming-out-based model of
chosen families also entails significant theoretical limits. As Elizabeth Freeman
(2007) points out, the element of “choice” in Weston’s argument is “an individu-
alistic and . . . bourgeois notion” that belongs to “part of a liberal discourse that
privileges subjects unfettered by various forms of difference and dependency”
(304). Freeman notes that Weston’s “families we choose” construct is “a pecu-
liarly queer-unfriendly model” in that “it presumes a range of economic, racial,
gender and national privileges to which many sexual dissidents do not have
access—often by virtue of their sexual dissidence itself” (304).
This underlying liberalist logic is made explicit particularly by Weston’s
(1991) insistence on coming out as a prerequisite for queer kinship. She argues
that “only after coming out to blood relatives emerged as a historical possibil-
ity could the element of selection in kinship become isolated in gay experience
and subsequently elevated to a constitutive feature of gay families” (111). In
other words, the formation of “families we choose” hinges on the declaration of
breakup with blood families, which supposedly contributes to the consolidation
of queer identities. This model can be highly discriminatory since it marginalizes
the experiences of queers who do not have the political and economic resources

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Introduction 15

to come out, or those who cannot exile themselves from their blood families
even after coming out. The conspicuous split between blood families and queer
families in Weston’s theorization is at least partially determined by its rootedness
in the economic, political, and cultural climates in 1980s San Francisco, where a
queer community took shape because a growing number of queers moved to the
city seeking freedom and mobility. Whether this model can be applied in other
contexts, therefore, needs further interrogation and scrutiny.
The gaps in Euro-American theorizations of queer kinship and their inad-
equacy in thinking beyond the liberal pluralist model show that queer kinship
studies have much to gain from research on Chinese queer kinship. Indeed, the
relationship between queerness and family and kinship have long been a concern
in Chinese queer studies. In his book Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in
Chinese Societies, for instance, Chou Wah-Shan (2000) famously argues that “[t]he
model of coming out is hinged upon notions of the individual as an independ-
ent, discrete unit segregated economically, socially and geographically from the
familial-kinship network” (251). He suggests that the coming-out rhetoric is
incompatible with Chinese societies, in which the family “has salience for each
individual in terms of emotional support, personal growth, economic bonds, and
the entire sense of personal selfhood” (254). This fundamental importance of the
biological family means that for Chinese queers, the major issue has always been
the negotiation with, rather than negation of, familial ties. Therefore, in lieu of
“coming out,” Chou proposes an alternative model of “coming home,” defined
as “a negotiative process of bringing one’s sexuality into the family-kin network
. . . by constructing a same-sex relationship in terms of family-kin categories”
(36).
Chou (2000) makes a strong case for the importance of a careful considera-
tion of blood family relations in theorizing Chinese queer kinship; however,
his insistence on an imagined core of the Chinese family has been critiqued
for its essentializing and romanticizing tendency. Liu and Ding (2005), who
also focus on the Chinese family as a site where queerness is negotiated, refute
Chou’s presumption about the tolerance of the Chinese family by identifying a
specific kind of homophobia prominent in China, namely a tradition of “reticent
poetics” (30). They suggest that the “tolerance” Chou observes should, in fact,
be regarded as a form of indirect speech that wields considerable disciplinary
power in Confucian Chinese societies. Stressing that silence toward queerness
within Chinese kinship is a speech act that both presumes and reinforces heter-
onormativity, Ding and Liu draw attention to the subtle yet difficult negotiations
between queerness and kinship in Chinese contexts. Day Wong (2007) further
argues for a hybridized approach, she suggests that in many cases, coming home
may well become a strategy through which queers maintain a close relationship
with their family members in order to come out. Coming home, she suggests,
is not always a substitute for coming out; coming home is sometimes seen by

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16 Queering Chinese Kinship

Chinese queers as “inseparable from and indispensable to coming out” (604).

Lucetta Kam (2012) makes similar observations in her ethnographic study of
queer women in Shanghai. Shedding light on how the queer practice of coop-
erative marriage (xinghun 形婚)—where a lesbian woman and a gay man marry
to cope with familial pressure—is shaped by discourses of family harmony,
decency and respectability, and queer agency, Kam suggests a more complex
queer survival strategy in China beyond the simple binary of coming out/
coming home. Also noting the insufficiency of the coming out/coming home
models, S. Huang and Brouwer (2018) propose an alternative model of “coming
with” to understand how Chinese queers “combine the preservation of space for
one’s queer sexuality with tactics that stay with the family either by cultivating
parental harmony or actively interrogating heteronormative family structures”
(107). More recently, J. Wei (2020) proposes the concept of “stretched kinship”
in his discussion of queer mobilities and kinship relations. He observes that
China’s economic development has opened up the possibilities of internal and
international migration, which are used by queer subjects as important strategies
to reconcile their nonconforming sexuality with familial relations and expecta-
tions. He argues that in this imbricated process of home-leaving, homemaking,
and homecoming, Chinese kinship has become “stretched” in multiple senses
of the word (29). For J. Wei, “stretched kinship” refers both to the physical and
emotional separation between queer people and their families of origin, as well
as the elastic, resilient, dynamic, and often-uneasy processes of negotiation that
underpin the transformation of kinship structures and cultures (41).
In her now-classic essay, Judith Butler (2002) famously asks: “Is kinship
always already heterosexual?” By posing this question, she directs attention to
the paradox in gender and sexual nonconforming subjects’ pursuit of legitima-
tion: on the one hand, it is politically crucial to claim intelligibility and recogniz-
ability; on the other, to act and speak in ways that are “recognizably political” is
to “rely on a foreclosure of the very political field that is not subject to political
scrutiny” (19). In other words, the demand to be recognized can lead to new ways
of supporting and extending normative power if it does not “institute a critical
challenge to the very norms of recognition supplied and required by legitima-
tion” (26). The key to understanding and potentially solving this paradox, Butler
argues, is by attending to the foreclosure that delimits the possibilities of politics.
She identifies “hybrid regions of legitimacy and illegitimacy” within the field
of intelligible sexuality, which have “no clear names” and where “nomination
itself falls into a crisis produced by the variable, sometimes violent boundaries
of legitimating practices” (19–20). Butler suggests that these sites of “uncer-
tain ontology” trouble the distinction between legitimacy and illegitimacy and
disrupt the apparent coherence of the available lexicon of legitimation (20). While
Butler’s strategy in the essay is to open up the meanings of kinship by question-
ing its boundaries and distinguishability from community, in this book I direct

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Introduction 17

attention to the field of blood kinship and contest its definition as a foreclosed
site of heterosexual relations. The book shows how, through close engagements
and creative negotiations, Chinese queer subjects bring forth “middle zones and
hybrid formations” (Butler 2002, 19) that challenge the legitimating practices of
blood kinship ideologies as well as the view of blood kinship as always already
heterosexual. The processes of appropriating, approximating, and subvert-
ing available kinship lexicon, which I argue are fundamental to Chinese queer
selfhood and culture, open up a new terrain of power relations where bounda-
ries between illegitimate and legitimate sexual identities and between queer and
straight kinship relations are constantly renegotiated. Whereas this book high-
lights the potentiality of these practices of queering in constituting a critical and
transformative relation to the norms governing the recognizability of kinship,
it also maintains what Butler describes as “a critical relation to the desire for
legitimation” (28) by foregrounding the ambivalences in these practices’ encoun-
ters with normalizing forces such as commercialization and state power. Blood
kinship is thus configured in the book as a complex site of normalization, conten-
tion, and potentiality. It is only by subjecting blood kinship to scrutiny that can
we understand its operation and politics, and the ways in which queerness can
be imagined through it as a basic condition of existence and survival.
Discussing queer kinship among Asian American communities in the United
States, Eng (2010) asks, “Why do we have numerous poststructuralist accounts
of language but few poststructuralist accounts of kinship?” (15). He argues for
the necessity to demarcate alternative material structures and psychic forma-
tion and a new language for family and kinship. Existing scholarship on queer
kinship in China and Chinese-speaking societies have fruitfully teased out the
incommensurabilities as well as creative negotiations that arise from the frictions
between Chinese queers and families of origin, calling for a paradigm shift that
moves away from the liberalist ideal of “chosen families” and toward the fun-
damental instabilities and elasticities of blood kinship itself. This book advances
this corpus of research by adopting a paradigm of “queering Chinese kinship.”
Informed by poststructuralist thinking, the paradigm conceives Chinese blood
kinship as a pivotal site for negotiating queer subjectivities, and aims at desta-
bilizing the epistemological opposition between queerness and blood kinship
through a deconstructive analysis of both concepts. As the extensive debate on
“coming out” and “coming home” has shown, any account of Chinese queer-
ness would be insufficient without a proper investigation into its interactions
with blood kinship. Nevertheless, I do not imagine Chinese blood kinship as
a romanticized sphere that silently tolerates and smoothly incorporates queer-
ness. Instead, I understand “queer” not as a fixed condition of being but as a
dynamic process of becoming. The paradigm of “queering Chinese kinship” is
thus intended to shed light on the productive tensions between queerness and
blood kinship, and to underline the negotiative processes that do not directly

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18 Queering Chinese Kinship

confront but tacitly appropriate and transform kinship roles and ideologies,
thereby rendering kinship into a site for realizing and sustaining queer desires,
intimacies, and connections. In formulating the paradigm as “queering” instead
of “queer,” I hope to highlight two points. First, I stress the ongoingness of the
discursive constructions of “queer” and “kinship” in their interactions instead of
attempting to describe a sedimented state of “queerness within blood kinship”;
in other words, this book situates the two concepts in flux and in cross-fertiliza-
tion. Second, “queering” also registers two levels of actions and engagements.
The first level is Chinese queer subjects’ engagements and negotiations within
kinship, where “queering Chinese kinship” is mobilized as a survival tactic. The
second level is the understanding and theorization of queerness and Chinese
kinship, where “queering Chinese kinship” encompasses a vantage point and
interpretive strategy. The paradigm of “queering Chinese kinship,” in this sense,
both provides an analytical perspective in theorizing Chinese queer experiences
and sets in dialogue Chinese and Euro-American queer discourses for a multi-
plicity of reference points in queer knowledge production. By highlighting the
ways in which local cultural specificities fundamentally shape queer strategies
and practices, queering Chinese kinship accentuates the necessity of expand-
ing and complicating existing Euro-American scripts for queerness and queer
kinship.

Chinese Kinship in Flux

Recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes of family relations and struc-
tures in China. While traditional senses of family obligation and filial piety
continue to be important ideologies that animate family and individual lives,
they are nevertheless strongly influenced by social, economic, and political
transformations. Thus Chinese kinship is far from a coherent and fixed site; it is
a site of changes, negotiations, and contentions. In traditional Chinese philoso-
phy, the family stands at the center of social ordering and state control. As Shek
(2006) remarks, Chinese families are critically shaped by traditional Chinese
cultural values closely related to Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist thoughts (276).
Specifically, he identifies three key features intrinsic to traditional understand-
ings of the family. First and foremost, a strong emphasis is placed on filial piety
(xiao 孝), reflecting the popular Confucian saying that “filial piety ranks the top
in all virtues.” The concept of filial piety further encompasses two core responsi-
bilities: children’s care and support for their aging parents and fulfilment of the
patrilineal expectation that the son bring honor to the family and continue the
family name (276). The second feature of this traditional understanding of the
family is that, per traditional Chinese family values, children are socialized to
obey their parents unconditionally. Derived from a rigid age hierarchy, parents
assume an overriding role in the family while children have little personal space

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Introduction 19

(277). The third feature is that in traditional Chinese culture, gender differentia-
tion is great, and children are thus socialized to fit into fixed, patriarchal gender
roles. The traditional Chinese family believes in a gendered division of “men
taking care of things outside the family, whereas women take care of things
inside” (nan zhu wai, nu zhu nei 男主外, 女主內), which characterizes husbands as
masters of the family and wives as subordinates (277).
While many aspects of these traditional Chinese family ideologies are still
alive today, Chinese concepts of family and kinship are constantly reshaped
by changing socio-cultural landscapes; kinship practices are at once heavily
influenced by conventional values and deeply rooted in particular social,
economic, and political conditions. In his discussions of traditional Chinese
family dynamics, Sangren (2013) proposes to understand the Chinese family as
“instituted fantasy.” Chinese family life, he argues, is animated by “ultimately
unrealizable . . . patrilineal and familial fantasies” that serve as “an important
constituent of Chinese realities” (279). Understood in this way, the Chinese
family is a locus where traditional values and ideologies are reproduced not in
closed cycles, but against new backdrops and social conditions that bring trans-
formations to kinship arrangements and relations.
The changes of family and kinship in the recent history of the PRC can be
divided broadly into two stages. The first stage is the Maoist era from the PRC’s
establishment in 1949 until the implementation of economic reforms in the late
1970s. This period of drastic changes was marked by the recast of Confucian
ideals as the “Four Olds” (sijiu 四舊)—old ideas, old habits, old customs, and old
culture—and “attacked, destroyed, and replaced by communist ideology,” which
sought to establish an egalitarian social order (Guthrie 2006, 77). Traditional
familial bonds were broken and ancestor worship and lineage organization, the
“cultural and religious core” of the extended family, were directly targeted (77).
In order to subjugate individuals and their families to the greater goal of running
a communist country, the state reinforced a series of radical strategies, including
collectivization of the economy, elimination of private property, and the intro-
duction of the work-unit system in urban areas and communes in rural areas
(77–78). These top-down efforts “encroach[ed] upon all aspects of individuals’
lives to a much greater extent than ever before” (77). As a result, the material
basis for the clan-based system was destroyed and family royalty dissolved.
“The fates of individuals and their families were [instead] tightly tied to the state
through party membership and party loyalty” (78). Moreover, the party-state
elevated women—at least in theory—to a position equal to men. Women were
granted work opportunities, equal status in marriages, and the legal right to file
for a divorce with the introduction of the 1950 Marriage Law. Consequently, most
of the rituals and ceremonies centered on marriage transfers, lavish dowries, and
wedding feasts fell out of practice.

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20 Queering Chinese Kinship

The second stage of revolutionary change in the Chinese family happened

during the reform era, which started in the late 1970s and continues to the
present day. This era marks the self-transformation of the CCP, which attempted
to maintain its political legitimacy through reforms of China’s economic and
political systems (Guthrie 2006, 90). It began with Deng Xiaoping’s replacement
of the Maoist dictum of “politics in command” with “economics in command,”
which essentially reversed Mao’s creation of a “revolutionary government” (90).
These reforms brought forth fundamental changes in the lives of individuals in
two important ways, via demographics and economics.
State-led decollectivization efforts and the party-state’s retreat from the center
stage of family and personal life diminished ideological and social control in
the family (Guthrie 2006, 107). Younger generations depended less on the
state redistributive system, and an increasing number of young people found
work in the private and foreign sector. Economic liberalization also led to a
higher degree of mobility for both urban and rural populations (79–80). In the
meantime, however, the state took a different form of control over the family,
including austere measures like the enforcement of the one-child policy—which
started in 1979 and began to be formally phased out in 2015—and the institu-
tion of more subtle policies such as tax penalties for those failing to conform to
birth control requirements (107). State intervention on family structure produced
an entire generation of “only children.” As Deutsch (2006) observes, the one-
child policy effectuated a child-centered approach for Chinese parents, which
further fostered closer emotional ties between parents and children (382). In
his 2006 study, Deutsch found that only children expressed a “remarkable level
of filial piety,” with articulated intentions to help their parents, live near them,
and provide them with grandchildren (382). Meanwhile, the one-child policy
also appears to be promoting gender equality, with parents of only daughters
supporting and encouraging their academic achievement and development of
liberal gender ideas, a trend that potentially undermines gendered norms associ-
ated with Chinese patrilineality (366).
The second major change to the lives of everyday Chinese was the transi-
tion to free-market economies, which has given rise to the formation of what
Yunxiang Yan (2003) calls “the transformation of private life in a dual sense: the
rise of the private family and of the lives of the individuals within the family”
(219). Emerging by the end of the 1990s, the private family is characterized by
“the relatively weak influence of public forces, the greater control of the indi-
viduals over the observability of their behavior by others, the centrality of com-
panionate marriage and conjugal relationships, and an emphasis on personal
well-being and affective ties” (219). Underlying the rise of the private family is
a trend of individualism that has been shaped by both local forces of marketiza-
tion and influences from Western thoughts and ideas (Shek 2006, 278). In this
new family power structure, parental power, authority, and prestige begin to

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Introduction 21

decline, while youth autonomy and independence are on the rise (Yan 2003, 218).
Consequently, individual concerns such as emotionality, desires, and personal
freedom have become “not only legitimate aspirations but also part of everyday
practice” (218). Nevertheless, this does not mean that traditional family ideolo-
gies have become irrelevant. As has been suggested earlier, filial piety continues
to play a significant role in this new child-centered, individual-oriented form of
family life. Fuligni and Zhang (2004) also find that while individualistic desires
are incorporated into the family, both urban and rural adolescents “continued to
report a strong sense of obligation to support, assist, and respect the authority of
their families” (188).
This symbiosis of an increased latitude to pursue personal goals and desires
and the persistence, if not intensification, of Confucian family values has become
more prominent in recent years after Xi Jinping took office in 2012. On the one
hand, China’s economic development has given rise to greater intranational and
transnational mobilities, which produce new forms of kinship arrangements and
new spaces for negotiating personal aspirations with familial duties. J. Wei’s
(2020) discussion of “stretched kinship” is a good example of how physical
distances created by domestic and international migration are at the center of
fundamentally new ways of envisioning personal life trajectories in relation to
the biological family. The ubiquity of mobilities, as he shows, has fundamentally
reshaped people’s understandings and practices of kinship (54). Kam (2020) also
observes that the emergence of transnational mobility as a normative aspira-
tion among young elites has enabled new ways of living and being for middle
class queer women. While the increasingly globalized forms of Chinese kinship
facilitate the expression of nonnormative genders and sexualities, as the party-
state turns to a modernized and re-packaged Confucianism as the source of its
political authority, personal and intimate lives are also expected to conform to
state-defined familialism. Fincher (2014) notes how state propaganda campaigns
push educated, independent women—derogatively named “leftover women”—
to return to the domestic sphere. This rejuvenated Confucian patriarchal tradi-
tion aligned with neoliberalism has created more hurdles for women (see Ji et
al. 2017) and sexual minorities (see Song 2020) as they try to balance personal
aspirations with kinship values.
As I hope my very brief introduction of the changes of kinship structures and
values in the PRC shows, as a culture of relatedness Chinese kinship has no fixed
essence. Instead, it is continually shaped and reshaped by material, cultural, and
political forces. As Chao (2020) argues in the context of Taiwan, the notion of “fil-
iality,” which is fundamental to Chinese familialism, is a “discursive formation”
that has been “differently maneuvered by different regimes at different historical
moments” (39). Likewise, writing on Hong Kong, Kong (2010) points out that
family and kinship function not only as an institution for state power to disci-
pline subjects, but also as a site for homosexual subjects to engage in processes of

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22 Queering Chinese Kinship

self-making (118). These complexities and intricacies make Chinese family and
kinship a particularly important site for scholarly attention. It is an intersection
where global trends of individualist and neoliberalist aspirations meet local tra-
ditions of familial unity and obedience, where personal desires are negotiated
with family duties, and where new gender and sexual identities are imagined.
In this book, I focus on Chinese blood kinship as a key axis in envisioning queer
selfhood and cultures in postsocialist China. The interactions between queerness
and kinship are not only are central to Chinese queer politics, but also constitute
a crucial dimension in contemporary Chinese public culture.

Queer Public Culture under Censorship

This book’s vision of a queer public culture in contemporary China is based

on a universalizing approach that conceives queerness as a locus of contesta-
tory cultural encounter and debate. At first glance, the insistence on a vibrant
queer public culture may seem overly optimistic, if not naïve. After all, as an
authoritarian state, the PRC has been notorious for constraining civic and politi-
cal activities, suppressing discursive rights, and censoring media and cultural
contents deemed detrimental to the state, which include queer representations.
Nevertheless, as China studies scholars have convincingly demonstrated, there
has never been a lack of contentious politics, collective actions, and alternative
cultural production in the PRC (see Lei 2019; Shih-Diing Liu 2019). Although
the space for these public contentions remains characteristically ephemeral and
fragmented (Rauchfleisch and Schäfer 2014; Shao and Wang 2017), contestatory
practices playfully, creatively, and resiliently engage with censorship to open up
possibilities for survival and development. Indeed, studies on queer China have
already taken notice of what Bao (2020b) observes as “the fast-developing and
vibrant scenes of queer cultural production” (24) in arenas such as activism (Bao
2020b), erotic self-representation (Ding 2020), and digital media (Yingyi Wang
2019). This book advances the discussion by delineating a picture of Chinese
queer public culture permeated by engagements with blood kinship relations
and ideologies, in which censorship functions as a condition of survival that
often intersects with other non-state forces such as cultural traditions, transna-
tional cultural encounters, and workings of capital.
I focus in this book specifically on queer public culture in post-2008 China.
The year 2008 marks an important turning point in the contemporary PRC: in
September of that year, the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers
triggered a global financial crisis, dealing a huge blow to America-led globali-
zation and bubble capitalism. Having escaped this crisis relatively unscathed,
China underwent extensive economic restructuring. On the domestic front, to
cope with the shrinking export markets caused by the recession of the Global
North, the Chinese state committed to boosting aggregate demand, deploying

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Introduction 23

massive economic stimuli to encourage domestic consumption and investment

(Jun Zhang 2019). These measures helped the country to successfully maintain
a decade of high growth and eventually become the world’s biggest exporter
and second-largest economy. On the international stage, the PRC has partici-
pated more actively and assertively in the globalization process, recognizing
that China’s growth has a measurable impact on a worldwide economy that
continues to grow. In retrospect, this is perhaps best encapsulated by the 2008
Beijing Olympics, “a milestone in the engagement of Chinese society with inter-
national society and with wider processes of globalization” (Giulianotti 2015,
295). These changes have had profound implications for media and cultural
production. Since 2008, the domestic media sector and cultural industries experi-
enced rapid expansion, decentralization, and commercialization, especially with
the involvement of private capital (L. Li 2019). The state-led project of modern-
izing China’s network infrastructure has also fundamentally transformed the
country’s communication systems, entertainment industries, and digital media
(Hong 2017). Moreover, China’s popular culture blossomed in the dense traffic
of transnational cultural encounter. Post-2008 China, in short, affords a myriad
of new ways for self-expression and public engagement in an increasingly
global age.
However, economic and partial cultural liberalization in China has developed
in tandem with the state’s censorship efforts. Chinese censorship is a sophis-
ticated, continuously evolving apparatus that adapts to changing social and
cultural practices. Instead of a blanket censorship over all voices that differ from
state propaganda, Chinese authorities employ a more subtle tactic that estab-
lishes varying standards according to the nature of the content and its potential
to cultivate collective action (V. Ma 2016). Rofel’s (2007) distinction of “benign
interests” versus “dangerous passions” (118) is helpful for broadly understand-
ing how Chinese censorship works. As she suggests, nonpolitical desires asso-
ciated with possessive individualism or acquisitive consumption are usually
accepted if not encouraged, whereas explicitly political aspirations are conceived
as something to be avoided. Within this dyad, what counts or passes as “nonpo-
litical” is further contingent upon the specific socio-cultural contexts from which
the cultural product emerges, including state cultural policies and the prod-
uct’s medium or art form. Generally speaking, traditional media forms with a
wider audience reach, such as television and popular cinema, are under heavier
scrutiny; other channels of public representation, especially those enabled by
new technologies, offer more space for negotiating with or circumventing cen-
sorship. The case studies presented in this book show how censorship does not
spell the end for queer visibility in China; instead, it prompts experiments with
new art forms, media technologies, and modes of representation. By looking
at queer representations in both old and new media and art forms, the book
outlines a thriving queer public culture under censorship.

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24 Queering Chinese Kinship

Notes on Methodology

This book is a cultural studies project structured by an interest in the interplay

between lived experience, texts, and the social context. Informed by a poststruc-
turalist and particularly Foucauldian perspective, I set out to uncover the power
relations underlying cultural texts in order to tease out their queer potentiali-
ties. A core interpretative methodology I employ is textual analysis, defined as
a qualitative analysis method that involves a “prolonged engagement” of the
chosen text (Hall 1975, 15). Although textual analysis has a well-established tra-
dition in queer literary and cultural studies and is favored by many for its ability
to unveil otherwise-neglected or -distorted truths and subtleties about sexuality
(Halberstam 1998), it is also criticized for obscuring the social and the empirical.
As Green (2002) pointedly remarks, queer textualism “constructs an undersocial-
ized ‘queer’ subject with little connection to the empirical world and the sociohis-
torical forces that shape sexual practice and identity” (522). Likewise, Edwards
(1998) also laments that text-focused analyses often fail to examine power as an
institutionally coercive, politically sanctioned, and socially practiced series of
oppressions (477). In this book, I seek to overcome these weaknesses by situating
cultural texts in what du Gay et al. (1997) term the “circuit of culture,” a process
that includes representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation
(3). I achieve this by conceptualizing texts as inseparable from their conditions of
production, as sites of negotiation, and as performative.
I consider cultural texts as integral to their circumstances of production,
including institutional constraints, economic resources, and professional strate-
gies (see Fürsich 2009, 242). As Martin (2003) points out, “cultural production is
at once indicative and reproductive of the social relations of power that sustain
dominant formations of knowledge on sexuality” (39). To better explain the
scope of the cultural texts and to situate them in particular historical contingen-
cies, I supplement close textual reading with contextual information. Drawing on
government documents, market reports, news coverage, and scholarly articles, I
provide a nuanced picture of how cultural representations are shaped by regula-
tion and other conditions of production before providing close readings of the
texts per se. I also see cultural texts as sites of negotiation; I believe that texts
provide a “cultural forum” (Newcomb and Hirsch 1983) where societal debates
play out. In this sense, I agree with Fürsich (2009) in conceiving of text as a
“possibility.” The point of textual analysis is not to arrive at the most accurate
interpretation of what the text means, but to start an “argumentative activity”
through which one can provide a way of seeing that enriches the knowledge of a
text (244). This sense of openness is crucial to a queer project. It paves the way for
what Sedgwick (2003) calls “reparative reading” (128), a strategy that uncovers
queer potentialities by focusing “not on the exposure of political outrages
that we already know about but rather on the processes of reconstructing a

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Introduction 25

sustainable life in their wake” (Hanson 2011, 105). Finally, I believe that texts are
performative: they actively produce connections and meanings that form part
and parcel of Chinese queer public culture. Therefore, my analysis engages with
the circulation and consumption of cultural texts by probing into the various
aspects of what texts do, such as connecting bodies through affective experiences,
engendering participatory spaces and politics, challenging cultural imaginar-
ies, and negotiating conventional values. By doing so, I theorize cultural texts
as elements in social practices that not only reflect, but also reshape social rela-
tions. In short, this book evokes a more capacious understanding of textual
analysis as a methodology through “a combination of meticulous reading and
contextualized interpretation” (Fürsich 2009, 248). By connecting cultural texts
with the systemic features of their production and the generative potentials of
their circulation and consumption, this book explores how cultural representa-
tions produce and negotiate meanings in specific historical and socio-cultural
contexts, and how these processes of meaning-making contribute to a unique
and vibrant queer public culture in China.
As far as data collection is concerned, I follow queer scholars such as
Halberstam (1998) and Bao (2018) in employing a “scavenger methodology,”
defined as “us[ing] different methods to collect and produce information on
subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional
studies of human behavior” (Halberstam 1998, 13). This methodology is advan-
tageous to my project as it helps to reconstruct a varied and nuanced picture of
queer public culture that would otherwise be hidden or erased. When select-
ing materials, I consciously defy academic disciplinary boundaries as well as
the dichotomies of straight/nonstraight and normal/deviant to draw on a wide
array of sources from cinema, popular culture, and digital media. I organize
these materials around five case studies, each representing an art form that
opens up a space for queer representation, negotiation, and meaning-making.
I have chosen these five art forms because they capture the diversity and crea-
tivity of queer cultural production. Moreover, by moving from more conven-
tional media genres like cinema to emerging ones such as online video, I hope to
convey a sense of continuity and development of Chinese queer public culture
by showing how new technologies enable new modes of queer representation.
This said, I do not seek to offer an exhaustive picture of queer public culture in
China, nor do I argue for the omnipresence of queerness in China. Rather, this
book will demonstrate that, despite its resilience, queer representations remain
contingent upon very specific social, cultural, and political conditions that at
once enable and delimit them.
The book has its limitations. First, it focuses on publicly accessible cinematic
and popular cultural products that explicitly portray queer issues vis-à-vis blood
kinship relations. Consequently, it leaves out other forms of queer articulations,
such as queer magazines (see Bao 2020b), social networking applications (see S.

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26 Queering Chinese Kinship

Wang 2020), as well as proliferating cultural texts that feature a queer undertone
(see A. Wong 2020). Second, though the book touches upon other queer issues
such as bisexuality and transgender, the cultural texts it studies are mainly con-
cerned with homosexuality, particularly male homosexuality. This bias is partly
caused by the higher public visibility of gay issues in China, itself a product of a
gendered unequal social structure that I critique in Chapters 5 and 6. The afore-
mentioned queer cultural forms and topics about queer sexualities are impor-
tant sites of critical inquiry, and a nuanced analysis, though beyond the scope
of the current book, may usefully supplement and complicate the picture of the
Chinese queer public culture it delineates.

Structure of the Book

Five case studies form the core of this book. These case study chapters are
conceived relatively independently, and each explores the representations of
queerness and blood kinship relations in one particular media genre. The book
is woven with two overarching concerns. First, it looks at how the interactions
between queerness and blood kinship form part and parcel of contemporary
Chinese public culture, marking out a clear challenge toward the privatization
of sexuality. This theoretical orientation distinguishes the book from the works
on Chinese queer cultures that focus on underground queer articulations. By
investigating how queerness is publicly represented and negotiated, I expand
the analytical framework in theorizing queer cultures by underlining their rel-
evance to public culture at large. Second, the book also adopts a transnational
lens in understanding queer selfhood and cultures. Rather than subscribing to
a model of Western dissemination or insisting on China particularism, it treats
queerness as an open and dynamic concept that gains meaning through move-
ments. These can be movements across various domains of private and public
lives, and also movements across geographical and cyberspaces. Taken together,
the case studies show how queerness is constantly rerouted, reconfigured and
reimagined through its contact with different sociocultural conditions, politics of
subject-making, and media practices.
Taking readers through a range of genres in contemporary Chinese cinematic,
popular, and digital cultures including documentary, arthouse film, musical
theater, and online video entertainment, the five core chapters explore different
manifestations and cultural politics of queering Chinese kinship. Chapter 2 looks
at queering Chinese kinship as an activist agenda by exploring the relationship
between the queer and the public in two recent queer community documentaries
by Popo Fan: Mama Rainbow (2012) and Pink Dads (2016). In its exploration of how
these two films appropriate blood kinship relations and ideologies to promote
queer activism, the chapter observes a querying and queering of the public that
is emblematic of new openings in postsocialist China for queer negotiation and

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Introduction 27

embodiment. It also identifies queering Chinese kinship both as a social practice

and as a starting point to understand Chinese queer media cultures. Further
investigating cinematic cultures, Chapter 3 discusses queering Chinese kinship
as a negotiative strategy in artistic expression by analyzing the queer Sinophone
film Spring Fever (Lou 2009). Situating the film in the transnational film-making
practice of “Sixth Generation” directors, the chapter explicates how queering
Chinese kinship is deployed in Chinese cultural production and circulation as
a strategy that contributes both to hybridizing transnational film aesthetics with
local conditions for queer expression, and to negotiating with state media control
and censorship.
Switching the focus to commercial and popular cultural products, Chapters
4 through 6 discuss the relationship between queering Chinese kinship and
local conditions of illiberal homonormativity. Chapter 4 offers a case study of
an imported and translated Broadway musical, Q Dadao (2013). Examining how
the musical presents an apparently entertaining queer image on the stage while
promoting kinship-based activism off-stage, the chapter identifies paradoxical
cultural politics where queering Chinese kinship can be at once assimilationist
and subversive, as well as enabling and delimiting. Chapter 5 develops this dis-
cussion by probing into the production and consumption of coming-out vlogs on
the video-sharing platform Bilibili. Looking at how queering Chinese kinship can
at once be appropriated as a key dimension in the queer vloggers’ commodify-
ing self-making processes and be used a gateway to a queer utopia, this chapter
explores the ways in which commercialized spaces enable transformative queer
politics through the engagement with blood kinship relations and ideologies.
Chapter 6 remaps queering Chinese kinship by investigating how the emerging
genre of online video engenders intraregional connections and structures of
homonormativity. Focusing on one episode of the phenomenal online talk show
Qipa Shuo (Mou 2015), the chapter observes how common kinship ideologies
serve as the basis for a deterritorialized, regional imaginary of Chineseness
evoked to critically reassess identity politics and coming-out strategies. These
intraregional networks of queer knowledge production and exchange, I caution,
also entail new structures of homonormativity and cultural hegemony.
The landscape of queer cultures in contemporary mainland China is anything
but coherent, clear, and stable. It is saturated by disjunctiveness, complex-
ity, and ongoingness. Instead of presenting a definitive picture of what “queer
Chinese kinship” is like or should be, therefore, this book attempts to capture the
dynamics between queerness and Chinese kinship across various sites of cultural
representations. In doing so, it showcases how converging local, regional, and
transnational flows of discourses produce situated sexual knowledges that
not only engender distinct queer experiences, but also prompt a fundamental
rethinking of existing notions of kinship ideologies, national and cultural imagi-
naries, and conceptualizations of queer identities and politics.

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 Part I: Cinematic Cultures

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2
Going Public: The Familial and the Political
in New Chinese Documentaries

The documentary is “the most produced [and] one of the most widely consumed”
genres in China (Chu 2007, 13), playing a “privileged role in reflecting social
and political aspirations, their transformations and effects,” and constituting “a
unique archive of China’s cultural and political fortunes” (2). Recent decades of
economic and political reforms have created a market-oriented and compara-
tively freer media environment, facilitating the diversification of documentary
subjects (26) Chinese documentaries today are characterized by “polyphonic
heterogeneity” (37) through which “intellectuals . . . test, debate and communi-
cate their new theories and perspectives” and “marginal views are . . . circulated
through independent, semi-independent or community driven documentary
filmmaking” (13).
Under these circumstances, queer filmmaking has prospered in China in the
last two decades and has become an important form of activism (Bao 2015, 47).
Queer documentary films are circulated in queer film festivals in major cities
(e.g., Beijing Queer Film Festival), as well as numerous screening events such
as “Travelling Queer Independent Film Festivals” and “China Queer Festival
Tours” (Bao 2015). Cyberspace has also become a home for the vibrant produc-
tion of digital queer documentaries. The digital activist website Queer Comrades,
for example, hosts a webcast channel that produces six to eight new documen-
taries on queer issues every year. The proliferation and popularization of queer
documentaries highlight what Yingjin Li (2012) observes as an alternative space
to “distribut[e] information and meanings that would otherwise be censored or
suppressed” (543).
This chapter looks at how queer documentaries reconfigure and reconceptu-
alize blood kinship relations and values through a process of embodied mean-
ing-making. By examining two documentaries by queer auteur and activist Fan
Popo—Mama Rainbow (Cai Hong Ban Wo Xin 彩虹伴我心, 2012) and Pink Dads
(Cai Hong Lao Ba 彩虹老爸, 2016)—this chapter posits that an intimate engage-
ment with and a queering of Chinese kinship constitute a key dimension in

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32 Queering Chinese Kinship

articulating queer selfhood and queer politics in contemporary China by sug-

gesting that the biological family functions to connect private identification and
desire to public politics and culture. Queering Chinese kinship is thus at once
an important social practice and a basis for queer activism and media represen-
tations. By configuring the familial as the political, Chinese queer subjects and
media practitioners contest heteronormativity and reimagine a public culture
with queer characteristics.

Queer Community Documentaries in China

From the late 1980s until now, an extended and heterogeneous collection of
documentary works has emerged in mainland China. Collectively termed the
“New Chinese Documentary Movement” by Chinese film scholar Lu Xinyu
(2010), these documentaries address a wide range of subject matters and exhibit
different personal styles and film techniques. They are grouped together by
virtue of their “rebellion against the old, rigid aspects of Maoist utopianism and
established political ideologies in China,” and their challenge “to the hegemonic
notion of ‘reality’ and how it should be represented in the film” (15).
The New Documentary Movement’s social critique is mostly derived from the
postsocialist conditions that characterize contemporary Chinese society (Berry
2007, 116; Robinson 2013, 33). Sheldon Lu (2001) posits that postsocialism is a
defining feature of the 1990s and twenty-first-century China, which is marked
by “the incongruent coexistence of an (emergent) materialism and a (fading)
revolutionary ethos”—“a postmodernity with ‘Chinese characteristics” (154). As
a periodizing concept, a socioeconomic condition, and a cultural logic, postso-
cialism registers the perception and affects of everyday life in which “ordinary
citizens struggle to make a transition from the guarantees and rigidity of socialist
welfare to the fluctuations and freedom of a mass consumer society” (208–9). In
other words, postsocialist China is “a place for the emergence of a new life-world
and the creation of as yet unseen socioeconomic practices that have learned
lessons from the catastrophes of [the socialist past]” (209). Berry (2007) further
points out that postsocialist conditions have contributed to the distinct feature
of contemporary Chinese cinema, which he defines as “operat[ing] under the
imperative to ‘get real’,” which indicates a drive toward the representation of
the “real” and refers to the slang phrase “get real,” meaning “wise up” or “stop
dreaming” (115–16).
This deep concern with a new realism is reflected in the logic of xianchang
現場, a fundamental aesthetic of the movement. Defined by Wenguang Wu
as “a film practice ‘in the present and on the spot’” (quoted in Robinson 2010,
180), xianchang indexes two perspectives of meanings. The first is the material
dimension of the location or “the scene,” since filmmaking has “a temporal and
spatial dimension that is bound to embodied presence” (Robinson 2013, 29). The

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Going Public 33

second is the space of the screen: this dimension of xianchang necessitates a set
of documentary aesthetics that shapes “a particular social and epistemic space
in which orality, performativity, and an irreducible specificity of personal and
social experience are acknowledged, recorded, and given aesthetic expression”
(Wenguang Wu, quoted in Robinson 2013, 29). In other words, it determines the
implementation of verité style with handheld camerawork, long takes, tracking
shots, and dependence on natural sound and lighting, techniques that are
believed to capture the experience of shooting “on the scene.” In the meantime,
xianchang also champions a sense of spontaneity that reflects a desire “to
describe a changing reality, and to reflect on the evolving relationship between
the director, his or her environment, and the human subjects of the filmmaking
process” (Robinson 2013, 29).
The xianchang aesthetic foregrounds an embodied experience in both film-
making and representing the filmed subject. As Robinson (2013) points out, its
manifestation of a “corporeal image” affords “a potential point of entry into
the world of the documentary subject portrayed on the screen,” through which
“the viewer may actually feel what it is like to be that individual in real life”
(106, emphasis in original). This mode of film production and circulation has
given rise to the proliferation of “queer community documentaries” (Bao 2019)
in China since the 2000s, distinguished by their focus on socially disadvantaged,
marginalized, and disenfranchised queer subjects and the auteurs’ embodied
engagements with their subjects throughout the production process. Examples
include Dyke March (Nütongzhi Youxingri 女同志遊行日, dir. Shi Tou 2004), Queer
China, Comrade China (Zhi Tongzhi 誌同志, dir. Cui Zi’en 2008), New Beijing, New
Marriage (Xin Qianmen Dajie 新前門大街, dir. Fan Popo and David Cheng 2009),
Mama Rainbow (dir. Fan Popo 2012), and Pink Dads (dir. Fan Popo 2016). As Q.
Wang (2013) suggests, these documentaries construct “fluid and dialogic” (665)
representations that “blur boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, imagina-
tion and reality, opinion and document, queer and straight, self and other” (674).
J. Tan (2016) also highlights the potential of queer community documentaries in
engendering “aesthetics of queer becoming” by pointing out how “the bodily
corporality on screen” and “the intimacy of the video apparatus” operate as an
interrogation and rethinking of queer subjectivity (38).
I argue that the xianchang aesthetics and embodied filmmaking practices
open up new possibilities for rethinking the relationship between queerness and
blood kinship in China. At the heart of this process is a political engagement
with kinship as a contentious site of meaning-making. By rendering the familial
political, queer community documentaries produce vibrant and distinctly public
discussions of queer identity and subjectivity. Next, I discuss the idea of “public”
as a useful framework through which to examine queer community documen-
taries. I then offer a close reading of the two films by Fan Popo to tease out their
affective politics and their reimagination of Chinese kinship.

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34 Queering Chinese Kinship

Going Public

The idea of “public” is pivotal to understanding the production and circulation

of new Chinese documentaries in general and queer community documentaries
in particular. “Public” as a critical concept has been discussed extensively across
a range of academic disciplines. While efforts of theorization abound, recent
scholarship mainly draws on two significant definitions: the notion of “the public
sphere,” conceived by Jürgen Habermas, and Appadurai and Breckenridge’s idea
(1988) of “public culture.” Habermas ([1962] 1991) traces the development of a
bourgeois public sphere in the nineteenth century as a space in which “private
people” came together “as a public” to use their own reason to discuss public
concerns (176). Facilitated by institutions such as newspapers, debating societies,
salons, and coffee houses, the bourgeois public sphere generates opinions and
attitudes that serve to affirm or challenge the affairs of state. Habermas’s theori-
zation of the public sphere adopts an ideal liberal model of unrestricted, rational,
and open discussion. Such a model, as Nancy Fraser (1990) critiques, “rests on
a class- and gender-biased notion of publicity, one which accepts at face value
the bourgeois public’s claim to be the public” (61, emphasis in original). Fraser
calls attention to the existence of “multiple but unequal publics” in a society (70).
The dominant, official public, she argues, should be understood as “the prime
institutional site for the construction of the consent that defines the new, hegem-
onic mode of domination” (62), while alternative publics, or “subaltern coun-
terpublics” in Fraser’s phrasing, are “parallel discursive arenas where members
of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in
turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities,
interests, and needs” (67).
Central to the formation of counterpublics is the tension arising from the
public/private divide. As Fraser points out, the divide has “historically been
used to restrict the universe of legitimate public contestation” (1990, 73). Berlant
and Warner (1998) further develop this point by focusing on the mediation of
sex and sexuality; they posit that heteronormative conventions imagine a privat-
ized intimate life that is endlessly cited as the “elsewhere of political public dis-
course,” making “sex in public” appear like a matter out of place (553, emphasis
in original). As a result, nonnormative public sexual cultures are demonized
or erased. Under these circumstances, queer culture “constitutes itself in many
ways other than through the official publics of opinion culture and the state, or
through the privatized forms normally associated with sexuality” (558), and by
“learn[ing] not only how to sexualize these and other relations, but also to use
them as a context for witnessing intense and personal affect while elaborating a
public world of belonging and transformation,” queers form a powerful counter-
public sexual culture (558).
Revolving around the tension of the public/private divide, “counterpub-
lic” emphasizes the multiplicity of publics and the transformative potential

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Going Public 35

of discourses generated by conventionally subordinate and neglected social

groups. Such a conceptualization bears clear similarities with Appadurai and
Breckenridge’s (1988) idea of “public culture,” defined as a rubric term mapping
a zone of cultural debate where various types, forms, and domains of culture are
“encountering, interrogating and contesting each other in new and unexpected
ways” (6). The shared focus on new encounters and contestations bridges the
two concepts: if “public culture” is understood as a “contested terrain” charac-
terized by a variety of culture producers, materials, and methods (7), then the
discourses and practices that both give rise to and are circulated by counterpub-
lics should also be considered as indispensable components of public culture, the
boundaries of which are constantly interrogated, transgressed, and expanded.
This understanding of public culture as a domain of unequal power relations
and contestations affords a critical lens through which to understand queerness
beyond the tired public/private binary. In her discussion of queerness in Taiwan,
Martin (2000) argues that the reconfiguration of the categories of “public” and
“private” in the implementation of a liberal rhetoric in Taipei City gave rise to
tongzhi counterpublics through sexual dissidents’ occupancy of public spaces,
which provided alternatives to the exclusionary official spaces of the city and
state (89–91). Similarly, J. Kim (2007) suggests in contemporary Korean contexts
that spectatorship in queer film festivals harbors the potential of harnessing a
queer counterpublic by creating a space of radical politics that challenges existing
heteronormative sexual discourses and dominant understandings of queerness
(630). Furthermore, “public” occupies a key place in Chinese queer experiences.
In his discussions of queerness in mainland China, W. Wei (2012) proposes
“going public” or gongkai 公開 as a term to describe and understand local gay
identities: since gong means “public” and kai means “open,” gongkai, therefore,
means “open to public” or “going public” (16–17). Contrasting the term with the
liberationist rhetoric of “coming out,” which highlights the action of publicly
declaring one’s sexual identity, W. Wei stresses the multidimensional nature of
going public in the Chinese context. First of all, it describes the assertion of a gay
identity in public spaces. Such an assertion does not necessarily entail “a verbal
statement or public confrontation,” but includes and emphasizes the actions of
“participating in public gay scenes, developing gay social networks, and com-
mitting to a gay lifestyle” (17).
Through an ethnographic investigation into the gay community in the south-
western city of Chengdu, W. Wei (2012) suggests that the relatively tolerant
urban culture has facilitated a visible gay presence in public. Gay life, in other
words, instead of hiding underground, “is integrated into the everyday life of
the city” (17). This point regarding the public assertion of gay identity is further
reflected in the second dimension of “going public”—the embodiment of gay
men’s claims for public spaces. The emergence of gay public spaces in “a vibrant
and colorful urban life,” W. Wei argues, relocates privatized sexuality from

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36 Queering Chinese Kinship

domestic and marital institutions to “the public domain of the market economy,”
thereby “critically question[ing] the rigid distinction between the public and the
private” (18). Furthermore, the popularization of the internet has provided an
online public space that has significantly boosted a sense of community. Finally,
W. Wei remarks, “the ‘going public’ of homosexuality contributes to the con-
struction of a public sphere” by way of initiating community-based movements
that open public discussion of queer-related issues (19–20).
The concept of “going public” sheds light on the new channels for express-
ing previously privatized and demonized sexualities and provides a useful ana-
lytical framework for examining Chinese queer community documentaries. As
Robinson (2014) suggests, Chinese queer community documentaries are closely
connected to ideas of publicness “as representational visibility, as performance
in material space, and as an affective invocation of a shared viewing experi-
ence” (69). These documentaries aim to pose the issue of queerness for public
discussion through strategic appropriation of public spaces to enact queerness
as a publicly performed identity. By doing so, they challenge dominant heter-
onormative discourses that seek to demonize queerness and drive it out of the
public sight. Furthermore, the emergence of these documentaries alongside an
increasingly accessible internet allows them to engage with mobile forms of
production and circulation to reach a large online-based queer community and
gain exposure to a wider public audience, which together form a powerful queer
counterpublic.

Queer Activism through Audiovisual Production

A typical example in the recent proliferation of queer documentaries in China

is the online webcast “Queer Comrade.” Established in 2007 as a project of the
not-for-profit organization Beijing Gender Health Education Institute, the Queer
Comrades website now hosts a variety of videos, including self-produced talk
shows, short clips of queer-focused news, speeches, and discussions, as well as
around 30 independent documentaries on Chinese queerness. What is notewor-
thy about Queer Comrades is its efforts in promoting personalized documen-
tary-making through a training program called “The Queer University Video
Capacity-Building Training” (a.k.a. “the Queer University”) (see J. Tan 2016, 50).
This practice-oriented program recruits and trains students annually to equip
them with knowledge in documentary filmmaking, editing, production, and
distribution. First started in 2012, the Queer University has trained more than 60
students and produced over 20 films, including highly personalized documenta-
ries such as Comrade Yue (Xiao Yue Tongzhi 小岳同志, dir. Yue Jianbo, 2012), Magic
(Nü Yao’er 女妖兒, dir. Michael Liu 2012), Brothers (Xiongdi 兄弟, dir. Yao Yao 2013),
and Single Men (Shuang Sheng 雙生, dir. Alexia Wong 2016). These documentaries
are screened offline and circulated online via video streaming websites and social

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Going Public 37

networks. J. Tan (2016) argues that this new mode of digital production evokes
a documentary-based social activism, which showcases the fact that video has
become “a vital medium” in China “to work through and within the process of
identification and community formation” (50, emphasis in original). Bao (2020a,
2020c) also points out that platforms such as Queer Comrades make strategic
use of digital media to contribute to queer community-building and to refusals
of stereotypical and negative representations by mainstream media. Moreover,
digital video camera-enabled documentary production and the combined modes
of offline and online distribution demonstrate how mobile technologies enable
queers to claim and appropriate public spaces to form a queer counterpublic. In
his analysis of documentary viewership, Nakajima (2010) points out that viewing
independent documentaries forms “an important social critique” (134) in two
senses. The first is that the action of viewing itself enables a counter-discourse in
its exploration of “slices of social reality that the dominant authority such as the
party-state is reluctant to acknowledge” (131). In addition, the public discussion
of the films signifies an emergence of counter-discourse, one centered on these
independent documentary films (132). From this perspective, queer community
documentaries create a counterpublic that contests the rigid conceptualization
and regulation of the public/private divide by highlighting the queerness as an
important topic in public discussion.
Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads are both directed by Fan Popo, and coproduced
by Queer Comrades and the local nongovernmental organization Parents,
Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays China (PFLAG China). Founded
in 2008 in Guangzhou with the mission of “improving the living conditions of
LGBTQ people with joint efforts of families and friends,” PFLAG China has
grown into a national organization, reaching over 40 cities in China with more
than 500 volunteers (PFLAG China 2015). It hosts a range of events from small
workshops and sharing sessions to regional and national conferences, which
brings together LGBTQ people and their families and friends to cultivate mutual
understanding. PFLAG China is now one of the most influential LGBTQ-focused
organizations in mainland China (Bie and Tang 2016, 365). One major reason for
its success lies in the fact that it “call[s] upon family bonds” and “draw[s] upon
people’s shared family values” for mobilization (quoted in Moreno-Tabarez et
al. 2014, 126); W. Wei (2015) points out that a prominent feature distinguishing
PFLAG China from other PFLAG organizations around the world is that its
backbone consists mainly of supportive parents of queer children (46).
Focusing on these parents as documentary subjects, Mama Rainbow and Pink
Dads are audiovisual extensions of PFLAG China’s social activism. The earlier
documentary, Mama Rainbow (2012), revolves around the story of six mother-son
and mother-daughter pairs. In its focus on the conflicts, negotiations, and accept-
ance of homosexuality in these mother-children relationships, the documentary
delineates an emotionally charged and optimistic picture of interactions between

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38 Queering Chinese Kinship

queerness and Chinese kinship in a contemporary setting, with an emphasis on

the role of PFLAG China and its vision of social activism. Sharing strong simi-
larities with Mama Rainbow, Pink Dads (2016) is a sequel that spotlights father-
children relationships. Structured around the narratives of six fathers facing their
sons’ and daughters’ coming out, Pink Dads juxtaposes in-depth interviews with
clips of the fathers’ engagements in PFLAG activities, through which it inter-
rogates conventional values attached to fatherhood and conveys a reconfigured
conception of kinship. Both documentaries have been widely circulated in their
full-length, 80-minute forms in venues such as the Beijing Independent Film
Festival, Hong Kong LGBTQ Film Festival, and ShanghaiPRIDE, in addition to
small-scale screenings sponsored by queer-focused NGOs across Chinese cities.
Additionally, shorter 20-minute versions are available through major Chinese
online video websites. Through their circulation in both physical subcultural
venues and cyberspace, these documentaries establish the relationship between
queerness and Chinese kinship as a significant topic for public discussion. These
documentaries are intriguing, and not only because of their selection of subject
matter; how they present queer issues centered on the idea of “public” and
Chinese kinship values is significant.
In the following, I delve into the affective dimensions of storytelling in these
two documentaries and explicate how the films evoke relatable viewing experi-
ences as the basis for interrogating and challenging dominant understandings of
queerness and Chinese kinship. Due to access restrictions, my analysis is based
on the full-length, 80-minute version of Mama Rainbow, which is available on
DVD, and the 20-minute online version of Pink Dads. The full-length version of
Pink Dads is limited to offline screenings at the time of this writing.

The Familial Is Political

Two aspects that characterize Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads’ representations of
queerness and Chinese kinship, and the politics they engender, are examined
here. The first is the affective dimensions in their storytelling. Portraying
stories based on the lived experiences of Chinese queers and their parents, the
documentaries appropriate the rhetoric of “love” that saturates Chinese kinship
narratives to construct an affective experience moving from conflict to recon-
ciliation and from discomfort to comfort. I argue that this affective mode of
storytelling not only contributes to negotiating and proximating heteronorma-
tive ideals of familial relations in the documentaries’ representations, but also
provides a point of entry for viewers into a relatable kinship-based experience,
thus generating queer affective publics that contest dominant scripts of kinship
ideology. The second is the implementation of xianchang aesthetics, epitomized
by a shift away from an observational and objective mode of production in order
to champion one that is highly engaged and embodied. Evoking a reimagined

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Going Public 39

relationship between the filmmaker and documentary subjects, and between the
documentary and its audiences, such xianchang aesthetics enable the installa-
tion of a manifest political vision in the documentaries. On the whole, these two
characteristics showcase the potential of community-based video production in
invoking a powerful queer public politics.
In her analysis of the cultural politics of emotions, Sara Ahmed (2004) fore-
grounds (dis)comfort as central to the affective dynamics between heteronorma-
tivity and queerness. Heteronormativity, she suggests, “functions as a form of
public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken
their shape” (148). Those who conform to heteronormative ideals experience
easiness and comfort since “the heterosexualization of public spaces . . . is natu-
ralized by the repetition of different forms of heterosexual conduct . . . , a process
which goes unnoticed by heterosexual subjects” (Ahmed 2004, 148). By contrast,
queer subjects are dominated by a feeling of discomfort, “a feeling of disorienta-
tion . . . , the sense of out-of-place-ness and estrangement” (148). These power
relations in the distribution and restriction of comfort are key to understanding
the affective qualities in the two documentaries. In both Mama Rainbow and Pink
Dads, the interactions between queer children and their parents are characterized
by the affective transition from discomfort upon the revelation of queer identities
toward comfort as parent-child conflicts around the issue are resolved. Instead
of betraying conformity to a heteronormative ideal, I argue, such a transition
entails a rethinking and queering of kinship relations, a political message that is
communicated to viewers through networked affective publics.
The two documentaries convey affective intensities through representations
of the parents’ responses toward their children’s queer identities. In Mama
Rainbow’s interview with Zhang Lingxuan and Mama Xuan, for example, the
mother is invited to talk about her reactions when her son disclosed his homo-
sexuality. Emotively, she confesses that on the night of the disclosure, she “laid
in bed alone and wept silently,” feeling “great pain” for her son’s sufferings all
these years (Fan 2012). A feeling of discomfort here saturates Mama Xuan’s nar-
ration; this discomfort stems from her sympathy toward her son and reflects the
structural distribution of affect, which associates being queer with feelings of
uneasiness. The feeling of discomfort also plays an important role in the por-
trayal of the fathers in Pink Dads. Since fathers, who are often under the influence
of dominant scripts of masculinity, tend to be less articulate, their affective expe-
riences are represented with the help of nondiegetic background music. In the
interview with Papa Tao, for instance, he recounts his initial reactions on learning
of his son’s homosexuality by stating, “I felt that life had no hope anymore. That
life had no meaning anymore. I always wanted to be a grandfather. But now,
I would never be one” (Fan 2016). As he speaks, a track featuring an acoustic
guitar and a harmonica plays in the background. Tender and with a touch of
melancholy, the music compliments Papa Tao’s narrative of his coming to terms

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40 Queering Chinese Kinship

with queerness by toning up the embedded emotions. Such a multisensory

representation of Papa Tao’s experience underlines the sadness and discomfort
that a revelation of queer identity entails. In the speech, “hope” and “meaning”
are predominantly associated with and defined by heterosexuality as the script
for an ideal life. Ahmed (2004, 148) suggests that the display of queer intimacy
causes uncomfortable feelings in social spaces shaped by heteronormativity. By
the same token, the queer identity of Papa Tao’s son brings about feelings of dis-
comfort because it deviates from heteronormative scripts of kinship, generating
uncertainties and anxieties about a life outside the comfort zone of heterosexual
trajectories.
The stories depicted in Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads start with pronounced
feelings of shock, uneasiness, and discomfort, but the documentaries construct
a narrative that transitions from discomfort to comfort, a process rooted in the
rhetoric of love in Chinese kinship relations. Mama Rainbow portrays an affec-
tionate scene at a karaoke lounge as the resolution of conflicts between Zhang
Lingxuan and Mama Xuan. In the scene, Zhang sings a song for his mother
about the greatness of motherly love and how it nurtures and sustains the family,
with a close-up shot of Mama Xuan, who, moved by the lyrics, silently wipes
her tears (Figure 2.1). Casting a marked contrast to the earlier interview, where
Mama Xuan’s tears stem from suffering and discomfort, the tears here symbol-
ize understanding, love, and affection as the crisis posed by Zhang’s announce-
ment is resolved through Mama Xuan’s acceptance. Appropriating the rhetoric
of parental love and the symbol of the family as an enduring structure of care
and support, the karaoke scene conveys feelings of belonging, satisfaction, and
comfort that are premised on the expansion and reconfiguration of the scripts of
kinship. Such an affective process also occurs in Pink Dads. Toward the end of
the narrative about Papa Tao and his son, a medium close-up shot is presented
in which Papa Tao and Mama Tao stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their son, his
boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s mother. The frame freezes for a few seconds as
the five look into the camera, all with grins on their faces (Figure 2.2). The mise-
en-scène evokes the impression of a family portrait. The happiness and harmony
among the five members of this extended family convey a feeling of comfort
derived from the reaffirmation of unconditional love and the expansion of the
kinship system.
The representations of the affective process from discomfort to comfort enact
these two documentaries’ political vision at two levels. At a diegetic level, they
identify Chinese kinship as a site for queer negotiation. As Ahmed comments on
the relationship between queerness and the distribution of comfort:

Queer lives do not suspend the attachments that are crucial to the reproduc-
tion of heteronormativity, and this does not diminish ‘queerness’, but intensi-
fies the work that it can do. Queer lives remain shaped by that which they fail
to reproduce. To turn this around, queer lives shape what gets reproduced:

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Figure 2.1: Mama Xuan wiping her tears to a song about motherly love in Mama Rainbow.
Reproduced with permission from Fan (2012).

Figure 2.2: A family portrait–style shot of a gay couple and their family members in Pink
Dads. Reproduced with permission from Fan (2016).

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42 Queering Chinese Kinship

in the very failure to reproduce the norms through how they inhabit them,
queer lives produce different effects. . . . The gap between the script and the
body, including the bodily form of ‘the family’, may involve discomfort and
hence may ‘rework’ the script . . . So the closer that queer subjects get to the
spaces defined by heteronormativity the more potential there is for a rework-
ing of the heteronormative. (2004, 152, emphasis in original)

In the case of Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads, the affective movement from
discomfort to comfort is enabled through the appropriation of the rhetoric of
unconditional love and parent-child ties. The resolution of conflicts and happy
endings for each family showcase the elasticity of kinship bonds and relations,
thereby installing an activist agenda of negotiating queerness through a rework-
ing of Chinese kinship.
At a nondiegetic level, the representation of emotions also provides an
entry point for the viewers through evoking common kinship-based affective
experiences. In her discussion of the transmission of affect in electronic spaces,
Papacharissi (2015) uses the term “affective attunement” to describe the ways
in which “affective mechanisms permit us to obtain a sense of the urgency with
which a particular symptom needs to be addressed” by amplifying the inten-
sity with which it is felt (118). Affective attunement allows viewers of certain
images, texts, or videos to “feel their way into politics” by developing “a sense
of their own place within this particular structure of feeling” (118). Based on this
observation, Papacharissi argues that the transmission of affect through media
has called into being “affective publics”: “networked public formations that are
mobilized and connected . . . through expressions of sentiment” (118). These
publics “produce disruptions/interruptions of dominant political narratives by
presenting underrepresented viewpoints” (130), and make possible the perfor-
mance of otherwise repressed identities in marginalized cultures (119). In this
sense, the documentaries’ focus on the affective dimensions of the queerness and
Chinese kinship is political. The emphasis on parent-child emotional ties and the
construction of images of loving families evoke “affective attunement,” through
which amplified expressions of sentiment allow viewers to develop a sense of their
own place within the familiar structures of familial love and the feeling of (dis)
comfort. By doing so, the circulation of these documentaries creates networked
affective publics that open up possibilities not only for the representation of queer-
ness but also for promoting the acceptance of queerness in Chinese kinship.
Apart from evoking common kinship-based affective experiences, the docu-
mentaries’ production of affective publics is also reflected in their rendering of
xianchang aesthetics. Immediately noticeable for audiences of Mama Rainbow and
Pink Dads is the fact that instead of attempting to provide an objective point of
view, the two films communicate a clear sense of self-consciousness. An early
example in Mama Rainbow is found at the start of the film, when Meiyi, the first
mother of the six mother-child pairs, is introduced. The scene is set in the kitchen

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Going Public 43

where Meiyi is preparing food and chatting with her daughter Yuexi’s girlfriend,
Dian Dian. In the duration of a handheld camera close-up shot on Meiyi, she
asks Dian Dian: “Have you shown Fan Popo photos of Yuexi?”, while casually
glimpsing at the camera. The close-up lasts as Meiyi asks Dian Dian to show more
pictures to Fan, after which she looks directly into the camera, declaring proudly,
“Our daughter is beautiful” (Fan 2012, see Figure 2.3). These audiovisual cues,
which serve as reminders of the documentary as a political engagement, reflect
the aesthetics of xianchang in two ways. By characterizing the interview with a
sense of spontaneity, it highlights the spatial and temporal qualities of xianchang
as on location. Meiyi’s awareness of the documentary-making process and her
immediate emotional responses during the interview add a layer of authenticity
to the documentary since they contribute to the mapping of where and how the
interviews take place, information that puts the audiences at the scene of these
interviews. The xiangchang aesthetics also create a more engaging experience
for viewers by conveying an aesthetic of location. In the interview, the camera
becomes an embodiment and extension of the director, who is not positioned as
a detached voyeuristic observer but is personally engaged in the documentary.
The director’s personal friendship with his filmed subjects allows them to act
in front of and interact with the camera more freely. These interactions, when
transmitted on the screen, establish a dialogic representation that speaks to and
engages the viewers, invoking a sensuous and embodied experience of being on
the spot—xianchang. The embodied and subjectivized visions of the director in

Figure 2.3: Meiyi introducing her daughter in Mama Rainbow, where she looks into the
camera and directly addresses the filmmaker Fan Popo. Reproduced with permission
from Fan (2012).

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44 Queering Chinese Kinship

the documentary, in other words, are translated and extended to the viewers’
experiences through xianchang aesthetics.
The xianchang logic in Pink Dads is more complex, encompassing two
layers that correspond to the documentary’s dual levels of narratives. Like
Mama Rainbow, Pink Dads presents interviews with six fathers and their queer
children, which form the film’s central narrative. What distinguishes it from
Mama Rainbow is the inclusion of clips of short stage plays from PFLAG China’s
activist event, “Tongzhi Forum Theater.” Modeled after the Brazillian theater
practitioner Augusto Boal’s idea of “Theater of the Oppressed,” Tongzhi Forum
Theater brings together fathers and queer activists to stage conflicts between
queer children and their parents in fictional theatrical representations. Fathers
are asked to play different roles such as a gay child, a stubborn mother, or a stern
father in the short plays; these vignettes are then used in the documentary to
thread the interviews together.
The complexity of xianchang aesthetics is captured in the Pink Dads interview
with Papa Rose, Mama Rose, and their son Ah Mu. The interview starts with the
three sitting in front of the computer to watch Papa Rose’s performance, where
he plays the role of a young gay man who goes on a movie date with his boy-
friend, only to come home to a fierce fight with his mother about his sexuality.
In the interview, the frames are split into two parallel sections, with one playing
clips from the stage production and the other showing real-time reactions and
comments from the three interviewees (Figure 2.4).
The xianchang in this scene juxtaposes two spaces and temporalities. Viewers
are introduced to theatrical performances of the traumatic experience of being

Figure 2.4: Snapshot of the interview with Papa Rose, Mama Rose, and Ah Mu in Pink
Dads. Reproduced with permission from Fan (2016).

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Going Public 45

queer in China, where dramatized conflicts between queerness and Chinese

kinship open up an affective space that invites the viewers to identify and
sympathize with queer subjects. At the same time, xianchang also appears in
the responses of the three interviewees in their living room. Mama Rose states
during the interview, for example, that watching the short play has given her
an opportunity to think deeply about the issue of homosexuality. Seeing the
hysterical reactions of the mother in the performance upon hearing of her son’s
homosexuality, Mama Rose has something of an epiphany, saying, “If I had done
that to my own kid, he might have left our home or even lost his life. My regrets
would have come too late” (Fan 2016). These diegetic commentaries extend the
affective qualities embedded in the fictional stage plays to lived experiences, and
foregrounds emotional responses both as a foundation and as a starting point for
queer politics. Moreover, the marked contrast between the two spatial-temporal
settings—dramatic conflicts and tragic struggles in the performances, and peace
and harmony in the representation of the three family members—also installs
a subjective and political vision that prompts the viewers to critically reflect
on queerness and Chinese kinship. In short, the use of two levels of xianchang
in Pink Dads implements a self-reflexive strategy that communicates a politi-
cal vision, which in turn activates subjective and affective senses of viewers,
prompting them to reflect on and address the issues of queerness represented in
the documentary.
In her discussion of the two documentaries, Engebretsen (2018) points out
that they emerge from “divergent definitions of familial relationships and
parental roles”: one that views homosexuality as a familial and social deviance to
be eradicated, and one that emphasizes same-sex desire as a positive and normal
individual quality in a progressive society (89). As examples of community-
based audiovisual activism, Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads seek to reconcile this
binary dynamic by establishing affective processes as a basis for reimagining
the relationship between queerness and Chinese kinship through an engaged
and embodied process of filmmaking. Appropriating the rhetoric of uncondi-
tional love and parent-child emotional connections, the documentaries not
only envision a reworking of Chinese kinship relations and values; they create
affective publics by evoking universal kinship-based emotional experiences as
well. The xianchang aesthetics in the documentaries also promote their activist
aspirations to advocate for the acceptance of queerness within Chinese kinship.
By representing nonnormative sexual identities and engaging the viewers with
affective articulations, the documentaries present alternative viewpoints that
disrupt and challenge dominant heteronormative narratives.

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46 Queering Chinese Kinship

Queering the Public, Reimagining Chinese Kinship

The representations of queerness within Chinese blood kinship in both Mama

Rainbow and Pink Dads have important political implications. First, they inter-
rogate the public/private divide and effectuate a queering of public spaces,
thereby establishing queerness both as a public issue and as a publicly per-
formed identity. They also appropriate and reconfigure Chinese kinship values
as a vehicle for embodying queerness.
As discussed earlier, Berlant and Warner (1998) argue that in the US context,
the reinforcement of a heteronormative convention of intimacy has constructed
sexuality as a private issue contained within the space of domestic life and thus
outside political public discourse (550–53). In the Chinese context, such a heter-
onormative privatization of sexuality is also very much present. In his discus-
sion of the predicaments faced by Chinese homosexuals, for example, Travis
Kong (2010) identifies the concerns over mianzi 面子 as an important factor.
Literally meaning “face,” mianzi encompasses an economy saturated by a social
dimension in terms of interaction with other people. The losing of mianzi, or
diulian 丟臉, would bring social disgrace not only to the person in question but
to their family as a whole. As a result, many Chinese homosexuals choose to stay
closeted, negotiating their sexuality privately with discretion and secretiveness
(160). Furthermore, even if a homosexual person does disclose his/her sexuality
to family members, the mianzi economy would still function to contain the issue
within the family out of concern for the family’s reputation and status. Mianzi
serves as one of the many heteronormative parameters in Chinese societies that
privatize issues of sexuality. In such an epistemological construction, queerness
is bound to the realm of domestic and private life, and is hence regarded as inap-
propriate for public knowledge and discussion.
Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads, however, transgress this rigid public/private
divide. The opening scene of Mama Rainbow is set in a busy commercial pedes-
trian street where random passers-by are asked two questions: one about their
impressions about homosexuality,and the other regarding their possible atti-
tudes if their children came out as homosexual (Fan 2012). The spatial settings of
these opening interviews effectively locate the issue of queerness in public atten-
tion and discussion, and this configuration of queerness as public is sustained
throughout the film. In fact, in most of the interviews in the film, the spatial
locations start in the domestic setting of the kitchen or the living room and even-
tually move into a public space, where the issue of queerness is discussed in
front of an audience. The problematization of the public/private divide is also
an important underlying logic in Pink Dads. The public performances of the
Tongzhi Forum Theater short plays, for example, signal clear efforts to bring
supposedly domestic and private problems into public awareness. Moreover,
the interviews in Pink Dads lead to footage of the fathers’ presence at a national

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Going Public 47

PFLAG conference, followed by their participation in the 2014 Hong Kong Pride
Parade. As video-based activism, the two documentaries’ representations of
spatial movement blur the boundary between private and public, connecting the
personal and familial to the public and the political.
Apart from establishing queerness as a public issue, the documentaries also
suggest ways in which both physical and electronic public spaces can be appro-
priated to perform queer identities. For instance, Mama Rainbow presents an
interview with Wu Youjian, founder of PFLAG China, in a park in Guangzhou.
During the interview, Wu points the director to a walking path in the trees,
explaining that this is the favorite spot for the tongzhi couples or parent-child
pairs who came to her for help. Many tongzhi couples, Wu tells the director,
would “hold hands or put arms around another’s waist” when they take pictures
there, and Wu would then post the pictures on her blog (Fan 2012). Here, picture-
taking and posting foster a queering of two spaces: the physical public space of
the park and the electronic online public space. Resonating with W. Wei’s (2012)
theorization of “going public,” it demonstrates a nonverbal and nonconfronta-
tional approach through which queer subjects claim the public sphere.
Based on this public orientation, the documentaries further evoke a queer
politics where conventional Chinese kinship roles and relations are appropriated
and reimagined to facilitate the embodiment of queer identities, which in turn
transforms Chinese kinship itself. In his discussion of Chinese kinship, Sangren
(2013) points out that the concept of “family” exists at two “synergistically impli-
cated” levels: it comprises an important part of the reality into which individu-
als are socialized; and it embodies, in instituted form, the individual’s attempts
to realize social arrangements as they would like them to be (279). Patrilineal
and familial values that animate Chinese family life and kinship arrangements,
therefore, while functioning as “an important constituent of Chinese realities,”
are at the same time “ultimately unrealizable . . . fantasies” (279). Sangren’s
insight affords a two-pronged framework for critically examining the dynamics
of kinship values in the documentaries. It highlights the importance attached
to kinship roles and lexicons, identifying them as key elements in weaving an
idealized kinship fantasy—and by pointing out the instituted nature of kinship,
it implies possibilities for intervention through lived experiences and practices.
My analysis of the documentaries’ approach to kinship values revolves around
these two points.
First, I argue that kinship roles and their associated affective investments
have been appropriated in Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads to pave the way for
the documentaries’ advocacy for the acceptance of queerness within Chinese
kinship. Sister Mei, one of the interviewed mothers in Mama Rainbow, states in
her call-out to all parents with queer children:

You have got to accept everything about them since you have brought them
to this world. Besides, this is nobody’s fault. . . . I hope that all parents can

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48 Queering Chinese Kinship

accept everything about their children with all of their heart and love. [The
children] don’t ask for too much. They just need you to accept them. They
just need somebody to pour their hearts out to. (Fan 2012)

In this at-once personal and political statement, Sister Mei mobilizes the rhetoric
of parental love by accentuating the affective connections between parents and
children. The essentialized parent-child tie, which is conventionally utilized to
reinforce heteronormative definitions of kinship, is in this case appropriated as
a foundation for greater acceptance of queer identities. In this new formulation,
the rhetoric of unconditional love based on blood connection is used to support
the argument that parents should love their children regardless of their sexu-
alities, because sexualities are considered an integral part of their personhood.
Through this argument, the expectations attached to the kinship roles of parents
have been expanded to function as the prerequisite for inclusive queer politics.
Kinship values, in this sense, are utilized in Sister Mei’s statement to establish a
political vision.
Apart from the appropriation and expansion of kinship values, the docu-
mentaries also showcase how kinship lexicons can be creatively resignified.
In Papa Jiao’ao’s discussion of transgender practices, for example, he remarks
that since his daughter is transgender, he would very naturally write “girl son”
when he was typing. “My daughter is no longer my daughter,” he claims, “he is
my son. But his assigned sex is female, so he is my girl son. Accordingly, there
must also be a ‘boy daughter’” (Fan 2016). Through appropriating and resigni-
fying existing kinship lexicons of “son” and “daughter,” Papa Jiao’ao’s inven-
tion of the two terms “girl son” and “boy daughter” conveys the affirmation of
queerness in Chinese kinship by emphasizing blood and affective connections
between parents and children, and also problematizes the rigid gender roles pre-
scribed by conventional kinship terms. In this sense, the oxymoronic construc-
tion of “girl son” and “boy daughter” can be viewed as a practice that challenges
heteronormative presumptions of kinship, thereby queering kinship itself.
Second, I maintain that the reconfiguration of kinship values also engen-
ders an alternative kinship network into which queerness is incorporated. This
alternative kinship network is exemplified in Pink Dads, in which a gay couple
attends a PFLAG China event together with their mothers. In a subsequent
interview with Papa Rose, he comments on the close relationship between the
gay couple and their mothers by remarking that he envies it, because “they are
in-laws, and they’re getting on great” (Fan 2016). The formation of an “in-law”
kinship network engendered by the romantic relationship between a gay couple
signifies a way through which alternative forms of relatedness can be established
outside the heterosexual model of kinship. The epistemological hegemony of
heteronormativity in kinship and relatedness-making is thus decentered and
problematized.

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Going Public 49

The reimagination of Chinese kinship as inclusive of queerness is reflected

both in the documentaries’ appropriation and resignification of kinship roles and
lexicons, and in their representation of an alternative kinship model in which
queerness becomes generative of extended kinship ties. This reconfiguration of
kinship not only demonstrates the documentaries’ challenges toward Chinese
heteronormativity, but more importantly showcases their efforts in devising a
locally specific framework for queer activism that deploys the affective invest-
ments and political significance attached to Chinese kinship.

Conclusion

Bao (2019) remarks that queer community documentaries “represent grassroots,

community-based and activist-oriented political articulations in contemporary
Chinese society,” and “point to the political potential of queerness and docu-
mentary films in the world today” (214). This contextualized analysis of Rainbow
Mama and Pink Dads has identified blood kinship relations as a key locale where
political negotiations and contentions take place. Chinese queer subjects, activ-
ists, and auteurs do not see blood kinship as an essentialized site that merely
reproduces heteronormative kinship positions and life arrangements; instead,
they engage it as one of potential transformation and empowerment. This act
of queering—expanding and transforming blood kinship to generate spaces
for queer embodiment and politics—shows how queerness and kinship are
dynamic, mutually constitutive concepts in flux.
Apart from identifying queering Chinese kinship as a constant process of
negotiating, imagining, and articulating queerness, this look into Mama Rainbow
and Pink Dads also highlights how the productive tensions between queerness
and kinship have a distinctly social dimension in China: by configuring the
familial as political, these films foreground queer identities as public identities,
queer issues as public issues, and queer politics as public politics. This reclama-
tion of public spaces constructs an important foundation for the development of
a variety of queer cultural landscapes in contemporary China. As I go on to show
in later chapters, this desire to go public—made manifest through efforts to
create emotional resonance, connect communities, engage with social issues, and
rethink conventional cultural values—permeates queer cultural production and
motivates creative strategies in artistic and popular representations. Queering
Chinese kinship functions as a key social praxis and negotiative tactic in this
process.

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3
Localizing the Transnational: Spring Fever
as a Queer Sinophone Film

In Chapter 2, I suggested that queering Chinese kinship as a social praxis

constitutes an important dimension in the contestatory domain of contempo-
rary Chinese public culture. This chapter looks at a related yet distinct media
genre—art-house cinema—to explore how queering Chinese kinship functions
as a productive strategy in artistic expression that negotiates meanings of queer-
ness and kinship in transnational and local contexts of film production and
consumption. Whereas queer representations proliferated and were increas-
ingly incorporated into mainstream cinemas in the Chinese-speaking regions of
Taiwan and Hong Kong (Leung 2012; S. H. Lim 2006; Martin 2003; C.-C. Wang
2016), portrayals of homosexuality and queerness remain a taboo in the PRC’s
officially controlled system of studio production and distribution. Under such
circumstances, independent art-house cinema has become a major channel for
exploring queer issues. Chinese art-house queer films are typically screened first
in international film festivals before being introduced back via pirated copies,
peer-to-peer downloads, or small-scale underground screenings. Through these
unofficial channels, art-house queer films have thrived in China in past decades.
The most renowned mainland Chinese queer film auteur, Cui Zi’en, has
remained a prolific director, especially on issues of sexuality, identity, and desire
(Rofel 2007, 443–45). Alongside Cui, a new generation of filmmakers began to
use art-house cinema as a channel to explore queer sexualities in China as well,
through works such as China’s first lesbian film, Fish and Elephant (Jinnian Xiatian
今年夏天, dir. Li Yu, 2001); Cloud (Chuque Wushan 除卻巫山, dir. Zhongqiang,
2007) which discusses lesbian eroticism; the gay-themed Fire in Silence (Guhuo 孤
火, dir. Han Chen, 2009); and more recently, A Dog Barking at the Moon (Zai Jian
Nanpingwanzhong 再見南屏晚鐘, dir. Xiang Zi, 2019), which explores marriage
frauds among Chinese gay men. Collectively, these films portray a kaleidoscopic
picture of new developments in gender and sexuality in postsocialist China.
Unlike independent queer documentaries, whose focus lies in factual dimensions
and lived experiences, art-house cinema allows filmmakers to “develo[p] queer

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Localizing the Transnational 51

styles by deploying generic conventions in novel ways, mak[e] creative use of

autobiographical narratives, and writ[e] authorial signature[s] over a coherent
body of works” (Leung 2012, 534). Queer art-house films not only showcase
creative ways to represent, but to negotiate, confound, unsettle, and subvert.
Their aesthetics constitute an important part of queer cultures and queer con-
sciousness in the contemporary PRC.
This chapter focuses on a queer Sinophone film, Spring Fever (Chunfeng
Chenzui De Yewan 春風沉醉的夜晚, dir. Lou Ye, 2009), as a case study of queer
representations in contemporary Chinese art-house cinema. Directed by the
“Sixth Generation” auteur Lou Ye, the film is a bold and dark feature that
portrays entangled relationships among two gay men, one bisexual man, and
two straight women in the city of Nanjing. Having won the award for Best
Screenplay at Cannes Film Festival in 2009, Spring Fever not only received
international attention; it also became one of the most well-known queer films
domestically. Situating the film in transnational cinema and transnational flows
of sexual knowledges and politics, this chapter probes the hybridized vision
that underlies the film’s representations. I argue that on the one hand, the film
is informed by and takes advantage of globalized queer sensibilities to attract
transnational audiences; on the other hand, it is distinctly shaped by local condi-
tions of cultural intelligibility. Kinship relations and ideologies become central
in the film’s engagements with heteronormativity and exploration into Chinese
queerness.
I start this discussion by delineating a brief picture of “Sixth Generation”
filmmaking in China and its connections with international film festival circuits
and official censorship. I then approach Spring Fever as a queer Sinophone film
located at the periphery of both Chinese heteronormativity and global queer
culture. Next, I offer a close analysis of the film’s aesthetics and representations,
which I argue are anchored by the film’s engagements with Chinese queerness
and kinship. I conclude by highlighting queering Chinese kinship as a strategy
in artistic expression, one that permeates the film’s cinematic language and its
implicitly political exploration of alternative forms of kinship relations.

Filming at the Margins: Hybridized Vision in Sixth Generation

Filmmaking

As a term, “Sixth Generation” loosely refers to a group of Chinese directors who

began to gain prominence during the mid- and late 1990s. With Jia Zhangke,
Wang Xiaoshuai, and Zhang Yuan as pioneers, Sixth Generation directors dis-
tinguish themselves from their predecessors in terms of subject matter. While
the works of the “Fifth Generation” directors (e.g., Zhang Yimou and Chen
Kaige) emphasize the nation’s political, social, and cultural past by focusing on
“the mystique of an unchanging and closed rural communal system,” the Sixth

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52 Queering Chinese Kinship

Generation is more often regarded as “the urban generation” courtesy of their

reliance on “the modern city and contemporary life as their main themes, . . .
[having] little or no regard for a ‘national’ past” (Lin 2002, 263).
The films from the Sixth Generation directors share a pessimistic undertone,
largely because of the political and financial backdrops for their filmmaking. As
Lin (2002) comments, Sixth Generation directors have been “ostracized from the
very start of their careers,” having had to live and work in obscurity within an
environment “ignorant of and hostile to their artistic creation” (262). Since the
CCP wields almost exclusive power over the filmmaking sector in China, these
young artists—who wished to resist the reinforcement of official ideology and
explore more sensitive topics—have chosen to work “underground,” producing
unofficial and in some cases illegal art-house films (Pickowicz 2006, 4). Lou Ye,
for instance, was banned by Chinese officials from filmmaking for sending his
work Summer Palace (Yiheyuan 頤和園, 2006), which was inspired by the 1989
Tiananmen Square protests, to the Cannes Film Festival without prior approval
(Watts 2006). Consequently, his 2009 feature film Spring Fever, which I discuss
in this chapter, was shot in secret in Nanjing and registered as a Hong Kong/
French coproduction before its screening at Cannes (Bei 2014). The unofficial and
underground status of Sixth Generation filmmaking has affected the works in
two significant ways. First, the lack of financial support from state and domestic
capital has in part given rise to a focus on everyday subjects instead of grandi-
ose ones and led to an emergence of more “unpolished” techniques in filming,
inspiring an alternative film aesthetic. Second, since their films seldom made it
into mainstream cinemas in China, Sixth Generation filmmakers have become
active participants in international film festivals. They also embraced transna-
tional capital more readily than Fifth Generation directors.
Despite Sixth Generation directors’ skepticism toward official discourses
about China’s rise as a world power and their focus on the darker side of com-
mercialization and globalization, it is important to note that these directors
do not stand against the state. As Pickowicz (2006) suggests, the imagined
dichotomy between Sixth Generation directors and the Chinese state fails to
capture both the state’s own heterogeneity and evolvement over time, and the
directors’ ambitions to “move back and forth aboveground and underground
in order to address the different consumer needs and interests of both foreign
and domestic viewers” (13). This marginal yet nonoppositional position of
Sixth Generation directors has far-reaching influences on their artistic vision.
Lin (2002) observes that while Fifth Generation filmmakers “bitterly attacked
an antiquated Chinese patriarchy and its oppression of women and children,”
in the work of the Sixth Generation, “that same patriarchal authority is simply
absent or ridiculously impotent” (264). Pickowicz (2006) also makes a similar
observation by pointing out that “little or no effort is made to explain the origins
or sources of [the problems faced by protagonists in Sixth Generation films]

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Localizing the Transnational 53

beyond the incredibly narrow confines of closed, private, residential spaces. . . .

Still less is there an inclination to assign blame for social problems or to hold
the party or state accountable” (15). He suggests that this “floating” quality of
Sixth Generation art-house films demonstrates a “preoccupation with ‘self’ and
‘world’ . . . and disinterest in ‘nation’,” which, according to him, reflects an act of
“self-censorship” (16–18). While Pickowicz’s comments are insightful, labeling
these works as “self-censorship” is an overgeneralization that risks neglecting
the cultural politics underlying the modes of representation in Sixth Generation
films. I argue that the floating characteristic is in fact shaped by a hybridized
vision that saturates Sixth Generation filmmaking.
Discussing the proliferation of cinematic representations of queerness in the
PRC, S. Lim (2006) suggests that film as an artistic medium serves as a “rounda-
bout route” for public discussion and “a viable strategy of survival” under heavy
ideological control (26). As he argues, it is “precisely because of homosexuality’s
marginality and difference [that] the conjunction of homosexuality and Chinese
cinemas lends it comfortably to the growing disjunctive order of the new global
cultural economy” (29). The “margins and interstices” generated by the global
public sphere of Chinese cinemas, he posits, mark a “constitutive, not a reflective
relation” with reality (26).
S. Lim’s analysis provides a critical angle through which to better understand
the transnational and local dimensions in Sixth Generation films. First and
foremost, the transnational mode of production is pivotal to the survival and
success of Sixth Generation films. In order to attract attention on the international
film festival circuit, Sixth Generation directors need to cater to the tastes of a
transnational audience. One way to achieve this is to work with the links between
Chinese social realities and global cinema aesthetics (i.e., to present issues from
China that will interest, engage, and impress a global audience). Appealing to
a transnational audience, however, does not necessarily mean submitting to a
Western gaze; while many Sixth Generation films are transnationally conceived,
they take a distinctly local stance in their representations, portraying experiences
that relate to but do not revolve around Western identity conceptualizations.
At the same time, Sixth Generation filmmakers have had to take their relation-
ship with the state into consideration out of concern for potentially mainstream
career developments in China. Under such circumstances, the floating qualities
and aesthetics in Sixth Generation art-house films should be regarded as both a
survival strategy and an alternative tactic that allows roundabout depictions and
explorations of Chinese social realities. These three factors contribute to shaping
a hybridized vision in Sixth Generation filmmaking, positioning it at the conver-
gence of transnational and local knowledges and politics.

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54 Queering Chinese Kinship

Spring Fever as a Queer Sinophone Film

Set in the city of Nanjing, Spring Fever portrays entangled relationships fusing
heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and transgender desires. The story starts
with the relationship between two gay men, Jiang Cheng and Wang Ping,
which is soon revealed to be adulterous with the introduction of Lin Xue, Wang
Ping’s wife, who commissioned a private investigator, Luo Haitao, to spy on
her husband. After finding out the “mistress” is actually a man, an increasingly
distraught Lin Xue drives Wang Ping to desperation and eventually suicide with
her attempts to salvage their marriage. Wang’s death agonizes Jiang Cheng, who,
during his drinking sprees at a local gay bar, unwittingly meets Luo Haitao, who
has grown attracted to Jiang during his investigation. The budding romance
between Luo and Jiang is complicated by the presence of Luo’s girlfriend Li Jing,
who joins the two men’s getaway weekend trip at the last minute. During the
trip, Li stumbles onto Luo and Jiang kissing. Much like Lin, she is overwhelmed
and leaves immediately, wandering into a karaoke lounge. The tension among
the three comes to a magical resolution when Luo and Jiang join Li in the lounge,
where they sing and dance together in warm smiles. The trio enjoys a transient
moment of harmony until Li abruptly disappears at a gas station en route back
to Nanjing, resulting in a furious fight between Luo and Jiang that leads to their
breakup. One day, as Jiang is strolling alone down a city street, he is caught by
the vengeful Lin Xue, who cuts him on the neck. Jiang survives the injury and
starts a new life with an apparently transgender partner at the end of the film,
with Wang Ping’s voice echoing in his mind.
Queerness functions as a prominent theme in Spring Fever, both in the film’s
explicit portrayal of gay romance and sex and in its portrayals of subcultural
commercial gay venues. As Altman (1997) and Rofel (1999) observe, the trend
of globalization and the opening up of the Chinese economy at the turn of the
twenty-first century have contributed to the greater visibility of a self-identified
gay population, who are connected to the transnational circuit of queer knowl-
edges and identities. The film’s representations of the gay bar highlight the
relevance of transnational queer cultures to Chinese queer experiences and iden-
tities. The mobilization of globalized queer symbols and images not only situates
Chinese queerness in a transnational background, but also enables the film to
relate to an international audience. During its run in Cannes, Spring Fever was pre-
dominantly reviewed by virtue of its representations of queerness. The Guardian,
for example, introduced the film as an “opaque, grainy account of homosexual
liaisons in modern-day China; a tale of illicit love that is itself illicit” (Brooks
2009). While the categorization of Spring Fever as a queer film added to the film’s
appeal to Western audiences, it also created tensions between the critics’ expec-
tations and the film’s mode of representation. During its Cannes screenings, the
film attracted many criticisms for its apparent lack of radicalness. The Hollywood

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Localizing the Transnational 55

Reporter commented, for instance, that “Lou’s treatment of a supposedly taboo

subject in China and its particular social context neither shocks nor surpasses
seminal works like Lan Yu and East Palace, West Palace” (Lee 2009). Likewise,
Film Comment also pointed out that “Lou sacrifices the political engagement and
specificity that make the work of queer auteurs so valuable,” making the film “a
dreary Happy Together wannabe” (Chan 2010). Aside from comparing Lou with
his more political Chinese counterparts, critics also declared that the “gay story”
felt like “throwbacks to the queer dramas of yesteryear” and was thus desper-
ately in need of “more fire” (Kois 2010). To Western critics, Spring Fever was a
“non-sensical and off-putting” film with a “distracted” and “restricted” vision
that was “impossible to invest in” (dGenerate Films 2009).
While Spring Fever failed to impress its Western critics, it was received
enthusiastically by audiences in Chinese-speaking societies. In Taiwan, the
only place in Greater China where the film was publicly released, Spring Fever
was reviewed as exploring the underground status of queerness in a distinctly
mainland Chinese context (S. Zhang 2010). Applauding the film’s insights on
the relationship between queerness and Chinese realities, reviewers praised
Spring Fever’s adoption of “a repressive style” that “corresponds to its repressive
subject matter” (S. Zhang 2010). In the PRC, where the film was chiefly dissemi-
nated through illegal channels of pirated DVDs and peer-to-peer downloads,
the film also received favorable reviews. On Zhihu, the popular Chinese online
question-and-answer community that resembles America’s Quora, Spring Fever
is listed as one of the “most unforgettable” gay films, alongside local classics
such as Happy Together and Vive L’amour, as well as Hollywood favorites like
Brokeback Mountain and Boys Don’t Cry (Zhihu 2016). A more sophisticated inter-
pretation of the film in relation to lived queer experiences appeared on Danlan,
a major Chinese LGBTQ website. Calling Spring Fever “a new milestone in Lou
Ye’s career,” the reviewer applauds the film for providing a “challenging and
subversive” viewing experience, especially for those “accustomed to gay films
from different countries” (A Da 2010). Recounting the ways in which the film
engages the constraints of the realistic aspects of China’s social life, the review
dubs Spring Fever as an “irreplaceable cinematic record of Chinese tongzhi in the
21st century” (ibid.).
The divided receptions by Euro-American critics and Chinese viewers shed
light on the tensions in categorizing Spring Fever as a queer film. In Euro-American
contexts, the contours of queer cinema, as observed by Rich (2013), are defined
by a heightened sense of defiance leveled at mainstream homophobic society; in
other words, it is a cinema that “thrives on provocation, ambiguity, and strange-
ness” (Leung 2012, 519). This explains the critics’ preference for the other works
in Chinese queer cinema: for example, Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, a film
laden with the political anxiety of Hong Kong’s handover to the PRC in which
homosexuality becomes a symbol of exile; and the works of Cui Zi’en, whose

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56 Queering Chinese Kinship

cinema features an unapologetic and disruptive experimentality. By comparison,

Spring Fever is apparently cut off from any political roots in its depiction, thus
rendering homosexuality as a desire rather than a political identity. For Western
viewers this emphasis on desire has created characters who lack motivational
and logical coherence, but for the Chinese audience, it is exactly this incoherence
that has proven relatable. From the comments of Chinese viewers, it is easy to
discern that for them both the extremely dark lighting and the floating quality of
the characters capture the defining features of queer experiences in China, which
have less to do with political opposition and more to do with a highly personal
search against the backdrop of an oppressive political and cultural environment.
In other words, while Spring Fever represents globalized queer symbols and
aesthetics that have been gaining prominence in postsocialist China, it is also
distinctly rooted in local conditions of queer existence, survival, and negotiation.
I propose situating Spring Fever in queer Sinophone cinema to better attend
to its transnational and local dynamics. The term “Sinophone” was first put
forward by Shu-mei Shih. Focusing on “a network of places of cultural pro-
duction outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness” (Shih
2007, 4), Shih eloquently shows how the heterogeneity of Sinitic-language
speaking communities challenges the hegemonic construction of “continental
Chineseness.” Although Shih presents a compelling argument that has funda-
mentally reshaped the field of Chinese studies, her decision to exclude mainland
China from “Sinophone” has become a point of contention; critiques of Shih’s
notion of Sinophone point out that cultural productions inside the geographical
boundaries of China may also contribute to the critical project of challenging
and rethinking “Chineseness.” In her discussion of the relationship between
queerness and Chinese cinema, for example, Yue (2012) defines queer Sinophone
cinema as including “queer Chinese cinemas outside of China, and queer
Chinese films in China that are beneficiaries of peripheral Chinese and global
Western queer film markets” (95). Combining the tradition of queer studies in
challenging various forms of normativity and the insistence in Sinophone studies
on contesting and decentering the hegemonic construction of Chineseness, queer
Sinophone cinema as an analytical concept locates its subject of inquiry in the
global circuit of film production as well as the local politics of domination and
resistance. As Yue argues, queer Sinophone cinema forms “an alternative social
practice that exceeds the heteronormative bounds of Chinese film and institu-
tion” by elucidating “how regional and global are bound up with the shaping of
the periphery in China” (2012, 105). Similarly, Pecic (2016) suggests that queer
Sinophone cinema provides a translocal and transnational space that stresses the
hybrid and lived qualities of Chinese queerness, repositioning it in-between “the
overarching categories such as local, global, Western, and Chinese” (7).
The queer Sinophone cinema framework productively expands Shih’s defini-
tion of Sinophone by shedding light on the intertwined issues of transnational

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Localizing the Transnational 57

and local cinema, heteronormativity, and construction of Chineseness. The fol-

lowing analysis of Spring Fever as a queer Sinophone film includes special atten-
tion to how its exploration of queer desire and politics decenter heteronormative
constructions of Chineseness. I organize my analysis around how the film appro-
priates and transforms transnational cinematic conventions, in particular sexual
storytelling and melodrama, to explore local queer issues. I look closely at how
the tensions between queerness and Chinese kinship have been foregrounded as
a significant site for power struggle and negotiation, and explore how a queering
of kinship is utilized in the film as a negotiative strategy for artistic expression.

Melodrama and Chinese Heteronormativity

Albeit an art-house film, Spring Fever is threaded by melodramatic elements

throughout: adultery and revelation, cheating and extramarital affairs, confron-
tations and suicide, and breakup and revenge. These elements not only con-
tribute to intensifying tensions in the film’s storyline; more significantly, they
shed light on private issues and their public mediation, thereby teasing out the
dynamics between queerness and Chinese kinship as an institution.
Dating back to Greek theater, melodrama is defined by Brooks (1976) as a
drama of excess, a mode of “high emotionalism and stark ethical conflict that
is neither comic nor tragic” (12). Feminist film theorist Mulvey (1994) further
demarcates between two types of melodrama: the universalized melodramatic
nature of Hollywood that has been legitimated as mythic treatments of the public
(and male) sphere of history, and family melodrama that focuses on the private
space of home (5). Feminist film criticism suggests that by indexing “an aes-
thetic ideology founded on the contradiction between a transgressive feminine
sexuality and a social system that seeks to delimit and contain it,” melodrama
functions as “the site of central contradictions of patriarchy” and hence a space
of “ideological critique” (Browne 1994, 41). Further expanding the scope of this
critique, Goldberg (2016) defines melodrama as “an aesthetics of the impossi-
ble situation” (155). Through the lens of sexuality and queer theory, he argues
that melodrama is “always trying to find . . . a means to express something else,
trying . . . to draw us to some core experience of meaning difficult to come by
otherwise” (76). Following this line of argument, Chairetis (2017) points out that
melodrama “integrates complex dialects of resistance and acceptance, refusal
and capitulation,” and is hence “potentially ambiguous, ideologically subver-
sive, and accommodating of queer history and experience” (12–13).
While film studies has viewed melodrama predominantly as a product of
Western modernity, recent scholarship has noted the importance of thinking
about melodrama transnationally to explore the hybrid forms and cultural prac-
tices the genre produces (Gledhill and Williams 2018, 7–8). Melodrama has a
distinct history in Asian societies (Dissanayake 1993, 3); in China, it witnessed

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58 Queering Chinese Kinship

two high tides in recent cinematic history. The first came with leftist filmmak-
ing, which led to a marriage of classic melodrama and the elementary Marxism
of class struggle (Kuoshu 2002, 24–25). Under these circumstances, melodrama
was appropriated by the CCP to build “a society driven by constant campaigns”
by targeting enemies, affirming myths, creating new heroes, and mobilizing the
masses (23–24). The second high tide arrived with the nationwide reflection on
the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution, when melodrama offered “an emo-
tional way of licking the wounds” (25). Though short-lived, this period exerted a
far-reaching influence on melodrama as a genre in Chinese cinema. N. Ma (1994)
suggests that melodrama from this period renegotiated the relationship between
tradition and modernization against the backdrop of a new economic order.
In the Chinese melodramatic tradition, the family as a unit constitutes the
key focus. As S. Cai (2015b) observes, Chinese melodramas concentrate on
family life to depict social and political tensions (282). Browne (1994) also
argues that in the Chinese context, melodrama arbitrates the relation between
subjectivity and society by offering a mode of representation for an experience
“that inscribes ‘subjectivity’ in a position between the expectations of an ethical
system (Confucianism) and the demands of a political system . . . a condition that
typifies the Chinese dilemma of modernization” (46).
Melodrama’s transnational travel, in other words, provides a channel for
“local experiences to partake in and enrich a global experience of modernity”
(Jiang 2007, 234), which is reflected in Spring Fever’s employment of the genre
as a means to explore queer identities in the institution of Chinese kinship. As I
argue, melodrama in the movie functions as a negotiation between subjectivities
and sociopolitical structures in China’s postsocialist order. By illuminating the
emergence of unruly queer identities in the family unit, Spring Fever draws on
melodrama’s focus on the domestic space and its potential to explore and critique
the contradictions of heteronormativity to reflect on the conflicts between newly
available identities and an old, dominant kinship system that reinforces conven-
tional values. These concerns are also expressed through the film’s alternative
aesthetics, including its dim lighting style, use of handheld cameras, and shot
and editing maneuvers. Through its visual representations, the film critically
examines the oppressiveness of the institution of Chinese kinship.
The film’s idiosyncratic aesthetics and depressing undertone are established
with the opening scene, which presents Jiang Cheng and Wang Ping driving to
a Nanjing suburb on a dark rainy day. Apparently shot with a handheld camera
and solely dependent on natural lighting, the sequence is filled with dimly lit,
shaky, and often out-of-focus long takes that signify a bumpy, tiring journey. The
picture becomes even murkier when the two men enter a cabin in the woods, a
secluded space where the only source of light comes from a small window open
to the heavily overcast sky. The two men are almost submerged in the shades
until they take off their clothes and start making love, when their naked bodies

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Localizing the Transnational 59

faintly reflect the light. In this lighting condition, the men’s faces become indis-
tinguishable and the viewers can only make out the profile of two entangled
bodies, with one man’s hand caressing the other’s back. What such a mise-en-
scène foregrounds is Wang Ping’s wedding ring, a glaring presence during the
dusky sex scene. This opening sex scene serves two functions in the film: first,
it introduces the theme of queerness through a crude representation of gay sex
in the confinement of a dark private space. Second, while the long takes at the
beginning of the film have already set a secretive and exilic undertone that impli-
cates forbidden love, the homosexual relationship is further shadowed by the
strong visual presence of the wedding ring, a symbol of heterosexual marriage.
Homosexuality, in this sense, is at once introduced and delegitimized at the very
start of the film.
The regulative power of heteronormativity is further revealed by the intro-
duction of the character Luo Haitao, a private investigator who becomes the
embodiment of the disciplinary power of marriage. Although the character is
not officially introduced until the meeting between him and Wang Ping’s sus-
pecting wife Lin Xue, the presence of surveillance is foreshadowed early on
in the film through the implementation of unconventional shots and composi-
tions. During the opening scene, for instance, when Jiang and Wang park the
car and walk into the cabin, a point-of-view shot is inserted. The shot features
very shaky pictures and frames constantly disrupted by trees and leaves, which
simulates the perspective of a stalker. Throughout the earlier half of the film, the
actual presence of the private investigator and the use of inserted point-of-view
shots are conflated as a recurring motif that serves as a constant reminder of the
surveillance on and illegitimacy of Jiang and Wang’s relationship. This surveil-
lance is represented predominantly in public spaces, which enhances the sense
of spatialization in the film. A compelling example appears in a sequence where
Jiang and Wang flirt and kiss in the corridor of an apartment building. In this
sequence, the composition is violently divided by large chunks of shadows and
the frames tilt continuously from left to right, suggesting an observer in hiding.
For the duration of the kissing scene in the same sequence, however, the shot
suddenly switches to a close-up that stretches for seven long seconds until the
two men part, with Jiang Cheng looking directly into the camera. This sequence
is distinct from earlier point-of-view shots in that the secrecy of the surveillance
has been broken. Both the insertion of the close-up and the rare break of the
fourth wall initiated by Jiang’s direct eye contact with the camera confound the
audience in terms of the whereabouts of the supposed secret investigator, who
appears to have jumped out of hiding and assumed an impossibly close position.
Such a peculiar design of the sequence, I argue, abstracts and elevates the motif
of surveillance from a single character (Luo Haitao) to a more prevailing charac-
teristic of queer existence; here, the film’s visuals evoke an experience of heavy
stigmatization of queerness in China. This theme of surveillance alludes to the

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60 Queering Chinese Kinship

omnipresent power of Chinese kinship, which functions in the film as the chief
apparatus by which queerness is regulated.
Whereas the film’s dark, depressing aesthetics function as foreshadowing, the
regulative power of marriage and kinship is directly represented through melo-
drama—the amplified, emotionally charged portrayal of domestic conflicts and
disputes. The two representative melodramatic scenes in the film revolve around
the fights triggered by the revelation of Wang’s homosexuality. The first fight,
between Wang and his wife Lin, is set in the domestic space with an everyday
scene that portrays the husband and wife in their divided, gendered spaces: Lin
Xue is doing the laundry while Wang Ping strolls around in the study. The peace
is broken by the sound of Lin’s cell phone, which triggers Wang’s attention and
draws Lin away from her daily chores. The two converge in the common space
of the living room, where Wang angrily confronts Lin about the photos of Jiang
and himself just received on the phone. Lin is petrified for the first few seconds,
but soon bursts into shouted accusations: “You’re asking me? This is your fault!
. . . What got into you? . . . A girl, ok, but a boy? You’re sick!” (Lou 2009) These
words apparently infuriate Wang, who slaps his wife’s face and storms into the
kitchen. Lin follows Wang, desperately crying out, “Do you really want to do
this? Do you really want to destroy us?” These words bring the fight to an end:
Wang escapes from the apartment, leaving the devastated Lin leaning power-
lessly against the kitchen wall.
Through its depiction of a direct confrontation between homosexuality and
heterosexual marriage, this first fight scene reveals the omnipresent structures
of heteronormativity in everyday lives. To start with, the structured domestic
space serves as a clear symbol of the gendered division of both labor and power
within a heterosexual marriage: the man as the breadwinner and decisionmaker,
and the woman as the caretaker. This unequal power structure also explains the
curious fact that Wang is both the one committing adultery and the one initiating
the fight. Moreover, Lin’s desperate attempt to keep the marriage from falling
apart despite her husband’s homosexuality and infidelity demonstrates the
unrelenting pressure of staying in the marriage-kinship system in order to avoid
social stigmatization and marginalization. During the fight, Lin reveals her chief
concern not to be about her husband’s infidelity, but about how it would lead to
the dissolution of their marriage. Lin’s question—“Do you really want to destroy
us?”—positions heterosexual marriage as an institution granting social respect-
ability. In this sense, the fight reveals both the homosexual husband and the het-
erosexual wife to be victims of that institution.
If the first fight scene exposes the oppressions of marriage mainly through the
perspective of gender, the scene of Lin’s fight with Jiang Cheng focuses on the
intersection of marriage and sexuality. Removed from the privacy of the apart-
ment, this scene (one of the film’s few well-lit sequences) is set in Jiang’s office,
which is decorated with large French windows facing the streets. Rejecting

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Localizing the Transnational 61

Jiang’s request to talk in another room, Lin declares, in front of Jiang’s colleagues,
that she will “never divorce Wang Ping” (Lou 2009). The camera tracks the looks
of Jiang’s confused coworkers as Lin recklessly continues her speech, screaming,
“In any case, you couldn’t live together, ok? Don’t call him anymore! . . . Aren’t
you ashamed? How can you mess up with our lives? . . . Don’t you get it? You’re
a man!” (ibid.) Having thrown out a series of furious remarks, Lin rushes out,
leaving Jiang in the center of the office surrounded by a crowd of curious and
bewildered colleagues. Here the domestic conflicts over queerness are relocated
and enacted in a public space, which functions as a space of regulation and sur-
veillance in which Lin effectively summons Jiang’s colleagues as witnesses to
the condemnation of Jiang as a home-wrecker and a homosexual. The mobili-
zation of a moral rhetoric associated with heteronormative kinship values both
reasserts the superiority of heterosexuality and reinforces heteronormativity in
public spaces.
The film’s representations of the two intense fights probe the relationship
between queerness and marriage from the perspectives of gender and sexual-
ity, and highlight the dynamics between domestic and public spaces in the
regulation of queerness. The film problematizes the myth of romantic union by
depicting marriage as a normative and compulsory institution granting social
respectability and regulating sexual desires; however, while it initially character-
izes queerness as a domestic, private issue, it also showcases the mediation of
the domestic in public spaces. The preoccupation with the public regulation and
mediation of private lives and sexual identities reflects melodrama’s focus on
the negotiations between subjectivity and sociopolitical structures and ideolo-
gies. This point is further reflected in the film’s portrayal of Wang Ping’s suicide,
which serves as a tragic resolution of the escalating tension between queerness
and kinship.
Cut off from contact with his lover Jiang Cheng and alienated in his own home
from his wife Lin Xue, Wang, isolated and hopeless, takes off his wedding ring,
walks up a suburban hill, and slits his own wrist with a blade. The cinematic
language in this sequence is saturated with irony and violence. The scene shows
Wang leaving home in the early morning, and as he walks up the slope, the dawn
is breaking and golden sun rays begin to fill the frames. A tracking shot shows
Wang walking toward the sky, and he is eventually immersed in the glimmer
of dawn. These seemingly hopeful pictures abruptly cut to a medium close-up
of Wang’s pain-twisted face, followed by an extreme close-up that unabashedly
focuses on his wrist, portraying the cutting with unbearable weight and detail.
The violent resolution of Wang’s suicide functions as a narrative device to wrap
up the melodramas provoked by the discovery of his homosexual affair and,
more importantly, as the cinematic climax of these melodramas, in which the
direct confrontation between queerness and kinship leads to the literal as well as
symbolic exile and elimination of queerness itself.

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62 Queering Chinese Kinship

The tragic ending is not unique to Wang’s storyline in Spring Fever; it echoes the
convention of the “sad young man” in queer Sinophone cinema. As Berry (2000)
comments, the cinematic representation of lonely, tragic young men captures the
solitary status of Asian queers who are neither members of emergent gay and
lesbian communities nor members of gay and lesbian “chosen families” (189).
Such a solitary status derives from a Confucian understanding of the self “as
a socially and relationally defined role,” following the archetypal model of the
hierarchy of blood family roles (190). Within this system, “the only place of the
individual outside family roles is that of the outcast, the exile, the social derelict”
(190). In this light, Wang’s suicide in Spring Fever dramatizes the contradictions
between queerness and a social system that seeks to limit and deny its existence.
Kinship, in particular, is foregrounded as the central site where heteronormativ-
ity is reinforced and where private senses of sexuality and selfhood are publicly
regulated and sanctioned. The depiction of Wang’s violent and tragic ending in
the film not only enhances the depressive undertone that saturates the homo-
sexual affair’s portrayal; it also opens up a space for reflecting on the regulative
power wielded by Chinese marriage and kinship.

Sexual Storytelling and Local Cultural Intelligibility

While the portrayal of the love triangle of Jiang Cheng, Wang Ping, and Lin
Xue employs melodrama to expose the power dynamics between queerness
and kinship, another trio in the film, consisting of Jiang Cheng, Luo Haitao, and
his girlfriend Li Jing, is represented as a form of sexual storytelling, through
which the film explores novel forms of kinship. The term “sexual storytelling”
is proposed by Plummer (1994) as a prominent characteristic of the political and
moral life of late modern Western societies. “Every modern invention—mass
print, the camera, film video, the telephone, even the computer,” Plummer
suggests, “has helped provide a veritable erotopic landscape to missions of lives”
(101–2). The developments of media, means of communication, psychology, and
medicine, he notes, have encouraged the telling of sexual stories in both formal
and everyday occasions. As a result, the modern Western society has become
“the sexual storytelling, confessional society” (103). Sexual storytelling, in turn,
is underpinned by the flow of power (26). Power, Plummer writes,

is both negative – repressing, oppressing, depressing – and positive – con-

structive, creative, constitutive. It flows into lives making some abundant in
capacity (empowered, actualized) and others diminished (inferiorized, mar-
ginalized, weak, victims). . . . It flows through the habitual networks of social
activity, making some alive with possibilities (democratic, participatory) and
others infused with oppression and dominance (hierarchic, authoritarian).
And ultimately it flows through the whole negotiated social order – controlling
and empowering, closing and opening, making some things possible and
others things impossible. (26, emphasis in original)

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Localizing the Transnational 63

Plummer argues that sexual stories live in this flow of power: “The power to
tell a story, or indeed to not tell a story . . . is part of the political process” (26).
Meanwhile, the telling of stories may also empower lives, transform situations,
and shift social orders (27–28).
These discussions of sexual storytelling in Western contexts shed light on the
representations of queerness in Spring Fever. The film’s portrayal of queer desires
and relationships can be understood as a mode of fictional sexual storytelling
linked to a larger network of social power. The bold, explicit depictions of erotic
and sexual experiences in the film, in other words, function as an exploration
into the possibilities for queer embodiment in a negotiated social order. The
telling of such sexual stories, in turn, intervenes with existing social structures
and power relations of domination and subordination. It should be noted,
however, that Plummer’s (1994) conceptualization of sexual storytelling does
not concern itself with the power politics that enable the inception of a sexual
story in the first place. By probing the issue of queerness in contemporary China,
Spring Fever showcases the limits and probabilities in envisioning sexual stories
and life arrangements under local conditions of cultural intelligibility. I argue
that while the film engages the convention of sexual storytelling to portray and
explore queer issues, it also problematizes its utopian vision through represent-
ing a novel kinship pattern that is brought to dissolution in the local context.
In Spring Fever, the telling of erotic, bold, and transgressive sexual stories
revolves around the character Luo Haitao. Through the portrayal of the char-
acter’s bisexuality, the film blurs the constructed boundaries between hetero-
sexuality and homosexuality, and explores fluid expressions of sexual desires
and eroticism. This sexual and erotic fluidity is mainly reflected in the depiction
of Jiang Cheng’s apartment as a space that fuses homosexual and heterosexual
desires. In the film, Luo asks to borrow Jiang’s apartment to spend a night with
his girlfriend Li Jing. After Jiang’s consent, the scene cuts to the next morning
when the heterosexual couple wakes up in Jiang Cheng’s place. Luo Haitao,
in his tank top and underpants, starts dancing alone in the living room to the
Latino hit “Chilly Cha Cha.” The heterosexual erotic undertone heightens as
Luo’s girlfriend, the half-dressed Li, joins the dance, swinging with Luo and
pressing her body against his. This romantic dance between the couple is inter-
rupted by a knock on the door, followed by Jiang’s entrance. As the music goes
on, Li Jing leaves the apartment. Luo, who keeps on dancing, leads Jiang into
the bedroom, where he takes off his vest and throws himself into bed. The scene
ends with Jiang turning off the music and taking off his clothes, an act filled with
homoerotic tension.
What is interesting about this scene is the way in which various desires freely
flow in the confined space of Jiang’s apartment. Jiang’s place is first and foremost
represented as a homosexual space, suggested through the elaborate interior dec-
orations, which include a large vintage mirror, ornamental plants and flowers,

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64 Queering Chinese Kinship

and a purple curtain in the living room decorated with crystal butterflies. These
symbols correspond to the character of Jiang as the embodiment of homosexual-
ity in the film. Luo and Li’s flirtatious dance, therefore, creates a visual juxta-
position of homosexual space and heterosexual desire. Such a spatial sense of
juxtaposition is carried forward to the chronological when the sexual tension
between the straight couple seamlessly transitions to a homoerotic seduction in
an extremely compressed time span. Threaded by a five-minute dance track, this
scene, condensed in both space and time, moves swiftly across the boundaries of
sexualities. The stark portrayal of desires and eroticism in the representation and
juxtaposition of two sexual stories powerfully problematizes the constructed
binary of homosexuality and heterosexuality, and in so doing contests the rigid
categorization and regulation of sexualities by a heteronormative social order
while spotlighting the transformative potential of fluid, queer sexualities.
Apart from highlighting the fluidity of sexuality, the film also questions the
cultural and political conditions for envisioning sexual stories through the por-
trayal of the formation and dissolution of the queer trio of Luo, Jiang, and Li.
The trio is formed during a weekend road trip planned by Luo to take Jiang
away from Nanjing as a temporary escape after Wang’s suicide. As the two are
preparing to set off, Luo receives a call from Li Jing, who implores Lou to meet
her. The two men end up taking Li with them as they drive out of the city to an
adjacent town. The three maintain a peaceful yet awkward silence until they get
into a hotel room, after which Li goes out to get groceries. Upon returning, she
is confronted by Jiang and Luo affectionately kissing by the window. Helpless
and in complete shock, Li leaves the hotel room later that night, wandering into
a karaoke lounge. Noticing Li’s departure, Jiang follows her into the lounge,
watching her sympathetically as she goes through a teary emotional catharsis,
singing the popular folk song “Those Flowers” (Na Xie Hua’er), which laments
the passing of youth and the loss of the beloved. A sense of understanding and
rapport is achieved during the silent long take after the ending of the song, when
Jiang, clearly moved and apologetic, sits down side by side with Li and hands
her a box of tissues to wipe her tears. Jiang holds Li’s hand in the next shot, and
as the song restarts, Luo enters the room and begins to sing. For the duration of
the song, the tension among the three seems to arrive at a magical resolution;
they sing and dance with each other wearing grins on their faces. This newly
established harmony is confirmed by a series of jump cuts immediately follow-
ing the karaoke scene, which together paint a happy picture of the queer trio
playing in the pool, strolling through the woods, and leaning on one another on
a windy boat. Indeed, this trio—consisting of a gay man, a bisexual man, and a
heterosexual woman—almost surfaces as a utopian, queer form of kinship by
choice until it is brought to an abrupt end, when Li abandons the two men at
a gas station, leaving Jiang and Luo to a furious fight that leads to their final
breakup.

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Localizing the Transnational 65

The story of the queer trio is at once transgressive, utopian, and transient.
While it provocatively introduces a novel pattern of chosen kinship, its abrupt
ending seems to suggest the fragile, if not improbable, nature of such a pattern.
When the director Lou Ye is interviewed about the unexpected formation and
dissolution of the trio in the film, he explains: “There are rainbow moments in
the film. But they won’t last. We have to take the realities into consideration”
(LeTV 2009). Lou’s comments convey a consciousness of the premises for the
formation and endurance of a sexual story. Spring Fever’s representation of a
fleeting sexual story accentuates local conditions of cultural intelligibility in
imagining new identities, intimate arrangements, and kinship relations. In
her celebrated work Gender Trouble, Butler defines cultural intelligibility as a
“socially instituted and maintained” matrix that governs the norms of gender
identities (1990, 23–24). The matrix of cultural intelligibility functions by natu-
ralizing certain distinct categories while denouncing others as “developmental
failures or logical impossibilities” (24). To exist in a culture, then, one needs to be
intelligible and become a naturalized subject inside the matrix. In Spring Fever’s
depictions, the matrix of cultural intelligibility is contextualized in local cultural
and political climates, linked to the memories of a homophobic revolutionary
past and the more recent top-down installation of a New Confucian vision that
normalizes the heterosexual nuclear family. These cultural and political contexts
in contemporary mainland China eclipse the film’s representation of queer,
chosen kinship, and eventually brings the story to an end.
From the very beginning of the portrayal of the queer trio, visual symbols of a
revolutionary China already start to gain prominence. One example can be found
at the start of the trip when the three drive across Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge,
where the camera gives a long eye-level shot of the twin bridgeheads decorated
with sculptures of red flags. As the car moves forward, the shot changes into a
low-angle close-up, with the flag sculpture nearly filling the frame and conveying
a sense of crushing weight. This shot is followed by another close-up of similar
composition, this time focusing on the other statues on the bridge, which portray
determined Red Guards raising a copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
(Maozedong Yulu 毛澤東語錄) into the air. These statues are then represented
from various angles with several tracking shots, inserted between close-up shots
of Jiang, Luo, and Li. The strong visual presence of the statues in the film revital-
izes memories of a revolutionary past in Maoist China, a historical period when
expressions of gender and sexuality were rigorously governed by the CCP. As Li
Yinhe (2006) points out, the Cultural Revolution, of which the Red Guard figures
are an unmistakable symbol, “deserves a special mention in any discussion of
the regulation of homosexuality in the PRC” (83). During this period, “harsh
treatment and excessive administration penalties” were meted out to homosexu-
als, acts that promoted homophobia in Chinese society that can still be observed
in the present day (86). In this regard, the appearance of revolutionary symbols

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66 Queering Chinese Kinship

foreshadows the doomed fate of the queer trio by bringing to life an oppressive,
homophobic local history that has significantly shaped the landscape of queer
experiences in China, in the same way that the statues have shaped the skyline
of Nanjing.
While the visual cues of the bridge statues extend the film’s discussion of het-
eronormativity and cultural intelligibility into the past, during the trip the film
also alludes to contemporary conditions underlying Chinese queer existence. In
the kissing scene between Jiang and Luo, which is set in an unlit hotel room,
the only light source is a large flashing neon sign right outside the window by
which the two stand, filling the picture with a red gleam. Against the dark back-
ground, the characters on the sign are brought to the forefront, which reads Hexie
Binguan; literally, “Harmony Hotel.” In the context of the film’s production, the
phrase Hexie immediately denotes the nationwide CCP campaign that since 2004
has put forward a New Confucian socioeconomic vision of cultivating a “harmo-
nious society” in China. This vision, carried throughout Hu Jintao’s leadership
until 2012 and extended by his successor Xi Jinping, centers on the concept of
“harmonious family”—defined as a family “built upon marriage, connected by
blood, and recognized by social morality and the law”—as the ideal social unit
in China (“What Is” 2008). “Harmonious family” reasserts heterosexual marriage
as the only legitimate model of relatedness in China, and further grounds indi-
viduals in the system of Chinese kinship as the only channel for gaining social
recognition and cultural intelligibility. The scene of Jiang and Luo kissing by the
neon-lit window, therefore, is highly symbolic as well as ironic: while the light
illuminates their profiles and makes them visible in the film, it also effectively
eclipses their queer identities, rendering them culturally unintelligible and invis-
ible within a Chinese heteronormative epistemology.
This culturally unintelligible status of Chinese queers is further depicted sym-
bolically by the revenge scene toward the end of the film. Returning to Nanjing
alone, the disillusioned and forlorn Jiang wanders aimlessly in the city. On the
spur of the moment, Lin Xue rushes in out of nowhere, fighting Jiang with a
knife and cutting him near-fatally before escaping the scene. Jiang stumbles
down a crowded street with blood gushing from his neck, but receives no help
from passers-by, who merely glance at him with looks of confusion until he
finally collapses to the ground. In a scene that follows shortly after, the recov-
ered Jiang again passes a bustling street. Lying in the middle of the street now
is a dead yellow dog covered in blood, and once more the pedestrians give
confused glances at the dog, offering no help. The juxtaposition of these two
scenes draws a close comparison between Jiang and the dog. The image of the
dog is an allusion to the Chinese writer Yu Dafu’s (1984) similar-titled short
story, “A Night Deeply Drunk on Spring Breeze” (Chunfeng Chenzui de Wanshang
春風沉醉的晚上), which depicts the protagonist’s impoverished and dismal life
in Shanghai. In the story, the speaker confesses in a monologue: “Suicide! If only

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Localizing the Transnational 67

I have the courage. . . . The tram driver today! How did he curse me? Yellow
dog. Yellow dog is actually a good name” (25). Borrowed from Yu’s story, the
yellow dog, a degrading curse word, becomes the film’s metaphor for the status
of social marginalization and cultural unintelligibility. Much like the yellow dog
that is neglected and despised, the equally marginalized Jiang becomes a symbol
for struggling Chinese queers who are rejected by society, stuck “in the realm
of cultural unintelligibility like . . . incomprehensible ‘ghost[s]’ that haun[t]
mankind” (B. Zhang 2011, 307).
While sexual storytelling contributes to the bold portrayal of erotic desires
in a film that contests the rigid regulation of sexualities, Spring Fever’s utopian
vision is also problematized through the film’s close engagement with local con-
ditions of cultural intelligibility. By showing a utopian yet short-lived queer trio
outside blood kinship, the film directs attention to the power relations that not
only saturate the process of storytelling, but fundamentally shape a sexual story
in the first place. While transnational flows of sexual knowledges and politics
have given rise to new queer identities and new understandings of life trajecto-
ries in China, these new identities, intimate arrangements, and forms of kinship
relations are nevertheless conditioned, controlled, and limited by local histories,
cultural conventions, and politics. Spring Fever’s exploration of and experiment
with Chinese kinship, therefore, is at once transnationally informed and locally
rooted. This hybridized vision has led to the film’s reflections on both oppres-
sions inflicted by Chinese heteronormativity, and the practicality of Western-
originated queer politics and strategies in navigating local queer lives.

Ambiguity and Subversion: Queering Kinship as a Strategy

The hybridized vision in Spring Fever’s use of melodrama and its reconfiguration
of sexual storytelling—combining genres of Western origin while maintaining a
preoccupation with local heteronormative apparatuses—characterizes the film
with a simultaneous transnational and local outlook. Although the dissolution
of the utopian queer trio has installed a sense of disillusionment in the film, its
ending does create space for further negotiation. In the following discussion, I
detail how the film’s ambiguous ending enacts a queering that functions both
as a survival strategy for Chinese queer subjects and as a negotiative strategy
throughout the film’s production to cope with state power.
The ending of the film immediately follows the dead yellow dog scene, with
a tracking shot that re-introduces Jiang as the owner of a small clothes shop,
apparently starting a new life. The camera follows Jiang as he closes up the shop
after a day’s work and walks back into a residential building. As he opens the
door to his new home, the audience is greeted by the profile of a ponytailed
figure dressed in female clothes. When they talk, the figure reveals a puzzling
gender-neutral, slightly male voice. Lou’s rendering of the film’s resolution casts

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68 Queering Chinese Kinship

an interesting contrast to the earlier representations of tragedy, violence, and

death. In this closing scene, the film hints at hope; first, through the contrast
between death and survival. The yellow dog offers a visual and allegorical
parallel to Jiang’s tragedy; its death signifies the inevitable fate of queer people
like Jiang upon their banishment into cultural unintelligibility. This dead yellow
dog in the middle of the street is contrasted, however, with the alive and spirited
Jiang at the start of a new life, suggesting an alternative surviving strategy that
helps Jiang to rebuild his life and negotiate his queerness, highlighted by the
introduction of Jiang’s partner in the concluding scene. While it is clear that Jiang
and his partner have adopted a marriage-like and seemingly “normal” way of
life, the ambiguity surrounding the partner’s gender and sexuality disrupts the
sense of normality in this relationship. By deliberately concealing the partner’s
face, the director baffles his audience about the identity of this figure: maybe the
partner is a transgendered person, or maybe he is a cross-dressing man. This
uncertainty saturates Jiang’s new relationship with a sense of queerness, which
further contributes to a reimagination of the institution of marriage-kinship.
In his commentary on Butler’s theorization of cultural intelligibility, Daniel
Warner (2004) stresses that “queerness is not about living outside of the regula-
tory apparatus of the matrix of intelligibility, for there is no proper existence on
the outside. . . . Queerness means misperforming in such a way that ‘natural’
assumptions are called into question; . . . living as a series of nonsequiturs which
highlight that the supposed ‘natural’ relations in the matrix are merely construc-
tions” (325). In this light, the apparently normal marriage between a homosexual
man and a genderqueer person challenges the definition of marriage, revealing
it to be a malleable social construction. Jiang’s “return to the subcultural closet”
(Yue 2012, 104) at the end of the film, in other words, not only keeps alive his
embodied desires through “strategies of self-regulation” (104), but also show-
cases a negotiative tactic that effects a queering of Chinese kinship from within
the system itself.
At the same time, the strategy of queering also functions as an overarching
characteristic of the film. Instead of directly positioning queerness as a politi-
cal identity and pointing fingers at specific institutions or historical events that
are complicit in the oppression of Chinese queers, the film presents queerness
chiefly through family melodramas and personal sexual stories. Even when the
work brings social realities into the discussion, the political aspects are never
made explicit; they are only vaguely alluded to through visual symbols. While
this strategy has irritated Western viewers and critics—for whom the subtle
clues given in the film are apparently lost—it has clearly been effective for a
local subcultural audience, who applauded Spring Fever for its vivid portrayal
of contemporary Chinese queer experiences. The film’s obscure references
to politics betray the fact that although the film is underground and illegal, it
is not intended to be directly and politically oppositional. The film, in other

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Localizing the Transnational 69

words, is situated both outside China’s official system of studio production and
inside China’s political ecology, where no direct criticisms of official ideology
are tolerated in artistic expressions. This feature of Spring Fever corresponds
to Pickowicz’s (2006) description of Sixth Generation filmmakers’ careers as
moving between aboveground and underground, a point that is perhaps best
illustrated by Lou’s later cooperation with official studios. More importantly, the
obscure political references demonstrate the director’s creative negotiations with
the state; seemingly neutral symbols from the city landscape are appropriated
and resignified, rendered into visual clues that contribute to the reflection and
problematization of Chinese heteronormativity. Similar to what is suggested
by the film’s ending, then, a strategy of queering is implemented in the film’s
cinematic language, which weaves everyday scenes and symbols to hint at the
potential for subversion.

Conclusion

Spring Fever’s engagement with issues of queerness and Chinese heteronorma-

tivity, along with its sharply personal and alternative cinematic aesthetics, dis-
tinguishes it from official Chinese film discourses; by the time of Spring Fever’s
release in 2009 at Cannes, these were dominated by generously budgeted local
blockbusters, including Zhang Yimou’s lavish production Curse of the Golden
Flower (Mancheng Jindai Huangjinjia 滿城盡帶黃金甲, 2006) and the star-studded
propaganda film The Founding of a Republic (Jianguo Daye 建國大業, dir. Han
Sanping and Huang Jianxin, 2009). Reflecting Sixth Generation filmmakers’ inter-
ests in marginalized populations within urban spaces, Spring Fever’s depressing
and violently fragmented representation of Nanjing captures a general unease
and disorientedness of a new generation of Chinese youngsters who grew up
amid rapid economic growth and social transformations. These transforma-
tions are presented in the film through the availability of both commercialized
entities such as private detectives, underground gay bars, and karaoke lounges,
as well as new sexual identities and desires. Characterized by a prevailing sense
of confusion, Spring Fever offers at the same time a pointed problematization of
the suffocating control of Chinese heteronormativity over individual lives and
desires, and a rethinking of the effectiveness of globalized queer politics in the
local context. The film’s vision, distinctly shaped by the conditions of its produc-
tion, is at once underground, subcultural, transnational, and decidedly local.
As a queer Sinophone film, Spring Fever is situated at the margins of both
Chinese heteronormativity and global queer culture. While its transnational
background has facilitated its exploration into the topic of Chinese queerness,
the exposure to transnational queer politics, instead of entailing Western-style
politicized queer identities, shapes the film with a hybridized vision. The film
embeds queerness in local cultural history, political climate, and conditions of

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70 Queering Chinese Kinship

cultural intelligibility. Its intensely personal perspective foregrounds the interac-

tions with Chinese kinship as the focal point of Chinese queer experiences.
What the film brings to the fore is a queering of Chinese kinship not only as
a condition of queer existence and survival, but also as a negotiative strategy
in artistic expression and cultural production within contemporary China. This
strategy of queering, which characterizes both the ambiguous resolution in the
film’s ending and its overall cinematic language, is a product of the tensions
between transnational queer sensibilities and local cultural and political climates,
and between artistic expression and official control and censorship. Queering
Chinese kinship, in this sense, captures the negotiations and contestations in the
production and circulation of cultural products in postsocialist China, and teases
out the negotiations and contestations in the formation of Chinese public culture
against local and transnational backgrounds.

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 Part II: Popular Cultures

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4
Entertainingly Queer? Illiberal
Homonormativity and Transcultural
Queer Politics in Q Dadao

The last two chapters explored how queering Chinese kinship, both as a practice
in lived experience and as a strategy in artistic representations, constitutes an
important dimension in post-2008 Chinese public culture. Focusing on the inter-
actions between, and transformations of, queerness and kinship, I have argued
that dynamics between the two encompass negotiations and contestations in con-
temporary Chinese cultural production against a postsocialist and transnational
backdrop. The following three chapters continue this discussion by directing
attention to popular culture, with a focus on how commercial and mainstream
cultural production engages with the issue of queerness and kinship. I probe into
two genres that recently gained prominence in Chinese popular culture, transna-
tional musical theatre and online talk shows, and examine how their representa-
tions intersect transnational and regional cultural flows, local commercialization
and controlled cultural liberalization, as well as local and regional structures
of normativity and hegemony. This chapter examines the intersection between
commercial cultural products and kinship-based queer activism. Through a case
study of the popular transnational musical, Q Dadao, I show how concerns over
the relationship between queerness and kinship permeate both the musical’s
depictions on the stage and its engagement in queer activism off stage. By doing
so, I explore the process of queering Chinese kinship as a glocalized—at once
globalized and localized—queer articulation and strategy against the backdrop
of China’s illiberal political and cultural landscape, and outline its political
potentialities as well as its limitations.
In October 2013, the Chinese musical Q Dadao, an adaptation of the Broadway
hit Avenue Q (2003), premiered in Shanghai and soon became a phenomenal
success. It went on tour in its first run of 50 shows and swept metropolises
such as Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and provincial capitals including
Chengdu, Wuhan, and Nanjing. As of 2017, the musical had wrapped up three
national tours: it has visited more than 30 cities, staged over 300 performances,
and pulled in a total audience of 200,000; it is hailed by the press as “the national
musical” for its immense popularity (Kknews 2016).

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74 Queering Chinese Kinship

Most intriguing about Q Dadao’s mainstream success is its inclusion of an

openly gay protagonist who has become the highlight of the musical in both
its marketing campaigns and onstage presence. As an example of transnational
musical theater, Q Dadao offers an interesting case regarding the proliferation of
queer popular cultural content in China. Whereas research on Chinese queer-
ness has conventionally focused on independent, underground, and diasporic
works that are understood as counter-discourses against a repressive govern-
ment, recent scholarship has foregrounded the prominence of queerness in con-
temporary Chinese mainstream, commercial, and popular cultures (Bao 2018;
Engebretsen, Schroeder, and Bao 2015; Lavin, Yang, and Zhao 2017). This chapter
explores the transcultural and multilayered queer politics in Q Dadao. Situating
the musical in the illiberal political and cultural landscape of a globalizing China,
the chapter teases out the dialectics of liberalization and regulation as well as the
localization and transculturation beneath Chinese queer popular cultural pro-
duction. By doing so, this chapter emphasizes the complexity and ambivalence
that characterize glocalized queer articulations and strategies in China today.

Situating Chinese Queer Popular Culture

Queer popular culture in contemporary China is shaped by both transnational

flows of queer knowledge and sentiments and local genealogies and social-cul-
tural contexts, particularly conditions of media control and censorship. Modern
usage of the term “queer” was developed in the United States as a “capacious
and deliberately inclusive” signifier (Yep 2003) defined by its eccentric position-
ality vis-à-vis the normative. Despite queer theory’s anti-universalist impulse,
as P. Liu perceptively critiques, Euro-American-centric queer theory fails to
adequately understand non-Western nonnormative sexualities without reducing
them to peripheral sites of difference; thus, manifestations of queerness in Asia
and China constitute a significant field of inquiry through which the category
of queer can be transformed and expanded (P. Liu 2010). To speak of “Chinese
queer popular culture,” therefore, is to assume a critical stance that takes into
consideration both the complex circuits of queer globalizations (E.-B. Lim 2005)
and the multifarious ways in which antinormalizing practices are embodied in
local contexts. In this sense, Chinese queer popular culture is not simply trans-
national (i.e., engaged in cultural flows beyond geographical national borders)—
more importantly, it is transcultural, a concept that describes how “an unequal
encounter between cultures . . . creates new social and cultural forms, styles,
or practices” (Chakravartty and Zhao 2008, 12). This transcultural nature has
been a central concern of recent scholarship on Chinese queerness. Commenting
on the translation of queerness into the Chinese language, Song Hwee Lim
(2009) posits that using “queer” presupposes an “already translated condition,”
within which the terms of translation and the question of translatability have

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Entertainingly Queer? 75

to be problematized. Similarly, discussing queer lives and activism in China,

Hongwei Bao (2018, 31) argues that the translation of terms such as “queer”
into the Chinese context offers an opportunity to break the “monopoly” of the
“authentic,” thereby opening up opportunities to reconceptualize queerness. As
I highlight throughout this chapter, queer sensibilities, subjectivities, and politics
in contemporary Chinese popular culture, while connected to global circuits of
popular culture encounters, are distinctly shaped by local political and cultural
conditions. In what follows, I contextualize Chinese queer popular culture by
discussing the illiberal conditions underlying Chinese popular culture produc-
tion and the recent proliferation of queer sensibilities.
Whereas neoliberal-oriented development strategies rolled out by the govern-
ment have opened up China’s cultural market and facilitated transnational flows
of cultural content in the country (Keane 2009, 438–41), vigorous media control
and censorship continue to shape the Chinese cultural landscape. Popular culture
thus develops in a characteristically illiberal environment in China; I borrow the
term “illiberal” from political scientists, who observe the rise of a politics that
defies the constitutional limits of state power (Zakaria 1997). China is regarded
as an illiberal state in that its self-positioning and self-understanding stand at
odds with liberal principles such as multiparty electoral democracy, individual-
ity, human rights, and so on (Vukovich 2019). Instead, the country is guided by
a philosophy of authoritarian developmentalism, which can be boiled down to
the two catchphrases “development is the hard truth” and “stability [under CCP
leadership] trumps everything else” (D. Yang 2017). Such a framework attaches
absolute value to economic development while lending legitimacy to state regu-
lation and interference. Within this illiberal framework, the Chinese government
evokes a “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” (Breslin 2006; Harvey
2005; Rofel 2007), where neoliberal elements are “interdigitated with authoritar-
ian centralized control” (Harvey 2005, 120). This new technology of governing
has profoundly changed both private lives and public culture in China: Ong and
Zhang succinctly term it “socialism from afar” in their 2008 book, a concept that
reflects the complex intertwining of socialist structural legacies and neoliberal
logics, where “citizens gain increased latitude to pursue self-interests that are at
the same time variously regulated or controlled by the party-state” (4).
A similar intertwining can be observed in the post-2008 development of
China’s cultural industry. In 2009, the State Council envisioned the domestic
cultural industry as “a new growth engine for restructuring the Chinese indus-
trial structure” (quoted in S. Kim 2015, 14). In order to achieve this goal, the
government carried out strategies such as speeding up major projects, boosting
the size of domestic cultural industry, and actively attracting foreign capital by
lowering entry barriers (14). However, cultural industry in China remains a
state-controlled project, a “planned marriage” that has more to do with the accu-
mulation of capital than with the ideas of creativity and freedom of expression

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76 Queering Chinese Kinship

(Keane 2009, 441). Consequently, while transnational cultural products have

gained increased access to the Chinese market, they are almost invariably subject
to censorship by the Chinese government.
This illiberal framework of concurrent economic liberalization and cultural
and ideological control fundamentally shape Chinese queer popular culture. In
her discussions about the impact of illiberal governance in Singapore, Yue (2007)
points out that the country’s central ideology of illiberal pragmatism, which
“embodies a vigorous economic development orientation . . . as the fundamen-
tal basis,” creates a foundation for the survival and development of local queer
cultures by opening up ambivalent spaces “between cultural liberalization and
sexual surveillance” (150–52). Whereas Chinese illiberalism is different from its
Singaporean counterpart in terms of genealogy and political implications, con-
temporary Chinese queer popular culture likewise hinges upon the country’s
simultaneous liberal and nonliberal conditions. The recent proliferation of queer
sensibilities in popular culture in China is linked to Chinese audiences’ exposure
to an unprecedented amount of transnational cultural products, an outcome of
economic opening and partial liberalization of the domestic cultural market.
Under these circumstances, Euro-American bromance narratives converge
with localized Boys’ Love subculture to produce a spectrum of queer expres-
sions and subtexts. Bromance narratives gained wide currency in China through
imported television series and films: Sohu.com (2015), one of the largest Chinese
online video streaming sites, recorded a monthly average of 25 million visitors
during the second quarter of 2015, and those viewers spent a total of 30 million
hours per month watching Western TV dramas. Among the most-loved imported
shows is the crime drama series Sherlock. The show’s immense popularity is
largely derived from its portrayal of the curious relationship between the two
protagonists, the “clipped, waspish” Holmes (played by Benedict Cumberbatch)
and “doe-eyed, dependable Watson” (played by Martin Freeman), whose subtle
chemistry burns into “a full-flown bromance” as the story develops (Strudwick
2013). Although the show has only released four seasons with thirteen episodes
as of 2021, it has established a wide fan base in China, attracting millions of online
viewers (French 2020). Similar representations of intimate relationships between
two male leads are featured in imported Hollywood blockbusters. Most notably,
the intense bond between two leading male characters in Marvel’s Avengers
movies, Captain America and Thor, became trending topics among Chinese
viewers. Fan-created pictures featuring them affectionately cuddling each other
were widely circulated on Chinese social media, and press reports about the
movie series revolved around the relationship between these male leads.
Ken Feil (2014) comments that the popularity of bromance in the United
States symbolizes the assimilation of queer perspectives into popular culture
by way of “instanc[ing] a culmination of hetero-male appropriations and nego-
tiations of gay taste . . . [that] play out loudly at the thresholds of gay/straight

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Entertainingly Queer? 77

and feminine/masculine” (173). Whereas in the US context bromance narratives

tend to focus more on homosocial bonds in which queerness serves more as an
undertone, in China, they converge with the local Boys’ Love (BL) subculture to
produce sensibilities that encompass a much wider range of queer representa-
tions and interpretations. Boys’ Love or Danmei 耽美 is “a genre of male-male
romance created by and for women and sexual minorities” (L. Yang and Xu 2017,
3). First introduced into China in the early 1990s via a large quantity of pirated
Japanese manga (L. Yang and Xu 2017, 4), BL was further popularized locally
both through the dissemination of online literature and video (Jin Feng 2009;
Xu and Yang 2013) and through its convergence with Western media culture.
As L. Yang and Xu (2017) note, although three prominent circles—the Japanese
circle, the Chinese circle, and the Euro-American circle—can be observed, there
is “no hard-and-fast boundary” between these circles and they are constantly
cross-fertilizing each other (8). Consequently, local BL culture has “successfully
merged with a diverse range of local and global media and celebrity cultures, and
developed into a transnational, all-inclusive, and female-dominated meta-fan
culture” (3).
In his discussions of the encounter between Western bromance fandom
and Chinese BL culture, John Wei (2014) points out that while the global cir-
culation of texts has made it increasingly difficult to draw a line between the
two, their hybridization has clearly extended the scope and diversified the aes-
thetics of queer appropriations of popular cultural products (28–30). As far as
media production and consumption are concerned, the convergence between
bromance and Boys’ Love has also engendered diverse ways in which queer-
ness is expressed and consumed, ranging from explicit portrayals of homosexual
relationships to fantasies of imagined romance in same-sex friendships. These
varied modes of expressions of queer sensibilities have opened spaces for the
circulation of queer media products. The incorporation of queer sensibilities into
Chinese mainstream media cultures became apparent in the local gay-themed
web drama Addicted (Shangyin 上癮, 2016). Adapted from a Chinese BL novel,
the drama follows the romantic relationship between two high school boys. With
little prior promotion, the series’ first episode attracted over 10 million views
in the first day of its online premiere, making it one of the most popular videos
in the history of the Chinese internet. In less than a month, the drama garnered
100 million views, generated social media buzz, and was widely reported on by
the mainstream press (Campbell 2016). The unprecedented success of this gay
drama makes clear that queer sensibilities are being increasingly embraced by the
Chinese audience; however, the explicit portrayal of homosexual relationships
apparently discomfited regulators, who decided to remove the series from all
Chinese video streaming sites before it wrapped up its first season. Two months
after the abrupt disappearance of Addicted from the Chinese internet, the State

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78 Queering Chinese Kinship

Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT),1

China’s official censoring body, issued a new set of guidelines for video content
that was widely interpreted as an official response to the huge impact of the
gay-themed drama. The guidelines stated that “no television drama shall show
abnormal sexual relationships and behaviors, such as incest, same-sex relation-
ships, sexual perversion, . . . and so on” (quoted in Ellis-Peterson 2016, par. 4).
These illiberal and oppressive state interventions are not rare in the production
and circulation of queer media content in China. In 2018, for example, a female BL
author received a ten-and-a-half-year prison sentence for breaking the obscenity
law by portraying homosexuality and “sexual perversion” (Morrissy 2018). As
Mark McLelland (2015) points out, obscenity legislation is broadly interpreted in
China to include depictions of various sexualities that fall outside the normative,
familial rhetoric purveyed by the state, such as homosexual content and incestu-
ous relationships—but it is exactly this nonconforming nature of Boys’ Love that
fuels its popularity (126–27). In his analysis of internet literature and culture in
China, Hockx (2015, 11) posits that censorship in China is never considered an
exception to cultural life, but an “integral component” of it; while censorship
persists, it is also contended with, circumvented, or creatively resisted. These
observations are echoed by the continued flourishing of queer sensibilities in
Chinese media cultures as video producers worked their way around censor-
ship. Six months after the announcement of the new guidelines, for example,
another BL novel-based web series, Love Is More Than a Word (Shi Ru Bu Shi Ding
識汝不識丁, 2016), managed to circumvent official censorship. The series pitched
itself as an “anti-corruption” drama in line with state propaganda, and care-
fully avoided direct references to homosexuality. While these attempts to veil
the show’s homosexual theme did not hinder viewers from enjoying the queer
sensibilities it conveyed, they contributed to securing the series’ public exposure.
The drama was featured on the major Chinese video streaming portal Youku and
became one of the most-watched web series that year.
Apart from explicitly and implicitly homosexual-themed dramas, queer
sensibilities also saturate local heterosexual-themed dramas through bromance
narratives. A typical example is the historical drama Nirvana in Fire (Langya
Bang 瑯琊榜, 2015), which tells the story of how Mei Changsu, a survivor of a
family massacre who has changed his appearance and hidden his identity, aids
the unwitting Prince Jing, Mei’s childhood soulmate and best friend, to claim
the throne and avenge Mei’s family. Two popular young idols were cast as the
male leads, whose shared tragic past and intensifying new comradeship wove
an engaging bromance subplot. A bromance narrative was foregrounded in
the series’ promotional campaign, in which the production team encouraged

1. The SAPPRFT, which was directly under the State Council, was abolished in 2018. Its suc-
cessor, the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), is housed under the CCP
central committee’s Publicity Department (Brzeski 2018).

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Entertainingly Queer? 79

audiences to read the lead characters’ relationship as more than merely mascu-
line camaraderie; for instance, the marketing team released a series of tantaliz-
ing promotional posters featuring intimate interactions between the two main
characters. In one of these posters, one holds an open ring box as the other shows
off an enormous ring on his finger: although this apparent gay proposal scene is
clearly intended to be ludicrous, it reflects the centrality of queer sensibilities in
the show’s marketing strategies. Tactically combining bromance narratives with
BL aesthetics, the mainstream media product manages to tap into Chinese audi-
ences’ taste for queer sensibilities without running afoul of the state’s prohibition
against on-screen homosexual content. The success of the series showcases the
expressions, negotiations, and consumption of queer sensibilities in the illiberal
contexts of Chinese popular culture.
The rise of queer sensibilities in Chinese popular culture, in short, is under-
pinned by accelerated transnational cultural flows and persistent local media
censorship. The convergence of Euro-American bromance and localized BL
culture, in particular, has created multifarious and flexible ways in which queer
sensibilities are conveyed and consumed in Chinese popular cultural products.
As queer sensibilities become an increasingly welcomed aesthetic, it is incor-
porated into mainstream and popular cultural products. Next, I investigate the
cultural politics in this recent proliferation of queer sensibilities by taking a close
look at the transculturally adapted Chinese Broadway musical Q Dadao.

From Avenue Q to Q Dadao

Avenue Q is a coming-of-age story that follows Princeton, a recent college

graduate, in his search for his life’s purpose. Unemployed and with no work
experience or skills, the lost Princeton has no choice but to rent a cheap apartment
on Avenue Q, a remote street located in “an outer-outer borough of New York
City” (Lopez, Marx, and Whitty 2010, 2). There, he meets his new neighbors: two
monsters, including Kate Monster, a kindergarten teaching assistant aspiring
to open a monster-exclusive school to protect monsters from social prejudice,
and Trekkie Monster, a surly recluse who stays in his apartment all day long
searching the internet for porn; Rod, a Republican investment banker who has a
secret crush on his slacker roommate, Nicky; Brian, a laid-off comedian engaged
to Christmas Eve, a Japanese therapist with no clients; and Gary Coleman, the
building superintendent. The neighborhood is visited by Lucy the Slut, a flirta-
tious and seductive chanteuse. By putting human and puppet characters on the
same stage, the musical alludes to the popular children’s show Sesame Street even
as it presents darker and more complicated adult themes such as racism, sex,
pornography, and homosexuality.
Opened off-Broadway and shortly thereafter moved to Broadway in 2003,
Avenue Q is the winner of three Tony Awards and is one of the longest-running

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80 Queering Chinese Kinship

shows in Broadway history (Avenueq.com 2020). While the triumph of Avenue

Q has given a strong impetus to the production of the Chinese version, the very
qualities that contributed to the show’s Broadway success—especially its engage-
ment with topics related to sexuality—have become key points of negotiation in
Avenue Q’s translation and adaptation. The production of Q Dadao is connected
to the boom of Broadway musicals in China: although Broadway musicals were
first introduced to the Chinese stage in the late 1980s (Sissi Liu 2016, 553), it was
only recently that they were imported at a large scale and embraced by a bur-
geoning market. In 2004, notably, the Ministry of Culture established China Arts
and Entertainment Group (CAEG), the largest state-owned creative enterprise,
with the aim of transforming China’s cultural and artistic institutions. CAEG
soon imported a number of original Broadway musicals including Cats, Rent,
and West Side Story, all of which have been enthusiastically welcomed. Chinese
audiences’ growing taste for musical theater has made China an increasingly
lucrative market: from 2016 to 2018, China witnessed the national tours of more
than a dozen original Broadway musicals. In the meantime, localized versions of
Broadway musicals have been gaining popularity.
While Q Dadao is obviously part of this recent trend of importing and localiz-
ing Broadway musicals, it is also distinctive from other productions for its explicit
representations of queerness, which is itself a comparatively recent development
in Broadway musical theater (Wolf 2008, 9). As Stacy Wolf (2008) notes, in the
conventions of Broadway musical theater, “the structure is thoroughly gendered
and the celebration of heterosexual romance is its very purpose” (9). As a result,
“the architecture of the performance depends on contrasting physicalities of
staged and choreographed bodies and contrasting sounds of male and female
voices in harmony” (9). By contrast, in Avenue Q, an extended subplot is dedi-
cated to the representation of homosexual identity and romance, with several
musical numbers performed by a male duo specifically dedicated to the issue of
being gay. In Wolf’s words, Avenue Q stands out in Broadway because it “nod[s
to] the nonheterosexual identities and relationships, an ideological gesture that
speaks to [Broadway’s] (successful) intention to address musical theater’s wide
range of spectators and even make them feel politically progressive” (2006, 216).
Such a celebration of gay identity, however, posed challenges for Q Dadao’s
Chinese producers. To negotiate censorship pressures and ensure commercial
success, Q Dadao employed a two-pronged strategy in its marketing campaigns:
it distanced itself from Chinese social realities to evade censorship, even as it
tapped into the popularity of queer sensibilities to attract mainstream audiences.
Hilary Baker (2011) suggests that Avenue Q’s success is primarily due to its
effective branding and marketing to young audiences (73). Likewise, branding
techniques were actively utilized in Q Dadao, whose main poster (Figure 4.1),
based on the Broadway logo, directs attention to an enormous letter Q that
occupies half of the picture: the face of a yellow puppet appears in the center

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Entertainingly Queer? 81

Figure 4.1: Q Dadao’s main poster. Courtesy of Seven Ages.

of the letter. A furry yellow background extends beyond the letter to cover the
entire poster, giving it a bright and sharp look. Beneath the letter Q are Chinese
characters in large, bold fonts, reading “Broadway Musical Q Dadao,” and a
square red stamp that says “Not Suitable for Children” partially overlaps the
black characters at the bottom.
Q Dadao’s poster reflects two dimensions of the show’s branding strategies.
First, it betrays a pronounced self-exoticizing strategy, evidenced by the inser-
tion of the words “Broadway Musical,” clearly defining the show as a foreign
production. While this branding as an imported Broadway musical undoubt-
edly aims at attracting cosmopolitan-aspiring audiences, it also allows Q Dadao
to maintain a tactical distance from Chinese social realities and mobilize local
occidentalist imaginaries of “the West” as “open” and “individualistic” to justify
its depictions of sensitive, sexuality-related topics. Second (and more impor-
tantly), Q Dadao’s marketing strategy is centered on its portrayal of sensitive,
sexuality-related issues as its major selling point, best illustrated by the red “Not
Suitable for Children” stamp, the most eye-catching element on the poster. Apart
from serving the practical purpose of cautioning against the show’s adult theme,
the stamp highlights the musical’s unconventional and explicit contents. This
strategy was taken even further in the musical’s promotional campaigns, for
which it released a series of posters. Adopting a minimalistic design with large-
font, black characters against the show’s signature yellow backgrounds, these
posters contained nothing but provocative slogans with conspicuous queer sen-
sibilities. One poster, for instance, features the title of its most famous number: “If
You Were Gay, It’d Be Okay” (Figure 4.2) Another poster, which uses an excerpt

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82 Queering Chinese Kinship

Figure 4.2: Q Dadao’s promotional Figure 4.3: Q Dadao’s promotional

poster. Courtesy of Seven Ages. poster. Courtesy of Seven Ages.

from the musical’s coming out scene, proclaims “I Am Not Afraid Anymore. I’m
Gay!” (Figure 4.3). The special emphasis on homosexuality reveals Q Dadao’s
efforts to tap into the increasing popularity of queer sensibilities in China; in
short, Q Dadao’s two-pronged branding strategy establishes the show as a
“Western” production that straightforwardly portrays homosexuality. Tactically
divorcing itself from Chinese social realities, the Chinese musical’s marketing
campaign manages to convey clear queer sensibilities to attract audiences while
evading the blow from censoring authorities.

Staging Homosexuality: Displaced Representations

Whereas Q Dadao’s creative negotiative tactics successfully helped the produc-

tion retain most of Avenue Q’s gay elements—the coming-out references, the
gay subplot, and the male duo performances—its representations of queerness
remain shaped by local geopolitical conditions. Avenue Q’s incorporation of
the gay subplot is highly specific to the New York context (Baker 2011, 80); the
production took advantage of New York’s liberal and LGBTQ-informed social
environment to stage a comical and celebratory account of the character Rod’s
struggles with, and final declaration of, his homosexuality. The gay subplot is
introduced immediately following the musical’s opening scene, and starts with
the confrontation between Rod and Nicky in their shared apartment, where Rod
has been enjoying a peaceful afternoon alone with his “favorite book, Broadway
Musicals of the 1940s” (Lopez, Marx, and Whitty 2010, 15). Nicky, suspicious of

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Entertainingly Queer? 83

Rod’s sexuality, brings up the topic of being gay, which makes Rod nervous and
defensive. The interaction between the two is represented in the cheerful and
dramatic number “If You Were Gay,” which features Nicky constantly reassur-
ing Rod that “[it]’d be okay” if he was gay, as Rod tries desperately to escape
the uncomfortable conversation. This tension between concealment and rev-
elation is heightened by Rod’s solo number at the end of Act One, where in an
attempt to refute Nicky’s speculation of him as “a closeted homosexual” (83), he
fabricates a story of his “girlfriend, who lives in Canada” (84). In the number,
Rod narrates an account of a girlfriend whose name is “Alberta” and “lives in
Vancouver,” and attempts to convince the other characters of his “heterosexual-
ity” by commenting that she “sucks like a Hoover” and that he “can’t wait to eat
her pussy again” (83–84). The use of casually made-up names and the insertion
of awkward sexual metaphors only comically confirm Rod’s homosexuality to
the knowing audience. The homosexual storyline is wrapped up toward the end
of the musical with a public spectacle, where Rod solemnly calls for everyone’s
attention, announcing that he has “confronted [his] fears and won” and has a
few things to say: “Number one: I apologize for being so hotheaded and dif-
ficult. It was all because—and this is number two—hold your applause, every-
body—I, Rod, am gay” (138). Nicky immediately welcomes this declaration of
gay identity and discloses that he has found Rod a boyfriend (139), a revelation
that concludes the gay subplot on a happy note.
The depiction of the gay subplot in Avenue Q is dependent on audiences’
abilities to take note of gay symbols in the show, and to sympathize with and
participate in the final celebration of disclosure of gay identity. Throughout the
storyline, the comical tension rests on the contrast between a knowing audience
and a character trying desperately to hide his sexuality, which requires the
audience to pick up clues about Rod’s homosexuality despite his continuous
denials. One clue is Rod’s favorite book, Broadway Musicals of the 1940s: laden
with a sense of self-reflexivity, the title of the book alludes to the stereotype
that Broadway musicals are closely associated with gay people, a piece of infor-
mation that would only make sense to theatergoers familiar with New York
Broadway culture. In the Chinese version of the musical, the reference to Rod’s
favorite book is changed to a collection of the women’s fashion magazine Elle
in an awkward attempt to imply homosexuality through symbols of femininity.
Moreover, the gay subplot draws heavily on liberationist identity politics: the
gay storyline fits in the larger coming-of-age framework of the musical because
of the liberationist legacy that conceives coming out as a “linear process” that
moves from immaturity and self-hate to the heathy development of a sexual
identity (Chirrey 2003, 36). In other words, like the other characters who struggle
through bewilderment and confusion to claim maturity, Rod’s coming-out
journey also portrays a process of growing up that ends with the declaration
of independence and mature adulthood. In other words, the tolerant social

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84 Queering Chinese Kinship

environment and liberationist tradition in New York culture play vital roles
in accommodating the musical’s gay subplot and in the categorization of the
show’s genre as a musical comedy with a happy ending.
This embeddedness of Avenue Q’s depiction of the gay subplot in New
York’s liberationist LGBTQ history poses questions about issues of translation
and translatability in its travel to China. The concept of “cultural translation”
provides useful insights here. Naoki Sakai points out that translation functions as
“a poietic social practice that institutes a relation at the site of incommensurabil-
ity” (2006, 75). Rey Chow (2005) also argues that the translation of texts from one
culture to another serves as a form of transformation and transaction that charac-
terizes the “coeval” development of cultures in the vast traffic of global popular
culture encounter (176). Cultural translation thus signifies the generation of new
texts and new meanings in translation’s endeavor toward linguistic equivalence
in a world characterized by the fundamental unevennessamong different lan-
guages and cultures. While the plot, characters, and musical numbers in Q Dadao
appear almost identical to the Broadway production, they are in fact products
of a process of resignification. A close comparative reading of the score “If You
Were Gay,” one of the musical’s most well-known numbers, illustrates this point.
The lyrics below are from the Broadway and Chinese version, respectively:

Broadway version: Chinese version (my literal translation):

(Nicky) If you were gay, (Nicky) If you were gay,
That’d be okay. That’d be okay.
I mean ‘cuz hey It really won’t matter.
I’d like you anyway. ‘cuz we are good brothers.
Because you see I’m not boasting,
if it were me, If I were you,
I would feel free I’d bravely come out,
to say and admit
that I was gay. That I was gay.
But I’m not gay. But I’m not gay.
... ...
If you were queer, If you were brokeback,
I’d still be here. I’d still face it.
Year after year, Year after year,
because you’re dear to me. I’ll be your company.
And I know that you And I believe that you
would accept me too would not despise me
if I told you today: if I told you
hey, guess what, hey, guess what,
I’m gay! I’m gay!
But I’m not gay. But I’m not gay.
(Lopez, Marx, and Whitty 2010, 16–17)

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Entertainingly Queer? 85

At a glance, the two versions are very similar—but a closer examination of

diction would reveal that the liberationist undertone in the original score has
been displaced in the Chinese translation. This displacement is most notable
in the two choruses. The first chorus, which in English goes “If you were gay,
that’d be okay. I mean ‘cuz, hey, I’d like you anyway,” is a clear encouragement
for coming out through a reassurance of friendship and solidarity, with the line
“I’d like you anyway” implying a promised acceptance of the new, anticipated
identity. In the Chinese translation, the chorus has become “If you were gay,
that’d be okay. It really doesn’t matter, ‘cuz we are good brothers.” The change of
the reassuring, affirmative “I’d like you anyway” into the ambiguous, passive “it
really doesn’t matter” displays a trivializing tendency in its depiction of coming
out. Described as “not to matter,” the act of coming out is made negligible
and inconsequential. This point is then complicated by the addition of kinship
lexicons. Whereas the Broadway production’s line “I’d like you anyway” conveys
a pronounced plural liberalist logic, it appears impossible to translate this con-
notation directly into Chinese (i.e., literally wo hui yiyang xihuan ni 我會一樣喜歡
你) without sounding awkward or altering the original meaning. Consequently,
in the Chinese musical, a new metaphor of “good brothers” is introduced to
mediate the translation by hinting at a similar sense of solidarity. The incorpora-
tion of such a metaphor has two implications. First, it demonstrates the extent
to which the Chinese language is saturated by kinship lexicons, so much so that
it is very difficult to make language sound natural without them. Second, the
musical’s introduction of a kinship-based unit as the premise for a declaration
of gay identity suggests a different model in envisioning homosexual identities
in China, one in which kinship relations play a fundamental role. In this sense,
the Chinese translation of the first chorus displaces the liberationist rhetoric of
sexual diversity and tolerance in the original Broadway version, and implies
local approaches to homosexuality.
The Chinese score’s reconfiguration of liberationist identity politics is further
demonstrated by the second chorus, with the English version going “If you were
queer, I’d still be here” and the corresponding Chinese translation as “If you
were brokeback, I’d still face it.” The English version makes a clear reference
to the famous Queer Nation slogan “We’re here! We’re Queer! Get used to it!”,
which takes an aggressive and confrontational stance in its advocacy for visibility
and elimination of homophobia. This overt liberationist undertone is displaced
and depoliticized in the Chinese chorus. The political term “queer,” in particu-
lar, is replaced by the metonymy “brokeback” (duanbei 斷背), borrowed from
the Taiwanese American director Ang Lee’s 2005 Hollywood gay-themed film
Brokeback Mountain. Ironically, although the term “queer” itself has been intro-
duced into the Chinese language as ku’er 酷兒 and is widely used by scholars
and activists (E. Chen 2005, 1), Lee’s movie never officially made it into cinemas
because of its explicit portrayal of homosexuality. Therefore, the translation

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86 Queering Chinese Kinship

“brokeback” here is used as a decontextualized symbol of homosexuality that

is more aligned with a series of Chinese euphemisms for homosexuality, includ-
ing fentao 分桃, duanxiu 斷袖, and longyang 龍陽, and less suggestive of concrete
LGBTQ politics. By avoiding using the political term ku’er, the Chinese musical
constructs on its stage a depoliticized, benign image of homosexuality that is no
longer linked to the Euro-American liberationist rhetoric; it mainly contributes
to the musical’s dramatic and comical effects.
Since explicit portrayal of homosexuality remains vigorously censored in
China, the musical has to avoid the overt political connotations of the Broadway
version and instead construct a depoliticized gay image. Such a rendering not
only enables Q Dadao to evade state censorship, it also contributes to its branding
as a transnational musical comedy that promises to surprise and entertain. One
might be quick to criticize Q Dadao’s negotiative strategy as instrumentalizing
and commodifying queer identities and sensibilities. While this is arguably true,
one should not lose sight of the multilayered cultural politics in the staging of Q
Dadao, especially since the inclusion of queer images and narratives in dominant
culture has far-reaching influences on social recognition. In postsocialist China
in particular, “culture has replaced politics as the site on which citizenship is
meaningfully defined, sought, conferred or denied” (Rofel 1999, 457–58). The
cultural politics in Q Dadao thus calls for further scrutiny.

Thinking through Blood Kinship

Q Dadao’s portrayal of an apparently depoliticized gay image on the stage does

not keep it from encompassing a far more multilayered and complex queer
politics. I would like to highlight this intricacy through a personal anecdote as
an audience member of Q Dadao’s Shenzhen tour in 2014. Halfway through the
show, when the storyline reached Kate’s dream of building a monster school, the
performers broke the fourth wall by walking into the audience for fundraising,
the diegetic purpose of which was to collect money for the school. The fundrais-
ing lasted for a short while as performers patrolled the aisles row by row, asking
audiences to donate. It was not until the very end of the show—the performance
concluded, the curtains drawn, and the audience preparing to leave—that an
announcement was broadcast saying that all donations would go to PFLAG
China, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to coordinating relationships
between homosexual children and their parents.
This announcement was a clear marker of the multiple levels of cultural
politics in Q Dadao, where apparent depoliticization in the performance stood in
contrast to offstage activism with an explicitly political agenda. Central to this
distinction is blood kinship relations: whereas the absence of blood kinship func-
tions as a prerequisite for constructing a depoliticized gay figure on the stage,
the blood family becomes central in imagining and articulating queerness in the

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Entertainingly Queer? 87

musical’s offstage campaign. This centrality is well demonstrated by the activist

agenda promoted by the musical’s NGO partner, PFLAG China: the majority of
PFLGA China’s core members are parents with queer children who have decided
to advocate for a more tolerant attitude toward queerness within the Chinese
family. The NGO’s activities reflect locally specific tactics for queer survival and
activism. As W. Wei (2015) comments,

The success of its family-oriented strategy is facilitated by the special legiti-

macy attached to the family rhetoric in the Chinese society. . . . On the one
hand, the strategic utilization of discourses on family and kinship makes it
easier for PFLAG China to gain recognition from the mainstream. . . . On the
other hand, . . . compared to other potential West-originated discursive strate-
gies, . . . the family discourse appears milder to the government, which has
helped PFLAG China to gain more space in coping with state control. (193)

While W. Wei writes positively about the effectiveness of PFLAG China’s

approach to activism, he also points out that its close engagements with parents
and “family values” have led to the promotion of a highly normative gay image
characterized by the traits of being “out, healthy, and monogamous” (197).
However, the reinforcement of these traits, W. Wei argues, risks engendering
new forms of exclusion and discrimination within the queer community (197).
W. Wei’s concerns are exemplified by PFLAG China’s national conferences.
According to a report on its official website about a June 2016 conference in
Shanghai, some 600 LGBTQ people and their families and friends attended; the
event facilitated discussions about dilemmas faced by sexual minorities and their
practical solutions (He 2016a)). The hottest topics, the report recounts, included
“how to ensure property rights for same-sex partners,” “how to raise children
as LGBTQ parents,” and “how do parents accept sexual minority children” (He
2016a; He 2016b; He 2016c). In a discussion about raising offspring, for instance,
PFLAG China assured LGBTQ people that they were more than competent for
the social role of parents, and invited a gay man who just became the proud
dad to a pair of baby twins. Asserting that he could provide the best education
and care for his children, this professor remarked that he was confident that
his children would face far less social pressure when they grew up (He 2016a).
Despite its optimism, the discussion—consciously or unconsciously—left impor-
tant aspects of Chinese gay experiences unexplained. For example, the discus-
sion deliberately avoided the question of how the gay professor got the babies
in the first place in a country where surrogacy is illegal. Furthermore, although
it promises a brighter and more tolerant future, it does not explicate how social
transformation would be effected. On the whole, then, the political agenda of
PFLAG China places heavy emphasis on individual efforts instead of the social
changes required to reconcile the conflicts between homosexuality and Chinese
kinship. It encourages parents to accept their children’s homosexuality with love
and tolerance, and concomitantly urges LGBTQ children to strive to negotiate

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88 Queering Chinese Kinship

with legal, societal, and cultural restrictions in order to better incorporate into
the system of Chinese kinship.
I would like to suggest two dimensions in Q Dadao’s cooperation with
PFLAG China in invoking LGBTQ politics. First, such politics raises concerns
of homonormativity, defined by Lisa Duggan (2002) as the emergence of a queer
culture anchored in domesticity and consumption while sustaining dominant
heteronormative social structures. The partnership between Q Dadao and PFLAG
China is shaped by the musical’s targeting of the Chinese middle class, who are
defined by their urban status, larger income, and purchasing power. This heavy
neoliberalist background raises questions of whether queer popular cultural
products like Q Dadao enrich or impoverish local imaginings of queerness. In
the meantime, however, dismissing the show as insignificant to queer politics
risks neglecting the queer potential of Q Dadao’s cultural politics. In the Chinese
context, the negotiations between kinship ideology and heteronormativity are
complex and ambivalent, defying the simple equation of returning to kinship
as heteronormative. As Engebretsen (2015) suggests in her analysis of queer
activism in China,

Due to the political situation in China, queer public participation remains

dependent on assimilationist strategies, at least on (sur)face level. Despite
the general absence of confrontational political rhetoric, queer modalities of
public visibility and participation are decidedly political. . . . [A]ctivists use
nuanced modes of articulation and develop meaningful ways to further their
political agendas while minimizing the risk of censorship and violence. These
communicative strategies convey messages of difference and sameness, or
of transgression and compliance, depending on the perspectives of the audi-
ences. In this way, they contribute toward creating powerful, and complex,
and yet paradoxical discourses of what it means to be Chinese and queer, in a
comparative, geopolitical perspective. (106, emphasis in original)

The queer potential of Q Dadao’s politics is reflected in the space the show
opens for the negotiation and reimagination of cultural citizenship. Michael
Warner (1993) argues that “‘queer’ gets its critical edge by defining itself against
the normal rather than the heterosexual” (xxvi, my emphasis). “If queers,” he
contends, “can be understood as protesting not just the normal behavior of the
social, but the idea of normal behavior, they will bring skepticism to the method-
ologies founded on that idea” (xxvii, my emphasis). Examined from this per-
spective, it is possible to see Q Dadao as challenging and potentially queering
state-defined heterosexual, monogamous, and reproductive models of citizen-
ship. By strategically combining an onstage and depoliticized West-originated
gay identity with an offstage LGBTQ politics, the musical establishes a cultural
ground for imagining queer identities as belonging to, instead of standing
against, Chinese kinship ideology. By associating queer people with kinship
lexicons such as “sons,” “daughters,” and “family,” Q Dadao’s activism claims
the queer population as “Chinese,” thereby reconfiguring state-defined notions

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Entertainingly Queer? 89

of a good Chinese citizen (i.e., heterosexual, married, and reproductive). This

claim to a reconfigured cultural citizenship allows queer Chinese subjects to
work within the system of kinship, appropriating its sets of values to negotiate
for nonconfrontational LGBTQ identities and politics.

Conclusion

The case of Q Dadao demonstrates the complexity of transnational cultural

products’ travel to China. The processes of adaptation and translation engen-
dered a set of cultural politics that was very different from that of the original
musical. The celebratory and liberationist undertone in Avenue Q, in particular, is
literally lost in translation. Instead, we observe locally grounded, creative strate-
gies that not only evade censorship, but also open spaces for queer negotiation.
What is intriguing about these strategies is the fact that they appear to be at once
assimilationist and queer; the convergence of commercialized popular cultural
products and blood-kinship-based activism begs the question of homonormativ-
ity. In the meantime, Q Dadao creates a space in which to challenge and rework
state-defined, heteronormative notions of kinship and citizenship.
These apparent paradoxes in Q Dadao’s cultural politics are first and foremost
derived from the nature of popular culture as a dynamic field characterized by
ongoing tensions and struggles (Hall 1981). Popular cultural products do not bear
a single, coherent ideological inclination, but are situated in ideological complex-
ities and ambivalences. More importantly, these paradoxes and ambivalences in
Q Dadao call attention to a markedly different form of homonormativity from Lisa
Duggan’s (2002) theorization. While for Duggan homonormativity is embedded
in neoliberal sexual politics, in the Chinese musical we observe the emergence
of an illiberal homonormativity located at the intersection of economic liberaliza-
tion, political control, and transcultural queer politics. Illiberal homonormativ-
ity describes a situation in which consumer culture functions as one of the very
few, if not only, public channels for queer expressions and negotiations under
illiberal rule. Under these circumstances, the marriage between queerness and
commerciality may be at once enabling and restricting, liberating and normal-
izing—and, apparently, assimilationist and tactically oppositional. As Petrus Liu
(2015, 7) remarks, to readily apply the homonormativity critique in the Chinese
context falsely presupposes an inevitable path to queer culture prescribed by
global neoliberalism, whereas the frictions and discrepancies in local knowledge
formations could afford opportunities to interrogate and rethink queer liberal-
ism. By (dis)placing homonormativity in an illiberal society like that of China,
we can fruitfully tease out, scrutinize, and retheorize the encounter between
queerness and popular culture, thereby gaining new insights about what queer-
ness is and what it can be. Illiberal homonormativity can serve as a particularly

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90 Queering Chinese Kinship

useful framework in examining queer politics in popular cultural products in

China, especially in an age of economically driven partial cultural liberalization.
Illiberal homonormativity also reveals how queering Chinese kinship is
a localized, multisited, and dynamic process both potentially enabling and
delimited by mechanisms of sociocultural regulation. If Chapter 3 focuses on
how queering Chinese kinship as a negotiative strategy enables the exploration
of new identities, positionalities, and kinship arrangements that are neverthe-
less restrained by local conditions of cultural intelligibility, this chapter further
examines the multifarious and paradoxical ways of queering Chinese kinship by
considering the role commercial forces play in shaping a space in which to nego-
tiate, portray, and consume queerness. Such a space should be embraced with
caution, since even though it offers new ways to rework and reclaim kinship
and cultural citizenship in illiberal China, it also engenders new structures of
homonormativity, a topic explored in Chapter 5.

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5
Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans: Digital
Self-Making, Carnivalesque Consumption,
and Queer Vloggers on Bilibili

In the last chapter I explicated how China’s illiberal cultural and media environ-
ment has at once facilitated and delimited queer representations in mainstream
popular cultural products, which often need to walk a fine line in articulating
queer sensibilities to simultaneously attract audiences and evade censorship. I
have proposed the term “illiberal homonormativity” to examine how a tactical
queering of Chinese kinship, while functioning as an effective strategy in opening
up a much-needed space to portray queerness in popular culture and reclaim
cultural citizenship, also entails locally specific structures of exclusion that call
for scrutiny. This chapter further unpacks the complexities and paradoxes of illib-
eral homonormativity by directing attention to a different site of queer cultural
production: queer vloggers on the video-sharing social media platform Bilibili.
By observing how an intimate engagement with blood kinship functions as a key
aspect not only in these vloggers’ entrepreneurial digital self-making, but also in
their fans’ carnivalesque consumption, I discuss how queering Chinese kinship’s
political and critical potential is entangled with neoliberal ethos as well as locally
specific patterns of homonormativity.
The cases studied in this chapter come from the emerging trope of coming-out
vlogs—video blogs that are shot, edited, and uploaded by users themselves—on
Bilibili, a youth-oriented video-sharing website. As a glocalized digital platform
for Japan-inspired animation, comic, and games (ACG) culture, Bilibili affords
a fertile ground for Chinese youth to playfully participate in public discussions
(Yin and Fung2017), challenge and counter social control (Z. Chen 2018), and
perform and explore new identities (Z. Chen 2020). While existing research
focuses more on how the platform’s novel scrolling closed-caption commen-
tary system known as danmu or “bullet curtain” enhances user interactivity
and fosters a participatory community (L. Liu, Suh, and Wagner 2016; Yin and
Fung 2017; L.-T. Zhang and Cassany 2020), I am interested in how the platform’s
cultural foundations and technical opportunities give rise to interconnected
ways of digital self-making and carnivalesque watching.

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92 Queering Chinese Kinship

The recent proliferation of coming-out vlogs on Bilibili offers an interesting

locus of inquiry. Compared to other Chinese video-sharing sites such as Youku
and iQIYI, where a keyword search of “coming out” largely returns clips from
news reports and documentaries, Bilibili is home to a large number of coming-
out vlogs uploaded by lesbian and gay vloggers, whose coming-out narratives,
especially negotiations within blood kinship relations, function as a key “bio-
graphical device” (Abidin 2019, 615) that establishes their public personae and
their relationship with followers. In other words, these coming-out vlogs sit at
the intersection of microcelebrity practices and queer politics in China’s digital
and popular cultural landscape. I look into these coming-out vlogs as a site of
cultural production by centering on two queer vloggers, Liu Jiu Zheng and Cai
Yi Ling10, who produced some of the most popular coming-out vlogs on Bilibili
that have become the basis of their careers as microcelebrities. I adopt a two-
pronged approach in analyzing these two vloggers, focusing on celebrity texts
(the vloggers’ entrepreneurial practices of self-branding) and fan texts (viewers’
interactions with the vlogs through bullet curtain comments). Specifically, the
chapter addresses the following questions: Why have coming-out vlogs emerged
on Bilibili against the backdrop of a heavily censored media environment? How
have these coming-out narratives taken shape and attracted viewership? What
queer politics do they engender and what role does blood kinship play in such
politics?
I start with a discussion of Bilibili as a glocalized marketplace where transna-
tional narratives converge and creative fan practices take place. Next, I employ
the analytical optics of digital self-making and carnivalesque consumption to
examine two bodies of texts—the two queer vloggers’ videos and their fans’
comments in the bullet curtain—in order to tease out the queer politics in the
production and consumption of these coming-out vlogs. This chapter concludes
with a look at how queer vloggers’ critical potential and homonormative tenden-
cies are intertwined in their queering of Chinese kinship.

Bilibili: A Globalized Marketplace of Subculture

Founded in 2009, Bilibili is a video-sharing platform modelled after the Japanese

website Niconico, a hub for ACG content distinguished by its unique comment
system that allows users to add comments as synchronous written texts overlaid
on videos. Because the comments appear concurrently with videos and scroll
side-to-side across the screen, they are called danmu 彈幕 in Chinese, literally
meaning “bullet curtain,” which alludes to the bullet barrage in early two-dimen-
sional shooter games (L. Liu, Suh, and Wagner 2016). Since its launch, Bilibili has
consistently ranked among the top-ten Chinese video sites (Alexa Internet 2020).
According to its official report, the site recorded 172 million monthly active users
in the second quarter of 2020, and its mobile version also topped the chart of
most popular mobile apps among Chinese young people under 24 (Bilibili 2020).

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Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans 93

Bilibili’s immense popularity among Chinese youth derives from its success-
ful provision of a local base for dense transnational popular cultural flows. As
Yin and Fung (2017) record, Bilibili initially emerged as “a highly particularized
platform” for ACG fans in post-2008 China, when access to Japanese anima-
tion was restricted in mainstream channels due to government control (138).
Under these circumstances, culturally aware and tech-savvy fans voluntarily
downloaded ACG contents from international platforms and re-uploaded them
to Bilibili. Tapping into young users’ passion for global cultural products and
desire for sociality, Bilibili thrived on user-generated content (UGC) and grew
rapidly as an interactive, subcultural community. These early traits defined the
contours of Bilibili, which now brands itself as a leading platform for “the two-
dimensional” (erciyuan 二次元, derived from the Japanese expression nijigen,
meaning ACG content) that grows “in symbiosis” with its users (Bilibili 2020).
Despite its rapid expansion, the site attempts to maintain an ACG-focused com-
munity culture; in fact, the new-user registration process includes a “member-
ship exam” consisting of 100 multiple-choice questions. More than half of these
are randomly generated questions about ACG culture, and one needs to get at
least 60 questions right in order to become a “formal member” and use the site’s
interactive functionalities, such as writing bullet curtain comments and upload-
ing videos. As a symbolic gatekeeping gesture, the exam establishes a sense of
shared membership in Bilibili’s subcultural community as defined by common
interests in ACG culture. This subcultural atmosphere is central for Bilibili, as it
keeps the platform a relatively marginalized space of entertaining and playful
cultural production and consumption (Yin and Fung 2017, 150). Bilibili’s appar-
ently nonpolitical nature has facilitated an influx of global cultures that cultivate
common values among its young users, whose worldview may sometimes con-
tradict dominant state agendas and ideologies (138–39).
Z. Chen (2018, 12) summarizes three features of Bilibli’s community culture
that are closely associated with Japanese ACG culture. The first is zhai 宅, which
comes from the Japanese word otaku, a general term referring to “those who
indulge in forms of subculture strongly linked to anime, video games, comput-
ers, science fiction, special-effects films, anime figurines, and so on” (Azuma
2009, 3). The second, meng 萌, corresponds to moe in Japanese, meaning elements
developed to effectively stimulate the interest and feelings of consumers, includ-
ing, for example, visual representations, particular ways of speaking, and ste-
reotypical narrative development (Azuma 2009, 42). The third feature is fu 腐,
which is derived from the Japanese word fujoshi 腐女子 and fudanshi 腐男子,
terms referring to fans of the Boys’ Love (BL) and Girls’ Love (GL) genres (Z.
Chen 2018, 12). As Z. Chen argues, these three transnationally inspired features
make Bilibili “a space of otherness” characterized by a liberal and agential ethos,
where users “explore and retain their subjectivity” and “resist pressure, repres-
sion, and control in a post-socialist China” (17).

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94 Queering Chinese Kinship

As much as Bilibili’s community culture can be empowering, it would be

misleading to regard the platform as an idealized space for democratic par-
ticipation, political resistance, and progressive politics. As Yin and Fung (2017)
remind us, Bilibili remains “deeply immersed in consumer culture,” where the
power of capital inevitably eclipses the platform’s democratic potential (150). In
his critique of Japanese ACG culture, Azuma (2009) famously describes otaku as
“database animals” to underline their “animalized” cravings for moe-elements:
fragmented character traits that are so devoid of deeper layers of “human”
meanings that they can be transformed into databases in order to catalog, store,
and display desired results (47–51). Azuma’s insights strongly resonate with
recent scholarship on the “platform society,” which describes how digital plat-
forms systematically collect, process, and monetize user data to accumulate
capital (Srnicek 2017; van Dijck, Poell, and Waal 2018). As user data become a
new kind of raw material (Srnicek 2017, 23), an economic logic saturates digital
platforms’ technical properties and patterns of communication (Langlois and
Elmer 2013, 14). In the case of Bilibili, which went public on the Nasdaq Stock
Market in 2018 and is now seeking a secondary listing in Hong Kong (B. Zhou
2020), the platform’s strong emphasis on community building, cultivation of user
interactivity through tools such as bullet comments, and promotion of profes-
sional user-generated video content (which makes up for 91% of the site’s total
traffic) are all intended to enhance user engagement levels, thereby generating
revenue through value-added services and advertising (Nga 2020). In this highly
commercialized environment, the platform encourages users—both uploaders
and viewers—to adhere to certain norms of self-representation and interaction
in order to commodify their activities. Lammare (2017) has fittingly termed this
phenomenon “platformativity”: “a kind of performativity via platforms” that
influences the participating individuals through platform infrastructure and
affordances (301). In this sense, it is important to consider cultural production
on Bilibili not only as a process of glocalization and negotiation of alternative
values, but also as deeply intertwined with platform capitalism.
Building on Jenkin’s (2006) celebratory account of “participatory culture,” a
majority of scholars who have examined viewer interaction on Bilibili stressed
the platform’s liberating nature, referring to it as a space for participatory digital
democracy (Yin and Fung 2017, 148) and a heterotopia for challenging consumer
values, authoritative control, censorship, and heterosexuality (Z. Chen 2018, 3).
I seek to complicate these arguments by showing how Bilibili’s platformativ-
ity fundamentally shapes the video content it has to offer and the politics they
engender. Although user interactions on Bilibili harbor democratic potential,
they are nevertheless organized in a highly commercial logic in which video
producers are incentivized to adhere to specific modes of self-representation in
order to appeal to a wide audience. Such a commodified relationship between
video producers and viewers creates narrow subject positions that delimit the

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Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans 95

critical potential of Bilibili videos. Consequently, I use the expression “glocalized

marketplace of subculture” to capture the complexity of Bilibli that is at once
global and local, marginal and commercial, and enabling and constraining. In
what follows, I unpack this complexity by analyzing the case of queer vloggers
in the emerging trope of coming-out vlogs.

Coming-Out Vlogs on Bilibili

In August 2019, Liu Jiu Zheng (LJZ), a young male vlogger in his early twenties,
uploaded a career-defining vlog on Bilibili that records his experiences after
being outed to his mother, who decided to take him to a hospital for medical
treatment. The vlog, which portrays four hospital visits—one with his mother
and three earlier visits by himself and his boyfriend to gauge professional
opinion—shows LJZ insisting that homosexuality is not an illness and vowing to
continue negotiations with his mother. With over 2 million views, 100,000 likes,
and more than 45,000 bullet curtain comments at the time of writing (September
2020), the video is the most-watched and most-discussed coming-out vlog on
Bilibili. LJZ is not alone in producing coming-out vlogs on Bilibili: Cai Yi Ling 10
(CYL10), a lesbian-identified vlogger of similar age, also created two immensely
popular coming-out videos in May 2020. The first chronicles CYL10’s experi-
ence growing up as a lesbian and her relationship with her parents, while the
second is a sequel that shows her mother’s acceptance of and affection toward
the lesbian couple. At the time of writing, these two videos have each attracted
more than 600,000 views and over 2,000 bullet curtain comments.
These two vloggers are part of a larger proliferation of coming-out vlogs on
Bilibili. Search for “come out” (chugui 出櫃) on the platform, and you will find
a considerable number of vlogs from the past two years where people publicly
share their coming-out experiences. Whereas this phenomenon apparently
corresponds with the prominence of coming-out videos and queer vloggers
on YouTube, which has been described in English-language scholarship as a
“central space” for the representation of gay identities and circulation of coming-
out scripts (Lovelock 2016), it is distinguished by two features. First, instead of
an emphasis on self-realization and individual empowerment, the Bilibili vlogs
are anchored in explicit concerns about and engagement with blood kinship rela-
tions, often including family members as a key aspect of the videos’ narratives.
Second, whereas queer YouTubers embrace coming out as a personal milestone
(Abidin 2019), queer Bilibili vloggers commonly approach it as a couple. Not only
do the vloggers involve their partners in the coming-out process, the practice
of coming out itself is often represented as an essential step toward a complete
and fulfilling romantic relationship. These distinctions indicate that coming-out
vlogs on Bilibili derive from specific cultural traditions, narrative tropes, and

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96 Queering Chinese Kinship

platform economies, and in turn engender fundamentally different cultural

politics in imagining queerness.
Two interrelated factors have spurred the rise of these Bilibili coming-out
vlogs. The first is the popularization of BL/GL narratives in China and particu-
larly on Bilibili, which has cultivated a tolerant, albeit highly commercialized,
community subculture. The second factor is the queer vloggers’ microcelebrity
practices (Senft 2008) of digital self-making, an entrepreneurial process by which
the vloggers build lucrative careers by constructing public personae and cultivat-
ing fan communities. These vlogs, imbricated in Bilibili’s digital infrastructure
and technical affordances as they open a space for queer representation and for
queering blood kinship relations, also establish a limited framework for queer
subject positions.

Embodying BL and GL Fantasies

The flowering of vloggers or wanghong (網紅, literally “internet-famous people”)

in China since 2016 has significantly changed personalities’ self-making pro-
cesses in a digital age (A. Li 2019). Facilitated by a plethora of video-sharing,
photo-sharing, and live-streaming channels for displaying personal images,
traits, and skills to attract followers and gain popularity (A. Li 2019), wanghong
has become a reliable channel of entrepreneurship as a large number of people
attempt to monetize their online activities (G. Zhang and de Seta 2018, 64). Senft
(2008) describes these entrepreneurial practices as “microcelebrity,” which refers
to “a new style of online performance that involves people ‘amping up’ their
popularity over the Web using technologies like video, blogs, and social net-
working sites” (25). As Marwick (2015) further points out, microcelebrity is a
self-representation technique shaped by digital platforms’ specific technological
affordances and the social context in which the performative acts exist (339). In
this sense, vloggers’ video representations of themselves are part of their celebri-
fication efforts in their constructions of a “branded self” (Senft 2015, 348).
Investigating how this concern for self-branding saturates coming-out narra-
tives on YouTube, Abidin (2019) argues that YouTube queer vloggers come out to
“accumulate social capital among their followers through self-disclosure, cultural
capital among the network of queer vloggers through collective branding, and
economic capital with potential clients and sponsors through an expansion of
their marketable personae” (615). To achieve these goals, coming out narratives
on YouTube typically involve a “graduated and extended” process of “padding
and preparation” and “long-tail closure and aftercare” (615).
While queer vloggers on Bilibili share similar aspirations, they notably follow
a different coming-out narrative structure: in lieu of building up and managing
their viewers’ expectations before coming out, they come out to viewers at the
very start of their career, and do so by featuring their romantic partners in their

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Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans 97

vlogs. LJZ, for instance, introduced his boyfriend in his second video, which he
describes as about the “bits and pieces of daily life with [his] ‘little cutie’” (Liu
Jiu Zheng 2018). Likewise, CYL10’s coming-out video was her first full-length
vlog, the very beginning of which features a cameo of her girlfriend. These queer
vloggers’ choice to come out at once as queer and happily partnered is con-
nected to Bilibli’s fu community culture, which celebrates BL and GL narratives
as an alternative to clichéd heterosexual romance stories (Z. Chen 2018, 14). As
described in the previous chapter, since their introduction into China, narratives
depicting homoromantic or homoerotic relationships have taken root, not only
developing rapidly as a subculture, but influencing mainstream cultural produc-
tion and consumption as well. On Bilibili, BL and GL genres, which are central
to ACG subculture (McLelland 2010), have long been popular among its liberal-
minded young users, so much so that users self-mockingly call the platform
“the largest same-sex social media in China” (Z. Chen 2018, 12). Even after the
platform began a controversial self-censorship campaign that targeted explicit
homosexual content such as visuals of kissing (Jiayun Feng 2019), queer content
continued to thrive in other creative ways (Y. Wang 2020).
LJZ’s and CYL10’s self-fashioning as gay and lesbian young persons in loving
relationships allow them to tap into a vibrant market for BL and GL narratives.
Such a process is not only a result of the vloggers’ entrepreneurial bent: more
importantly, it is shaped by Bilibili’s technical affordances, which encourage
vloggers to present themselves in ways that enhance viewer engagement and
interaction. On top of generic interaction metrics such as views, subscribers,
and likes, Bilibili’s bullet curtain comments function as an important channel
for vloggers to understand viewer tastes and preferences. A key feature of the
bullet curtain system is its pseudo-synchronicity (Y. Yang 2020; L.-T. Zhang
and Cassany 2020): while the messages are created asynchronously, their order
follows the moment of insertion in the video’s timeline, so that comments about a
particular moment in the video appear at the same time on the screen regardless
of their time of creation. This characteristic of bullet curtain commenting thus
captures and visualizes viewer responses. For instance, in LJZ’s second video,
most of the bullet curtain comments appear toward the end, when his boyfriend
shows up: comments such as “so cute,” “so sweet,” “I am so jealous,” “give him
a hug!” and “love between boys never lets me down” fill the screen (Liu Jiu
Zheng 2018). The same is true for CYL10, whose girlfriend’s brief appearance in
her first coming-out vlog has attracted so many comments that they almost block
out the actual image. These affectively charged comments include, for example,
“this is so sweet I’m gonna faint,” “so cute,” “please stay happy forever,” or
simply “ahhhhhhhhh” (Cai Yi Ling10 2020a). The bullet curtain’s straightfor-
ward visual representation allows vloggers to identify moe-elements that capture
viewers’ attention and interests, which in turn informs vloggers’ organiziation of
their vlogs around these moe-elements.

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98 Queering Chinese Kinship

These interactions between content producers and consumers on Bilibili

have become central to queer vloggers’ construction of their public personae.
As an example, after LJZ’s relationship caught viewers’ attention, he started
to consistently make vlogs about his interactions with his boyfriend, sharing
their love stories and footage of them travelling together. Likewise, after bullet
curtain comments pointed out that their relationship falls into the “older seme
younger uke” trope in BL (in which the top is younger than the bottom), LJZ
gladly adopted the BL vernacular and posted a vlog about “what it feels like to
be a younger uke,” where he addresses intimate questions such as their first kiss
and preferred sex positions (Liu Jiu Zheng 2019c). The same is true for CYL10,
whose second coming-out vlog was introduced as “My mother . . . secretly took
photos of us and posted in her WeChat Moments! Now we have to get married”
to highlight her relationship status (Cai Yi Ling10 2020b). Her later vlogs also
mostly feature her interactions with her girlfriend, whom she fondly refers to as
her “wife.”
Lovelock (2017) points out that vlogs create a platform where vloggers
exchange their willingness to disclose information, make confessions, and
share details of personal lives for “quantifiable signifiers of popularity” (90–91).
The examples of LJZ and CYL10 reflect that such popularity is premised upon
platform-specific models of desirable personalities: both LJZ’s and CYL10’s
disclosure of their sexualities to viewers is inextricably connected to their will-
ingness and ability to embody BL and GL fantasies to satisfy viewers’ consump-
tive desire. An example typifying this point is LJZ’s paid promotional video
for an electric toothbrush titled “If We Moved in Together.” The video presents
an imagined daily setting where the couple wakes up in the same bed before
unpacking the toothbrush and standing together in front of the mirror to get
ready for their day. Praised by a fan as “the most romantic paid promotion video
I have ever seen” (Liu Jiu Zheng 2019a), the video offers a real-life BL fantasy
that explicitly responds to viewer interest in the couple’s romantic life, through
which it translates the vlogger’s cultural capital into monetary income.
In short, coupling narratives constitute the foundation of queer vloggers’
microcelebrity images on Bilibili. By strategically embodying BL and GL fanta-
sies, queer vloggers not only earn support for their sexual identities, but also
accumulate cultural and economic capital by cultivating fan communities. While
this digital self-making process is arguably empowering—especially against
the backdrop of marginalization of LGBTQ-related discussions in China—it
also relies on a problematically narrow framework of LGBTQ identities. A close
textual analysis of LJZ’s and CYL10’s coming-out vlogs follows and examines
their construction of LGBTQ personhood vis-à-vis blood kinship in Bilibili’s
highly commercialized space.

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Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans 99

Coming Out Together to the Family

In his discussion of lesbian and gay identities and coming-out vlogs on YouTube,
Lovelock (2019) argues that queer vloggers employ “strategies of authenticity”
through which they bring together a view of lesbian and gay identities as an
innate, essential, and unchangeable part of the self and an expectation of vlogging
as a process of revealing inner truths (79–80). Cunningham and Craig (2017)
further suggest that authenticity is not established in a monadic relationship;
instead, it hinges on dialogic relations between the creator and fan base that are
characterized by “intrinsically interactive audience-centricity” (80). Authenticity,
in this sense, is constructed and used as a “currency” (Lovelock 2019, 83) to
negotiate queer vloggers’ public personae, mediate their relationships with fan
communities, and configure meanings of coming out. This conceptualization
provides a productive optic through which to study LJZ’s and CYL’s coming-
out vlogs. While these vlogs foreground authenticity as an important aesthetic
concern, they approach authenticity not simply as inner truth or self-acceptance;
instead, authenticity is constructed relationally in the process of queering blood
kinship and is intimately connected to the validation of their romantic relation-
ships. Through these strategies of authenticity, queer vloggers strengthen their
public personae and construct viable frameworks of LGBTQ personhood.
The two queer vloggers’ Bilibili coming-out videos establish authenticity
through unique vlogging aesthetics, which Tolson (2010) summarizes as “exces-
sive direct address, . . . transparent amateurishness, and . . . the sheer volume
and immediacy of ‘conversational’ responses” (286). LJZ’s (2019b) video starts
with a medium close-up shot where he talks directly into a static camera in what
appears to be his bedroom. After introducing the background of his coming-out
experience—how he was outed after someone sent his mother his previous vlogs,
and how she reacted strongly by calling him perverted and insisting on taking
him to a doctor—the vlog cuts to a style of investigative journalism with four
clips from hospital visits (Liu Jiu Zheng 2019b). The clips were captured by LJZ’s
phone, which he used as a secret camera, and feature shaky and blurry images
reminiscent of the on-the-spot realism of Chinese documentaries. Subtitles were
added to help viewers understand the conversations. CYL10’s two coming-out
vlogs follow a similar realistic aesthetic. The first video features the vlogger
sharing intensely personal accounts of her struggle with her gender identity and
sexual orientation when she was younger, and her mother’s recent acceptance
of her lesbian identity and her romantic relationship (Cai Yi Ling10 2020a). The
second vlog records her mother’s visit, with clips of her chatting with the lesbian
couple over meals and screenshots of her messages of approval and support.
It concludes with the couple sitting together in their apartment and expressing
their happiness about receiving the parent’s blessings (Cai Yi Ling10 2020b).

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100 Queering Chinese Kinship

While the coming-out vlogs’ authenticity is first and foremost established by

their visual and narrative style, it is more importantly grounded in the dramatic
confrontation between queer sexualities and blood kinship relations. If the
overarching theme of coming-out vlogs on YouTube is a trajectory of self-reflex-
ivity and self-acceptance that culminates in the confirmation of the authentic
self (Abidin 2019; Lovelock 2019), on Bilibili such an authentic self is notably
relational: it is not based on the vloggers’ acceptance of their own sexualities,
but upon their negotiations with their blood family. The narrative arc of LJZ’s
coming-out vlog illustrates this point. Although all four hospital visits confirm
that homosexuality is not an illness, and although the vlogger himself shows
nothing but determination about his sexuality in front of his mother and the
doctors, the central conflict remains his mother’s lack of acceptance. At the end
of the vlog, LJZ tells viewers that his mother has planned yet another visit to a
medical expert, and that he will be there “as long as she thinks it gives her hope”
(Liu Jiu Zheng 2019b). Sedgwick (1990) points out that coming out is a recur-
rent and repeated process addressed to different people at different times (68);
while LJZ has come out to viewers at the very start of his vlogging career and
presented himself unabashedly as a gay man ever since, the painstaking process
of coming out to his mother is central to the authenticity of his gay identity. As
LJZ concludes at the end of the vlog: “I can understand that she doesn’t under-
stand. . . . But I will hold on to my bottom line: homosexuality is not an illness.
It is who I am” (Liu Jiu Zheng 2019b). In its mix of an individualistic rhetoric of
homosexual identity with an explicit concern over biological family, the state-
ment shows that blood kinship relations continue to permeate the imagining of
LGBTQ personhood in China today. It is through the willingness to engage in
difficult negotiations with his mother that LJZ establishes his gay identity, not
as “an overly individualistic and indulgent behavior that threatens familial ties”
(C. Tan 2011, 867), but as a key part of his selfhood configured in relation to his
parents and family.
Furthermore, the authenticity of the vloggers’ homosexual identities is con-
nected to the authenticity of their romantic relationships. LJZ’s video implies this
by including his boyfriend in the hospital visits, a gesture that constructs negotia-
tions with LJZ’s mother as not only an individual matter, but as the gay couple’s
collective endeavor (Liu Jiu Zheng 2019b). CYL10’s two vlogs foreground this
link between parental engagement and the authenticity of the romantic relation-
ship more explicitly. At the end of her second coming-out vlog, after her mother
has expressed support for her sexuality and relationship, CYL10 says to her girl-
friend: “Now we have to invite them to our wedding. Otherwise they will be
mad. They are going through all these struggles to accept our relationship just
so they could walk me down the aisle” (Cai Yi Ling10 2020a). CYL10’s coupling
and coming-out narratives converge in this imaginary wedding scenario, where
her parents’ approval of her sexuality is made synonymous with the acceptance

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Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans 101

of the couple’s romantic relationship. Consequently, this approval also affirms

the relationship as successful and blessed. In this sense, coming-out vlogs on
Bilibili serve as milestones in queer vloggers’ careers, not because they signify
individual self-acceptance—something that the vloggers have allegedly already
achieved—but because they validate queer sexualities and romantic relation-
ships by situating them in relation to blood kinship. By engaging their family
members in their coming-out vlogs, queer vloggers not only address the conflicts
between queerness and conventional kinship ideologies that are at the heart of
Chinese queer selfhood; they creatively transform these conflicts into oppor-
tunities to demonstrate the commitment, resilience, and authenticity of their
romantic relationships regardless of the outcomes of the coming-out action.
The coming-out vlogs function as a discursive strategy for affirming the
validity and authenticity of the vloggers’ sexual identities and their romantic
relationships through an engagement with blood kinship relations. In doing so,
they construct apparently authentic public personae that correspond to viewers’
desire for narratives of same-sex attraction and relationship. These vlogs encour-
age an ambivalent cultural politics: on the one hand, they initiate a process of
queering by incorporating nonnormative sexualities into kinship norms as well
as into consumptive practices on Bilibili. As an outcome, they at once reconfig-
ure dominant desires, moral imperatives, and kinship scripts, and facilitate the
development of a sense of community for the sake of the personal as well as
the political (see Altman 1971, 27). On the other hand, these vlogs are part and
parcel of the vloggers’ commercialized self-making and self-branding practices,
through which they interact with their fan base and accumulate cultural capital—
and as such, they are notably limited in their reimagination of queer identities
and kinship. Not only do LJZ and CYL10 evoke monogamous coupledom as
the dominant, if not only, template for queer identities, their gay and lesbian
images are constructed along highly dichotomized lines of top/bottom and
butch/femme as masculine/feminine, which reproduce heteronormative values.
Their status as celebrities thus “operates centrally as a regime of disciplinarity,
implicitly delineating the forms of nonheterosexual identity which are ‘suitable’
for integration within heteronormative society” (Lovelock 2017, 99). Such a form
of “discipline by example” (99) establishes new expectations, frameworks, and
norms for what is considered “good” and “acceptable” LGBTQ personhood
within a family-oriented setting, thereby marginalizing queer persons who fail
to “properly” embody certain gender traits or sexual and relationship norms.
The enabling and delimiting aspects of these coming-out vlogs are responses
to China’s illiberal homonormative contexts. Under sociocultural conditions
that suppress LGBTQ activism and marginalize discourses about queer issues,
the exceptionally vibrant and liberal-minded subcultural community on Bilibili
is chiefly enabled by the platform’s commercialized and depoliticized setting.
This commercialized space provides a rare channel for exploring new identities,

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102 Queering Chinese Kinship

positionalities, and kinship arrangements, but since these particular forms of

queerness are produced for consumption, they remain governed by specific
economic logics and representational regimes. However, it would be oversim-
plifying to dismiss these commercialized vlogs as “conservative”: although
their representations are constrained by dominant limits of respectability and
intelligibility, their circulation engenders potentially subversive queer politics.
I illustrate this by directing attention to the carnivalesque consumption of these
coming-out vlogs.

Carnivalesque Consumption and Digital Masquerade

Existing studies about Bilibili have explored how the bullet curtain comment
system shapes the platform’s interactivity. While some suggest that their ephem-
erality and incoherence make bullet curtain comments nonsensical (Cao 2019),
others highlight their potential for facilitating meaningful political discussion
and participation. L.-T. Zhang and Cassany (2020) argue that the bullet curtain
fosters interpersonal interactions situated in specific scenes of the video (15). Yin
and Fung (2017) also find that the bullet curtain “encourages . . . enthusiastic
participation” and “amplifies the voice of youth” (149). Z. Chen further (2020)
compares Bilibili to an “identity college,” where the anonymous bullet curtain
comment system provides space for fans’ self-reflection, self-construction, and
identity performance (13).
The Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque, “a loosely structured constel-
lation of cultural practices, rituals, and symbols” that harbor “transgressive
potentialities” (Gardiner 1992, 28), is central to a critical understanding of bullet
curtain comments. According to Bakhtin (1984), the carnivalesque “celebrate[s]
temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order,”
thus marking “the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and
prohibitions” (10). The carnivalesque serves as an apt metaphor and framing
device for studying the Chinese internet and its relationship to offline society
(Herold 2011, 11). As Herold posits, the Chinese internet “cannot be described
as a space for rational and detached deliberations.” Instead, it resonates strongly
with the notion of the carnivalesque, as it is “filled with a cacophony of con-
flicting opinions, irrelevant or emotional outbursts, images stretching from the
beautiful to the grotesque and beyond” (11). H. Li (2011) further suggests that
despite being heavily surveilled and censored, the internet in China supplies a
rare (if not the only) space for the public to creatively interrupt dominant state
discourses and aspire to hope and resistance through a carnivalesque culture of
parody and laughter (83–84). Focusing on Bilibili more specifically, Yin and Fung
(2017) argue that the platform’s entertaining and relatively marginalized and
trivialized nature makes it a “safe place” for a carnivalesque “second world,”
one characterized by community freedom and equality “under the shelter of the
playful and enjoyable surface” (136–37).

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Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans 103

The notion of the carnivalesque provides a critical approach through which

to tease out the cultural politics of apparently nonpolitical consumptive prac-
tices on Bilibili. To better understand these cultural politics, I turn to the idea of
“digital masquerade.” The concept of “masquerade” is closely associated with
the carnivalesque: according to Tseëlon (2001), masquerade is “pleasurable,
excessive, sometimes subversive,” and it calls attention to fundamental issues
about identity through a dialectic of concealing and revealing (2–3). As a space
of anonymity and pseudonymity, the internet provides a fertile ground for mas-
querade; Véliz (2018) conceives of the ideal online space as a “masquerade ball”
where people forthrightly hide their identities to practice free speech (654). The
pseudonymous nature of the internet enables practices of digital masquerade in
China, defined by J. Tan (2017) as “a new relationship between user and digital
media that is resistant to state censorship and conditioned by both censorship
and the specificity of media forms” (175). On Bilibili, the bullet curtain comment
system facilitates digital masquerade by providing an event-based anonymous
space where fans can post comments relatively freely. These comments, though
taking an apparently nonpolitical, carnivalesque form, generate new and often
subversive politics that extend beyond the videos—and by so doing, add another
layer of cultural politics as well as critical potential to Bilibili videos. In the fol-
lowing, I show how fans’ creative consumptive practices unleash the coming-out
vlogs’ queer potential through a digital masquerade of coming out, and an inter-
rogation and reimagining of blood kinship relations.

Coming Out in the Bullet Curtain

The bullet curtain is a unique system; instead of separating videos and comments,
it superimposes comments temporally and spatially on the original video, which
not only makes the commenting experience more intuitive and interactive,
but transforms the video into a participatory site. When fans watch videos on
Bilibili, they are not just watching the videos themselves; they watch the video
concurrently with previous viewer comments and can contribute to the video’s
meanings by posting their own thoughts and opinions. Each video on Bilibili, in
this sense, is potentially an open-ended meaning-making project. The coming-
out vlogs, which straightforwardly engage with key aspects of queer identities
and selfhood in China, are thus not just part of the vloggers’ microcelebrity
practice: they open a space in which fans can contribute their own ideas and
construct their identities.
The examples drawn here from the bullet curtain comments revolve around
the practice of shuaping 刷屏, literally “flooding the screen.” Shuaping’s original
meaning of “spamming abusive and unwanted information [on the internet]”
has been repurposed with the rise of interactive platforms such as livestreams
and bullet curtain comments to show viewer response and support (X. Chen

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104 Queering Chinese Kinship

and Chen 2019, 734). Used to denote a large number of comments from dif-
ferent viewers repeatedly flooding the screen, shuaping signifies a spontane-
ous outburst of comments and emotions incited by the vlogger’s speech and
behavior. Shuaping moments, therefore, are moments that resonate strongly with
viewers.
In LJZ’s coming-out vlog, these moments are closely associated with issues of
queerness and familial and societal acceptance. One of these moments occurs at
the start of LJZ’s hospital visit with his mother: the doctor tries to confirm with
LJZ if he has never been attracted to girls; then, his mother then anxiously asks
if her son’s sexual orientation could be changed. The questions incited a flood of
comments in the bullet curtain. While some express frustration with the mother
and insist that sexual orientation cannot and should not be changed, others
make a statement by disclosing their own sexualities (Figure 5.1), claiming to be
“bisexual,” “bisexual and more homosexual,” “bisexual and more heterosexual,”
and “asexual.” These comments are echoed by other viewers who comment
“bisexual +1,” “bisexual + 10086,” and “bisexual + my identity card number”
(Liu Jiu Zheng 2019b). In bullet curtain comments, “+1” is an important mode
of asynchronous interaction, because it allows viewers to show endorsement
and support for existing comments. Playfully appropriating the “+1” logic,
the expressions “+10086” and “+ my citizen identity number” exaggerate such
support by replacing “1” with larger numbers commonly used in daily life—
10086 is a well-known hotline number, and a Chinese identity number consists of
eighteen digits. With a striking visual representation that takes over the screen,
the bullet curtain comments respond defiantly to the mother’s and the doctor’s
marginalization of queer sexualities, claiming literal and symbolic visibility. The
comments, through their references to a spectrum of fluid sexualities, evoke a
conspicuously queer approach to sexual orientation and challenge the dichoto-
mous formulation of homo- versus hetero- sexuality presented in the vlog. At
first glance, these viewers’ public announcement of their sexual identities resem-
bles coming out, since they alter the reality for both the self and the others by
presenting “to the hearer the new, gay or lesbian subject position of the speaker”
(Chirrey 2003, 29). However, whereas coming out is all about the authenticity of
selfhood and the embodiment of queer identities, the bullet curtain comments
here are notably anonymous, disembodied, and lack authenticity. What they
amount to is a digital masquerade of coming out, where viewers loudly claim
queer sexualities without revealing their true identities. As J. Tan (2017) remarks,
the notion of digital masquerade “does not suggest an authentic identity or per-
sonhood behind the masks and masquerades, but a process in which the creative
usage of social media intersects with the formation of . . . identities and articu-
lations” (183). Shaped by Bilibili’s technical affordances, the anonymity of this
digital masquerade not only allows viewers to protect themselves from being
identified and outed, it also directs attention from the perceived authenticity of

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Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans 105

identities to a carnivalesque celebration of queerness. Although the digital mas-

querade of coming out is apparently playful, it has important political implica-
tions in that it articulates a distinct queer consciousness that problematizes the
medicalization and stigmatization of homosexuality in the vlog (Liu Jiu Zheng
2019b).
As connective and collective actions, bullet curtain comments carve out a
space where polyphonic voices mark a temporary suspension of the dominant
heteronormative social order. Although this utopian space is ephemeral, its
critical potential should not be underestimated, as it gives rise to resistance and
critique in a highly commercialized and depoliticized platform. Under a playful
and entertaining façade, this space invites Chinese youth to construct their own
identities by negotiating with and even subverting dominant values, which in
turn leads to progressive changes in the youths’ outlook on gender and sexuality.

Figure 5.1: “Bullet curtain” comments from LJZ’s coming-out vlog. Picture by author.

Interrogating Blood Kinship Relations

The example of the digital masquerade of coming out shows how carnivalesque
consumptive practices on Bilibili could critically engage with queer vloggers’

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106 Queering Chinese Kinship

coming out narratives. By interacting with the events represented in coming-out

vlogs, the bullet curtain comments create a space for playful, reflexive, and some-
times subversive discussion that expands the vlogs’ queer politics. Furthermore,
the bullet curtain not only fosters confrontational practices like coming out, it
also lends itself to a confessional mode of communication that contributes to
interrogating, negotiating, and revising the dominant script for blood kinship
relations. This confessional mode is reflected in the shuaping moments in CYL10’s
first coming-out vlog. Unlike the documentary style used by LJZ’s vlog, CYL10’s
first coming-out vlog is set in the domestic space of the vlogger’s bedroom,
where CYL10 gives an intimate and confessional account about her relation-
ship with her parents growing up as a lesbian. As she recalls, when she was
young her dad would beat her when they had a disagreement. This experience of
domestic violence contributed to her self-fashioning as a tomboy. She confesses,
“I felt strongly that men could do whatever they want because they have more
strength. And I wanted to be like that. . . . I wanted to be able to fight my dad.
. . . That was when I started to act more like a boy” (Cai Yi Ling10 2020a). Her
confession leads to a plethora of comments in the bullet curtain, where viewers
share their own experiences of domestic violence, especially from their dads.
Some playfully write, for example, “One world, one dad!” and “Being beaten
is how I grow up.” Others are angrier, saying things like “My dad is the same! I
hate him guts!” and “My dad is why I hate men.” Taken together, these confes-
sional bullet curtain comments not only correspond to and amplify the vlogger’s
sharing of her own experiences, but further problematize traditional masculin-
ity and disciplinarian father figures. The comments’ anonymity enables viewers
to temporarily suspend the conventional hierarchy in the Confucian Chinese
family and critically reflect on their own relationships with their fathers. As I
have argued elsewhere (Song 2018), while transnational popular cultural flow
is rapidly changing masculinity ideals in China by popularizing soft masculini-
ties, traditional masculine and heteronormative values continue to define father
figures in the Chinese family. By recounting traumatic experiences associated
with traditional Chinese fatherhood and expressing anger and dissatisfaction,
viewer comments turn the coming-out vlog into an ad hoc space that challenges
and rewrites gendered scripts of fatherhood. In this sense, the confessional mode
of address in CYL10’s coming-out vlog starts a conversation between the vlogger
and anonymous viewers that further discusses, politicizes, and radicalizes the
issues put forward.
The bullet curtain comments’ interrogation and reimagination of blood
kinship relations are also demonstrated through their idealization of CYL10’s
mother, who is portrayed as loving and supportive toward her daughter’s lesbian
identity. At the beginning of the vlog, CYL10 shares screenshots of her mother’s
WeChat messages, where she says: “This is your life. This is your choice. Your
parents won’t be in your life forever. At the end of the day, it is up to you how

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Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans 107

to lead a happy life, as long as you have no regrets” (Cai Yi Ling10 2020a). The
mother’s supportive message has been greeted by flooding comments express-
ing appreciation. Many call the mother shenxian jiazhang (神仙家長), or “divine
parent.” In Chinese internet slang, shenxian (神仙), meaning “divine,” is used
to describe a person so perfect that they are otherworldly (Jikipedia 2019). The
bullet curtain’s carnivalesque celebration of the mother as a flawless, idealized
parent is based on her willingness to accept her daughter’s queer sexuality. This
sort of idealization not only expresses admiration; more importantly, it projects
viewers’ own desire for a parent-child relationship that is open to queerness.
Many viewers leave affectively charged comments, such as “Gosh! This is so
nice!”, “Crying!”, and “I can’t hold back my tears!”, while others lament, “My
parents would definitely not be on board,” “I can only be jealous,” and “Why
this is someone else’s mother?” (Figure 5.2) These comments show that the vlog’s
representation of an LGBTQ-friendly parent figure provides room for viewers to
negotiate their own expectations of—as well as frustration with—blood kinship
relations. By imagining and celebrating CYL10’s mother as a “divine parent,” the
viewers subversively envision queer-inclusive blood kinship relations that cast a
sharp contrast on their everyday realities.

Figure 5.2: “Bullet curtain” comments from CYL10’s first coming-out vlog. Picture by
author.

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108 Queering Chinese Kinship

As a form of carnivalesque consumption, Bilibili’s bullet curtain comment

system allows viewers to interact with the videos relatively freely in an appar-
ently playful and nonpolitical manner. Through a close analysis of the bullet
curtain comments from LJZ’s and CYL10’s coming-out vlogs, I suggest that these
carnivalesque practices can be political and subversive, since they create various
ways of engaging with, interrogating, and reimagining blood kinship relations.
Such a process of queering Chinese kinship bears a resemblance with PFLAG
China’s audiovisual construction of queer blood kinship relations, which I
examined in Chapter 1. However, there are significant differences: while PFLAG
China’s documentaries belong to an activist agenda that has been carefully
executed to bring about political change, bullet curtain comments on Bibibili are
grassroots-initiated, spontaneous, and unruly. They represent young, on-the-
ground voices from a subcultural community that remains dominated by capital
and constrained by censorship. Although these voices lack any concrete political
roadmap, their interrogation of existing blood kinship relations and ideologies
and imagination of an idealized Chinese kinship point to a queer utopia. This
queer utopia—where people can claim a spectrum of queer sexual identities and
enjoy fulfilling parent-child relationships with “divine parents”—may well be
a starting point for transformative queer politics. As Muñoz (2009) suggests,
queerness is itself about futurity and hope: “The here and now is a prison house.
We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality,
to think and feel a then and there” (1, emphasis in original). If, as LJZ states in the
end of his coming-out vlog, his dilemma is caused neither by himself nor his
mother but is “the fault of conservative thought from the old society” (Liu Jiu
Zheng 2019b), then it is in the bullet curtain comments’ carnivalesque discus-
sions that we can catch a glimpse of what a new society could look like—and it is
only through persistent and subversive imagining that such a queer future can
come into being.

Conclusion

Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of gay celebrities in China thanks
to new digital technologies such as social networking and livestreaming (S. Wang
2020; T. Zhou 2019). In this chapter, I focused on the nascent trope of coming-
out vlogs on the Chinese social media platform Bilibili. Approaching the vlogs
from the perspectives of production and consumption points to a very different
cultural politics emerging from celebrity texts and fan texts, despite a common
concern over blood kinship relations. For the vloggers, a queer engagement with
Chinese kinship functions as part of their entrepreneurial digital self-making,
where the coming-out vlogs strategically lend authenticity to their microceleb-
rity images and their embodiment of BL and GL narratives, thereby allowing
them to cultivate fan bases and accumulate cultural as well as economic capital.

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Coming Out as Celebrities and Fans 109

This process of self-making is intertwined with Bilibili’s technical affordances

and platform capitalism, which engender specific expectations of performativity
on a platform that itself shapes and commodifies vlogger-viewer relationships.
Within this highly commercialized space, however, the viewers’ carnivalesque
consumptive practices open a space for political discussion and participation
under a façade of playfulness and depoliticization, thereby adding another
dimension to these vlogs’ cultural politics. By engaging with, interrogating, and
reimagining heteronormative blood kinship relations, the anonymous bullet
curtain comments subversively create a queer utopia, which, though ephemeral,
enables transformative queer politics.
The case of Bilibili coming-out vlogs demonstrates the complexity of illiberal
homonormativity. Whereas commercial forces capitalize on, appropriate, and
domesticate queerness, looking to incorporate it into the ever-expanding process
of commodification, they paradoxically provide a much-needed channel for rep-
resenting and discussing queerness. Although the queer vloggers’ self-represen-
tation bears clear characteristics of commercialized and depoliticized celebrity
images, their videos nevertheless supply a venue for queer discussions, negotia-
tions, and politics. The seemingly ephemeral and trivial utopian outlook in the
bullet curtain comments could engender transformative queer politics on Bilibili
and in Chinese cyberspace more generally, since it reverberates every time a new
viewer is attracted to the vlogs. In China’s illiberal context, the queering of these
commercialized spaces is pivotal for queer politics to survive and thrive.
Moreover, the case also demonstrates the multifacetedness of queering
Chinese kinship. I have suggested in earlier chapters that queering Chinese
kinship can function as an activist agenda, a strategy for artistic expression, and
a negotiative tactic in popular cultural production. This chapter reveals how it
can at once be appropriated as a key link in microcelebrity self-making processes
and be used a gateway to a queer utopia. These various ways of queering not
only reflect how concerns over blood kinship relations figure centrally in queer
selfhood and culture; they also show how the process of queering is in flux as it
intersects with different sociocultural domains. In Chapter 6, I remap the cultural
politics of queering Chinese kinship by switching the geographical focus from
the national to the regional.

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6
Rerouting Queerness: Qipa Shuo in the
Rise of Chinese Online Video

In the last four analysis chapters, I identified the strategy and politics of queering
Chinese kinship in social activism, cinematic representations, and popular
culture in China. Queering Chinese kinship not only shapes the condition for
Chinese queer survival and existence but also exerts considerable influence on
Chinese public culture as a whole. Kinship relations, I have argued, function
both to regulate and limit—and paradoxically facilitate and enable—queer
expressions and identifications. The dynamics between queerness and kinship
reflect a renegotiation of kinship ideologies and reimagining of individual life
trajectories, a concern that critically conditions the production, circulation, and
consumption of cinematic and popular cultural production in post-2008 China.
While in the foregoing discussions my focus has been on the geographically
bounded area of the PRC as a site of inquiry, this chapter directs attention to the
increasingly dense regional traffic of capital, talent, and knowledge. Looking at
the booming online video industry in China as a regional hub of popular cultural
production, it observes how queering Chinese kinship engenders not only local,
but also regional ways of imagining queer selfhood and culture in a networked
age. While these new ways afford an alternative framework of knowledge
production, they also entail new structures of hegemony and exclusion. In this
sense, this chapter remaps and complicates queering Chinese kinship as a social
praxis and evaluates its impact on a regional scale.
Here I draw on “rerouting” as a critical lens through which to theorize queer-
ness in an increasingly interconnected digital Asia. I borrow the concept of
“rerouting” from postcolonial theories, which shift critical focus away from a
concern with national paradigms and borders toward “a more diffuse, rhizo-
matic sense of a network of connections created by the flows of capital, com-
modities, and people” (Wilson, Şandru, and Welsh 2010, 4). As Clifford (1997)
argues, histories of travel, displacement, and exchange necessitate a view of
culture not as bounded, homogeneous, and local, but as processes of encoun-
ters (24). The imagined “roots” of cultures, in other words, are “continuously

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Rerouting Queerness 111

changing, rerouted and reroutable in various ways” (Wilson, Şandru, and Welsh
2010, 4). This chapter conceptualizes queerness as a movement complexly and
simultaneously shaped by global cultural encounters and regional networks of
exchange, and looks at how queer knowledges are produced and (re)imagined
through new connections and networks facilitated by digital media production
and consumption in Asia.
In June 2015, a six-minute video clip on being gay went viral on the Chinese-
speaking internet. Titled “We Are Not Monsters,” the clip portrays renowned
Taiwanese host Kevin Tsai (Cai Kang Yong)’s emotionally charged confession
about being gay in the Chinese-language entertainment industry. Having come
out himself more than a decade ago, Tsai discloses the devastating loneliness
of always being singled out in an industry in which very few are open about
their homosexuality. He explains that because of this personal experience with
negativity and pressure, he would normally advise against coming out when his
peers come to him for help. Meanwhile, he confesses, he wishes that there were
more people to stand with him. In a teary statement, Tsai concludes:

We must prove to all the parents out there that you won’t die from coming
out. Not all who come out will be cornered by society and left with nowhere
to go. The only thing I can do is to prove to worried parents who are watching
that we are not monsters and we can still live a good life. (Shanghaiist 2015)

Released as a teaser for the second season of the China-based internet talk
show Qipa Shuo 奇葩說, or literally “Weirdos Talk,” the clip swept Chinese-
language social networks overnight. It was also enthusiastically shared across
Chinese social media outlets such as Weibo and WeChat, and covered by major
Chinese news websites (The Paper 2015; Sina.com 2015). Outside China, news
about the clip circulated widely among Chinese-speaking communities in
Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, as well as on English-language online media
(China Times 2015; Liberty Times Net 2015; Straits Times 2016). The immense
media attention partly derived from the popularity of Kevin Tsai, who became a
household name for cohosting the Taiwanese variety-comedy talk show Kangsi
Coming (Kangxi Laile 康熙來了, 2004–2016), one of the longest-running and most
popular shows in the Chinese-speaking world (S. Cai 2015a). More importantly,
the spatial settings of the Qipa Shuo clip—the fact that a rare, powerful public
discourse on queerness was initiated by a Taiwanese host’s speech in a Chinese
internet talk show—raise questions about the geographies of sexual knowledges
and politics in an interconnected digital world.
Situating the talk show in the rise of the Chinese online video industry, this
chapter examines how regional flows of capital, talent, and knowledge make
queering Chinese kinship a potential site of regional queer knowledge produc-
tion that both decenters Western-style queer politics and creates new patterns of
hegemony and exclusion. By doing so, I argue for conceptualizing queerness as
a continually changing, rerouted, and reroutable movement that defies the fixity

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112 Queering Chinese Kinship

of a single location as a source of theorization. I start with a brief overview of

the recent rise of the Chinese online video industry and its impact on regional
media production, and then examine two dimensions of the Qipa Shuo episode’s
representations of queerness in relation to blood kinship: how it evokes a deter-
ritorialized cultural imaginary of Chineseness as an alternative vantage point
for envisioning queer identities and politics, and how this Chineseness in turn
reflects emerging regional structures of hegemony and homonormativity.

Qipa Shuo and the Rise of China’s Online Video Industry

Since its first connection to the World Wide Web in 1994, internet in China has
experienced remarkable development. According to a report released by the
China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC), by January 2018, the total
number of Chinese internet users had reached 772 million, accounting for more
than half of China’s entire population (2018, 7). The popularization of internet
technology has fundamentally transformed contemporary lives in terms of
communication, information dissemination, social networking, shopping, and
entertainment. As far as the online video industry in China is concerned, the
development of internet infrastructure and the considerable audience size have
served as great stimuli; however, the Chinese online video industry displays dis-
tinctive features in part because of its degree of seclusion from the US-centered
digital video economy. Due to regulatory constraints, the world’s two largest
online video websites, YouTube and Netflix, are not available to Chinese users.
As a result, local video streaming sites and content providers compete for the
Chinese market.
Online videos in China, which have skyrocketed in number in the last decade,
can be roughly divided into two categories: user-generated content (UGC) and
professional-generated content (PGC) (Craig, Cai, and Lv 2016, 5464). Produced
by nonprofessional video makers and distinguished by their shorter length,
relatively poor production quality, and minimalist editing techniques, UGC
videos are typically uploaded onto video platforms that reach a specific and
sometimes subcultural audience. In contrast, PGC bears more resemblance to
conventional television programs, with the involvement of professional teams
and commercial campaigns of advertisement, syndication, merchandising, and
other business developments (Craig, Cai, and Lv 2016, 5464). Whereas UGC
videos remain highly active and influential among online video communities,
PGC videos play a vital role in online video companies’ strategies for drawing
audiences’ attention and generating profits. Numerous Chinese companies have
entered into partnerships with PGCs to produce internet-based shows. IQIYI, for
instance, is a Netflix-style subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) website that
provides “TV-like premium content” (Craig, Cai, and Lv 2016, 5464). Branding
itself as the world’s leading digital video content provider, IQIYI not only spends

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Rerouting Queerness 113

millions securing the syndication rights of TV programs and Hollywood films;

it also invests heavily in producing original online programming, such as reality
TV, variety shows, and web series, of which Qipa Shuo is an example. Bearing
a clear resemblance to conventional TV entertainment shows, Qipa Shuo is an
online talk show characterized by fine editing, high-quality post-production,
and the presence of celebrities. The popularity of online shows like Qipa Shuo
signify an increasing prominence of the online video industry in China and its
close connection with conventional television culture.
Framed as a show that searches for the most eloquent speakers in the Chinese-
speaking world, Qipa Shuo also reflects individualistic aesthetics that mark new
trends of subject-making in contemporary China. Kicking off each season with
American Idol-style auditions, it recruits contestants based on the central concept
of qipa 奇葩. Literally translated as “precious and beautiful flower,” qipa is a
popular term used among Chinese youth to describe people or things consid-
ered odd or unusual; along those lines, Qipa Shuo auditions look for potential
contestants with distinct personality traits and unusual self-representation.
Throughout the show, the qipas have included openly gay men and lesbian
women, gender nonconforming persons, and controversial artists and scholars.
Their “unusualness” is celebrated in the show’s representations as individual
differences, through which standardized life trajectories and subjectivities are
questioned and reimagined. Whereas the celebration of differences may suggest
autonomous selfhood, the configuration of such a selfhood contains obvious
characteristics of what Y. Yan calls “the Chinese self” (2010, 92); in other words, a
self constantly discussed and negotiated vis-à-vis social and kinship relations in
Chinese culture. The show’s selection of debate topics demonstrates this point:
they include, for instance, “Is Urging One’s Children to Get Married a Gesture of
Love or Perversion?”, “Is Choosing Not to Have Kids Wrong?”, and “Should We
Accept Open Marriage?” With their focus on the tensions between an evolving
sense of individualistic self and the constraints posed by dominant social scripts,
the topics of the show create a space for discussing, negotiating, and potentially
transforming individualism with Chinese characteristics.
Qipa Shuo’s individualistic aesthetics are derived from its hybrid format that
draws on two genres: the talent show pattern dominates Qipa Shuo’s procedures,
while a localized approach to the talk show characterizes its modes of repre-
sentation. Gamson (1998) points out that talk shows are not just an important
platform for representing marginalized sexualities, they constitute “a contested
space” in which the lines between the normal and the abnormal are negotiated
and redrawn (5–16). Talk shows, he contends, are “battlegrounds over [issues of]
gender and sexuality” in media space (6). Qipa Shuo’s heavy focus on personal
traits and experiences, as well as its representations of nonnormative genders
and sexualities, correspond to Gamson’s observation. More specifically, Qipa
Shuo displays two prominent features in its rendering of the talk show genre:

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114 Queering Chinese Kinship

the installation of a confessional mode of discourse that is associated with the

show’s focus on the personal; and the dramatization of conflicts, which estab-
lishes personal experiences as legitimate public issues. First, the show’s search for
eloquent speakers and its emphasis on “unusual” personal traits have inspired
a proliferation of personal narratives and confessional discourses, which charac-
terize the auditions and frequently surface during the debates when participants
use their own experiences as examples. This installation of a confessional mode
of discourse in the show both calibrates its focus on the personal and contributes
to the visibility of traditionally marginalized persons and experiences. Second,
the show’s debate format dramatizes these personal experiences and functions
as a framework for their public discussions.
Thornborrow (2007) suggests that two prominent features of talk shows are
the narrativization of lay experience and the mediated disagreement and discus-
sion they host (1436–38). In talk shows, stories are made into issues and rendered
dramatic through the situated interaction of tellers, hosts, and studio audiences,
and contextually produced as public discourse (1437). Focusing on the tension
between individualistic senses of selfhood and dominant social expectations and
scripts, Qipa Shuo divides its participants into pro and con sides, an arrange-
ment that not only brings forth a spectacle of confrontation but also establishes
everyday experiences as legitimate public and social issues. The dramatization
of conflict and the development of opposing stances based on a narrativization of
personal experiences, in other words, function to renegotiate the private/public
divide. In this sense, the talk show genre has been utilized and reconfigured in
Qipa Shuo as a vehicle for its exploration of emergent topics and issues.
Whereas Qipa Shuo’s format has been influenced by the transnational circula-
tion of media products, a regional network of knowledge and talent has been
crucial to the show’s production. The debate format of Qipa Shuo is heavily
dependent on the Star Debate network. Established in Malaysia in 2013, Star
Debate is a debating society among Mandarin-speaking university students and
graduates, and a prominent platform that gathers top-tier participants within
the Chinese debate community (Jianshu 2016). When Qipa Shuo was initially con-
ceived, Star Debate was a major influence. Many of Qipa Shuo’s participants were
recruited directly from the Star Debate network, including Ma Weiwei (from
China, champion of the show’s first season), Yan Rujing (from Malaysia, founder
of Star Debate and second place-finisher in the show’s first season), Hu Tianyu
(from Macau, second season finalist), and Huang Zhizhong (from Taiwan, third-
season champion). The prominence of these Star Debate members points to the
significance of a regional network of talent as the show’s foundation. While this
regional network is not new, what is new is what Yecies, Keane, and Flew (2016)
have observed as a reorientation of audiovisual production in the region, one
characterized by flows of expertise and content to China in increasingly cross-
border collaborations. Similarly, E. Zhao (2016) explains how a new focus on the

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Rerouting Queerness 115

production of original content by Chinese online video providers effectuates a

gravitational pull in terms of China’s professionalizing market. Although the
production and consumption of Qipa Shuo evidently confirm these observations,
there remain meaningful follow-up questions to ask. How does this new mode
of regional collaboration proximate the supposed mainland-Chineseness of the
show and point to an intraregional network of cultural politics? How does this
new mode of production and circulation enable new perspectives in understand-
ing regional flows of knowledge and culture? In what follows, I offer a close
analysis of Qipa Shuo’s episode on coming out, with special attention to how
queerness is reimagined and rerouted vis-à-vis blood kinship through these
intraregional networks.

Critically Regional, Queerly Chinese

Johnson, Jackson, and Herdt (2000) contend that globalization has become an
“insidious way of writing and privileging Northern and Western centrisms”
(367). The thesis of globalization, they remark, assumes a theoretical premise
that “everyone is equally subjected to and equally part of a similar transforma-
tive process” (367), thereby flattening the heterogeneous and often asymmetri-
cal ways in which gender and sexuality are formed across different locales. In
order to provincialize the West in queer knowledge production, a reimagination
of gender and sexuality mappings is needed in order to devise an alternative
framework for thinking outside the tired rhetoric of the local, the national, and
the global. Taking up this task, queer Asian scholars have explored the critical
potential of a regional approach in providing an alternative vantage point;
Johnson, Jackson and Herdt, for their part, use the term “critical regionality” to
describe this approach. A critical regionality, they propose, is one that

(a) recognizes the historicity of world areas or regions . . . and acknowledges

the diverse inter-connections and inter-cultural comings and goings which
simultaneously define and undermine regions as imagined communities,
and (b) employs “regions” not as a “truth” about the intrinsic and essential
relationship between particular people, places and cultures, but as both theo-
retically and politically useful and at times necessary “fictions” or “partial
truths.” (362)

Such a perspective allows one to think beyond “local” and (or versus)
“global” as self-evident or preexisting terms and critically reflect on the ways in
which “individuals in diverse situations create, draw on, and are implicated in
networks of material and symbolic relations through which something approxi-
mating the ‘local’ and ‘the global’ are made” (367). Further developing this trans-
national approach, Chiang and Wong (2016) call for greater attention to “less
orderly, bilateral, and horizontal intraregional traffics of queerness across differ-
ent countries and regions” in order to examine other global queer modernities

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116 Queering Chinese Kinship

underexplored in queer theory (1645). This decentering strategy is echoed by

Kong (2019), who sheds light on “the queer flows of circulation among and
within non-Western societies that shape queer desires, identities and practices”
(2).
This provincializing approach attentive to regional connections and trans-
actions offers a fitting analytical perspective through which to tease out the
cultural dynamics in Qipa Shuo. Qipa Shuo’s episode on coming out showcases
how intraregional material and cultural flows generate new understandings of
queer identities and politics by establishing a deterritorialized sense of shared
Chineseness as the basis for imagining queer identities. These reconfigured
queer identities challenge Euro-American identity politics by foregrounding
intraregional histories and experiences in queer knowledge production.
The deterritorialized sense of Chineseness is first and foremost installed by
the demonstration video at the beginning of the episode: this video, a standard
feature of every Qipa Shuo episode, introduces the debate topic. In the case of the
episode on “Should One Come Out to His/Her Parents?”, the video is a parodic
remake of a scene from the TV drama Return of the Pearl Princess (Huan Zhu Gege
1998). A PRC and Taiwan coproduction, Pearl Princess was a costume drama
based on the popular Taiwanese novelist Qiong Yao’s fictional story centering
on the mistaken identities between Emperor Qianlong’s illegitimate daughter
Xia Ziwei and the orphaned vagrant Xiao Yanzi. Set in the Qing Dynasty, it has a
Cinderella-like plot that portrays the romantic relationships between Ziwei and
Er’Kang, the Emperor’s bodyguard, and between Xiao Yanzi and Yongqi, the
Emperor’s fifth son. The series became a phenomenal success when it premiered
in Taiwan in 1998 and Mainland China in 1999 and held the record for highest
TV-drama ratings in the Mainland for years (Ouyang 2003). In addition, the
show attracted fans in Chinese-speaking societies such as Hong Kong, Macau,
Singapore, and Malaysia, and was translated for broadcast in other Asian coun-
tries including Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. The
transregional popularity of the drama ensured that its visual and audio symbols
would be comprehensible when it was appropriated by Qipa Shuo for introduc-
ing the debate topic.
The demonstration video was reedited and redubbed by Xudu Ba 胥渡吧, a
mainland Chinese online fan organization that specializes in remaking popular
TV drama clips. Famous for the resemblance between their voiceovers and the
original voices of television characters, xudu ba created numerous internet meme
videos featuring TV characters acting out new scenarios with new scripts written
by the team. The Qipa Shuo demonstration video is in this style: the video, entitled
“The Qipa Royal Son: Should One Come Out to His Parents?”, is a re-render-
ing of a Pearl Princess clip that depicts Yongqi and Erkang kneeling in front of
Emperor Qianlong, pleading for his consent for love unions with their beloved
girls. Through creative editing and mixing original lines with new voiceovers,

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Rerouting Queerness 117

xudu ba skillfully transformed the confrontation scene from an argument for het-
erosexual union into a dialogue about homosexual love. In the reinvented video
clip, the two male protagonists Yongqi and Erkang confess to the Emperor that
they have “fallen in love with each other and have made a commitment for life.”
Infuriated by the declaration, the Emperor scolds them for compromising the
moral principles of the royal palace. In a teary rebuttal, Erkang states that “affec-
tion cannot be contained by the laws of rites and rituals.” Outraged by Erkang’s
rebellious remarks, the Emperor threatens to punish the two without mercy if
they do not behave. The clip ends with a close-up on Erkang’s tearstained and
confused face, while the title “Should One Come Out to His Parents?” pops out
in the middle of the frame (Mou 2015).
As an introduction to the debate topic on coming out, the demonstration
video’s audiovisual construction of an imagined episode of homosexual love set
in imperial China is significant in two ways. First and foremost, it imagines a
regional sense of Chineseness that serves as the basis for the show’s discussion
of queerness, which is reflected in the video’s juxtaposition of two spaces and
temporalities. On the one hand, as a costume drama, Pearl Princess’s mobiliza-
tion of ostentatious visual symbols—ancient Chinese-style clothing, the royal
palace setting, and imperial characters—instills a sense of Chineseness that,
though fictional, appeals to audiences’ imaginings of a Chinese past. On the
other hand, such an imaginary sense of Chineseness is at once intensified and
deterritorialized by another layer of space and temporality—the popularity of
the TV series Pearl Princess as a transregionally shared memory. The familiarity
of the TV drama to viewers of diverse Chinese origins helps the demonstration
video to transcend geographical settings and construct an imagined sense of
Chineseness as a shared system of cultural symbols, traditions, and experiences.
The second point of significance is that the video grounds the discussion of
queerness in Chinese kinship relations and ideologies, shown by the motif of
parent-children confrontation. The father figure in the video is embodied by the
Emperor, who is not only a biological father to Yongqi but also a symbolic Father
and Patriarch to all subjects in a Confucian system. The conflation of the roles of
the father and the Emperor dramatizes and universalizes intergenerational con-
flicts over the issue of homosexuality: instead of being portrayed as a particular
instance of psycho-medical pathology, homosexuality here is configured as part
of a universal discord between the younger and the older generation, a form of
disobedience and rebellion against Confucian codes of conduct. Homosexuality,
in other words, is conceived as a generational and familial issue. The representa-
tion of queerness through parent-children confrontation establishes an alternate
system of reference that privileges kinship relations as the point of departure for
discussing queerness. In this regard, Chineseness serves as a cultural mapping
for the relationship between individual selfhood and hierarchical familial roles
and kinship obligations.

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118 Queering Chinese Kinship

This focus on an imagined and shared Chineseness is combined with

mediated arguments in the show to establish new grounds for strategy and
critique. In talk shows, confrontation serves as the key spectacle that creates
tension, generates controversy, and attracts viewers (Hutchby 2001). In the case
of Qipa Shuo, the development of opposing stances is embedded in the debate
format, which explicitly foregrounds verbal conflict by dividing participants into
pro and con sides. In the discussion of whether one should come out to one’s
parents, both sides mobilize Chineseness as a central rhetoric in their arguments
but approach the concept from different perspectives; for instance, one of the
celebrity mentors, Gao Xiaosong, who argues for coming out, uses Chineseness
as a point of critique. Commenting on the feelings of shame inflicted on Chinese
queers by a strong kinship ideology, Gao remarks,

I think it is a very typical Chinese idea for parents to regard their children as
possessions or products. It is only through this logic that they would come to
compare their homosexual children to defected products that bring shame to
the family. Don’t feel like you have shamed your parents just because you are
homosexual. There is no need for self-denial. (Mou 2015)

Focusing on the relationship between queerness and familial relations, Gao’s

speech creates an anti-shame discourse based on a critique of the Chineseness of
kinship ideology. First, he mobilizes an implicit rhetoric of autonomy and self-
determination to question and reconfigure the relationship between individual
and familial senses of self. Additionally, Gao’s speech highlights the need to
challenge the Chinese “face” economy, which he identifies as a chief source of
shame and self-denial for Chinese queers. He points out that the link between
a stigmatized individual sexual identity and the family’s social status and inter-
personal relationships rests upon a Chinese tendency to conflate an individual
with the family. A rethinking of the relationship between these two selfhoods,
he suggests, would contribute to undoing both a “face”-based system and the
senses of shame it inflicts. Gao’s vision of an anti-shame discourse is grounded
in a critique of what he identifies as a Chinese (i.e., Confucianized) system of
kinship relations and values.
Whereas for Gao Chineseness serves as a point of critique, for the con side
who argue against coming out, Chineseness constitutes a framework for creative
strategies. In Kevin Tsai’s defense of those who choose not to come out, for
example, he uses the imaginary of Chinese culture to propose a reexamination
of coming-out strategies. “There is a very Chinese reason behind my belief that
people shouldn’t come out to their parents,” Tsai states. “We Chinese like to keep
things indirect. Being indirect gives us more space to negotiate. . . . By not coming
out to your parents, you may be able to gain more freedom. In this sense, staying
closeted would be a sensible choice” (Mou 2015). In this speech, Tsai envisions
the shared experiences of being “Chinese” as a common ground for devising
negotiative strategies. His insistence on an “indirect” approach destabilizes

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Rerouting Queerness 119

the binaries of concealment/truth and lie/honesty commonly associated with

dominant coming-out discourses. Moreover, his speech reconfigures the idea
of freedom by examining it vis-à-vis kinship relations. Instead of relying on a
romanticized liberal notion of freedom that is seen as the corollary of coming
out, freedom is discussed relationally in Tsai’s speech as space for negotiation
and embodiment. Chineseness, in this sense, signifies common experiences
shaped by kinship ideologies in Confucianized societies, and is used to displace
liberationist discourses by proposing alternative understandings and strategies.
Gao and Tsai share a common concern over an imagined Chineseness as
an integral part in the show’s discursive engagements with queerness. This
imagined Chineseness challenges Euro-American strategies of coming out as
a “fundamental means by which an individual undertakes the process of con-
structing a sexual identity” (Chirrey 2003, 24). Premising coming-out choices
and strategies on shared regional experiences, Qipa Shuo’s discussions unsettle
the dichotomized views of shame/pride and secrecy/openness by reflecting on
and reimagining queer experiences within Chinese kinship relations.
The intraregional network of queer knowledge production is further reflected
in the episode through the narrativization of personal experiences in the form of
confessional discourses, which engender a “close-to-normal” strategy that cri-
tiques and rethinks confrontational identity politics. In her discussion of nonnor-
mative sexual subjects in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Yau (2010)
observes the desire to be “normal” as a prominent characteristic of Chinese
queer populations. Despite their own status as marginalized and stigmatized
social outcasts, Yau argues, Chinese queer subjects engage in various prac-
tices to get “close-to-normal” as strategies to survive social discrimination and
pathologization (1–14); in turn, these practices enable Chinese queers to “gain
more bargaining power” in society and ensure a “continual and thriving exist-
ence of nonnormative sexual subjects” (4). Further developing Yau’s argument,
Engebretsen (2015) contends that the aspirations to be normal signal a reconfig-
ured relationship with normativity that challenges the influential Euro-American
paradigm, which theorizes queerness as anti-assimilation and as being based in
coming-out events and a liberatory ethos (9). Stressing Chinese queer women’s
“experiences of the desire for normativity and sustaining kin-based familiar-
ity amid emerging queer imaginaries of regionally Asian and Western origin,”
Engebretsen highlights the “complex social processes and experiences, cultur-
ally specific adaptations and paradoxes” that underpin Chinese queer experi-
ences (9). The “close-to-normal” strategy captures the aspirations, negotiations,
and dynamics underlying the construction of regional queer identities.
This approach to queer identities and politics is revealed in the show through
the debater Jiang Sida’s account of his own coming-out experiences. Upon pub-
licizing his sexual orientation in the show’s first season, Jiang states that he has
been solely defined by virtue of his sexual identity as “the out gay man” both in

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120 Queering Chinese Kinship

the show and in his private life. This process of labeling, Jiang confesses, makes
him feel like he is treated as “a zoo animal covered in a different type of feathers.”
He remarks that other people’s “banner-waving and support-shouting” for his
coming out has only intensified the feeling of being singled out. Concluding
his speech, Jiang delineates an ideal picture of an “open and civilized” society,
where deep-seated structures of prejudice, sexual segregation, and inequality
would be eliminated, and people would be treated indiscriminately regardless of
their sexual orientations (Mou 2015). Jiang’s reflections act as a development of
Tsai’s “we are not monsters” speech by fundamentally challenging the division
between normal/abnormal and problematizing monumentalistic gay identities
and confrontational identity politics.
The narrativization through confessional discourses in Qipa Shuo enables an
exploration of coming-out experiences, which further facilitates the discussion of
a close-to-normal strategy that characterizes the aspirations and negotiations of
Chinese queers. Along with the imaginary of Chineseness, the close-to-normal
strategy invokes an alternate, intraregional understanding of queer identities as
the results of negotiations and coordination between sexualities and social—and
especially kinship—relations.

Networked Homonormativity

The case of Qipa Shuo demonstrates well how a Western-derived concept of

queerness is rerouted in the rise of digital communication and entertainment
in Asia. As discussed above, intraregional connections created by the flows of
capital and talent engender a network of queer knowledge production that
decenters both Western paradigms of sexual knowledges and politics, and
national approaches to sexual cultures. However, this network of queer knowl-
edges and politics is not exempt from its own power dynamics and patterns of
hegemony and exclusion. Here I offer two points of criticism on this emerging
network in digital Asia. First, since these new digital connections are enabled to
a large extent by China’s growing soft power in regional media production and
consumption, this regional network inevitably privileges mainland China as a
point of reference. Furthermore, the online show’s status as a consumer media
product poses a limitation on its vision of queer politics. I unpack the implica-
tions of these two points in the following section.
In her field-defining work Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across
the Pacific, Shih (2007) derives her analysis of the heterogeneity of Chineseness
from Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Noting “the many
different accents of the Mandarin spoken by the actors and actresses” in the
film, Shih draws attention to how the film challenges the Chinese-language
cinema convention of speaking standard Mandarin with “perfect” pronuncia-
tion and enunciation (2007, 2). The linguistic dissonance of the film, she suggests,

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Rerouting Queerness 121

“registers the heterogeneity of Sinitic languages as well as their speakers living

in different locales,” thus engendering and validating a Sinophone heteroglos-
sia (4). As a concept, the Sinophone frustrates the imagination of monological
Chineseness or a monolithic China and Chinese culture, and foregrounds the
value of “difficulty, difference, and heterogeneity” (5). Shih’s conceptualization
of Sinophone illuminates the underlying power relations in cultural hegemony
and marginalization, and highlights the urgency of critiquing the construction
of monolithic Chineseness in light of China’s rise as a superpower. However,
as Y. Zhang (2015) points out, her definition of Sinophone as counterhegemonic
by way of excluding cultural productions from mainland China is itself prob-
lematically territorial and binary. Instead of invoking an ideological opposition
between China/Chineseness, I direct attention to the power dynamics in con-
structing Chineseness as a structure of regional hegemony shaped by the PRC’s
rising economic status and its newly gained prominence in the regional cultural
market.
Immediately noticeable for viewers of Qipa Shuo is that while the show uses
the common language of Mandarin (putonghua or hanyu), the speeches are deliv-
ered in a variety of accents, a characteristic similar to Shih’s observation about
the dialogue in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. These accents include regional
variations of the standard putonghua, such as Shanghai and Xinjiang accents,
as well as accented hanyu in the forms of Taiwanese and Malaysian Mandarin.
These accents are straightforwardly presented, and sometimes even emphasized
and magnified. Malaysian participants in the show, for instance, frequently
use Cantonese phrases and expressions to illustrate their ideas. It is tempting
to suggest that these accented forms of hanyu, to borrow Shih’s words, subvert
the “hegemonic projection of uniformity” of Chineseness (2007, 5). A different
conclusion, however, may be drawn from a closer examination of not only what
accents and dialects are spoken, but how they relate to the representation of dif-
ferent knowledges and experiences. I argue that while Qipa Shuo gestures toward
the inclusion of a variety of locales, ethnicities, and nationalities both inside and
outside China in its audiovisual construction of “Chineseness,” it nevertheless
instills a China-centric vision by presenting a discussion of kinship that flattens
intraregional differences in queer politics.
While negotiations with kinship ideologies are shared concerns for regional
queer subjects, different approaches to and progresses of queer politics exist
across different locales in the region. In Taiwan, for example, recent queer move-
ments focused on the bill for “diverse family formation.” First drafted in 2013,
the bill includes three key components: marriage equality, civil partnership, and
a redefined kinship system. The bill aims to fundamentally reconfigure heter-
onormative kinship ideologies. In the proposal of civil partnership, for instance,
a more elastic system is envisioned to decenter the status of marriage as the
only legitimate model for intimacy by allowing any two persons over the age of

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122 Queering Chinese Kinship

twenty to register as partners, regardless of their relationship as friends or lovers

(Hsu, 2015). The “diverse family formation” movement in Taiwan develops a
more radical approach in rethinking kinship relations and structures, produc-
ing valuable knowledge for conceptualizing queer strategies within the kinship
system. Moreover, the Taiwanese host Kevin Tsai himself has been an avid sup-
porter of the bill, signing a petition and writing a widely circulated Facebook
post advocating for the movement (Ettoday 2013). It may come as a surprise,
therefore, that no reference was given in the discussion in Qipa Shuo about this
momentous movement, which could potentially contribute to a more fruitful
imagining of queer identities and politics. The neglect of queer politics in Taiwan
is not an isolated case. In Malaysian and New Zealander debaters’ speeches,
no mention is made in relation to how local queers engage with and strategize
kinship relations and ideologies. In other words, although a common concern
over kinship is foregrounded, the discussions themselves remain generalized,
abstract, and evasive toward regional specificities.
This characteristic is determined by the weight of a mainland Chinese per-
spective in the episode’s production. On the one hand, Chinese online video
production is heavily influenced by an entertainment-oriented, depoliticized
approach in Chinese television culture. As Miao (2011) observes, despite signifi-
cant transformations following commercialization since 1979, Chinese television
continues to be one of the most carefully surveilled and tightly controlled types
of media (95). Under the dual pressure of meeting censorship and propaganda
demands of the government and winning over viewers and generating profits,
Chinese television stations have turned to producing “harmless” entertain-
ment programs instead of serious programs on political or social issues (100).
Similarly, Rofel (2007) identifies the avoidance of “the dangerous passion of
politics” (119) as a defining feature of cultural lives in postsocialist China. In this
distinct media landscape, Qipa Shuo also engages in a degree of self-censorship
to avoid ostentatiously political content that would attract state sanction. On the
other hand, the fact that mainland Chinese audiences remain the demographic
majority of Qipa Shuo’s target viewership also contributes to the episode’s focus
on parent-children and blood kinship relations. Since queer subjects in China
still suffer from the neglect of the legal system and the heteronormative blood
kinship system remains dominant (Y. Li 2006), a discussion of parent-children
relationships and queer selfhood would be more relatable than marriage equality
or diverse family formation. In this sense, while the show both draws on and
constructs an intraregional network of knowledges and politics, its selection of
topic and representations of arguments are shaped by its own situatedness in
mainland Chinese contexts. Qipa Shuo thus reflects a problematic China-centric
pattern in regional cultural production.
Furthermore, Qipa Shuo invokes a revisionist and culturally conservative view
of family and kinship relations that raises concerns of homonormativity. This

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Rerouting Queerness 123

tendency is shaped both by Qipa Shuo’s status as a commercial entertainment

show and by its connection to gay mainstreaming, especially in mainland China.
In his discussion of the growing appearance of LGBTQ persons in daytime talk
TV in the United States, Gamson (1998) points out that while proliferating rep-
resentations of queer subjects in commercial media culture produce the positive
effects of empowering queers who have lived without any validation from the
dominant culture, LGBTQ visibility in talk shows simultaneously gives voice
and exploits (69–71). Through representing mediated conflicts between queer
people and “families,” American daytime talk shows work with a loosely liberal
ideology while simultaneously establishing a “new, updated, culturally conserv-
ative version of ‘normal’ families that includes gays and lesbians” while generat-
ing further exclusions for bisexual and transgender people who are considered
“too selfish and monstrous for the family” (Gamson 1998, 71). These observa-
tions resonate with the representations in Qipa Shuo. While the “close-to-normal”
strategy establishes new grounds for negotiating and imagining queer identities,
it also runs the risk of perpetuating, not challenging, dominant heteronorma-
tive kinship ideologies. This point can be most aptly illustrated by a speech
from Jin Xing. Described as “a kind of Chinese hybrid of Oprah, Simon Cowell,
and Caitlyn Jenner” (Rahman 2016, para.4), Jin is the first transgender celebrity
in China. Having led a decorated career in modern dance, she is now widely
known as a successful talk show host. In Qipa Shuo, she recounts her experience
of being transgender:

If being heterosexual can be compared to a continent, and being homosexual

is an island, then male-to-female transgender is a tiny rock floating on a vast
ocean. I have chosen to be the rock. I talked to my parents before I made the
call. Even if I could ignore all the other voices in the world, they were the two
persons I cared about, because they created me and educated me. If I were
not real with them, how would I have the courage to face other people? . . .
They are my copyright owner, and I had to ask for their consent if I were to
make any changes to myself. (Mou 2015)

Whereas Jin’s speech envisions transgender identity within the blood

kinship system—thereby productively destabilizing the ideological antagonism
between queerness and kinship—her imagination of queerness also problemati-
cally hinges upon a highly (hetero)normative idea of the nuclear family, which
reinstates, instead of challenges, normalizing scripts of gender, sexuality, and
intergenerational relationships. The speech’s strong emphasis on parent-child
relations thus creates a version of queer identity that is solely defined by and
upholds conventional family structures and kinship values.
In her critique of neoliberal sexual politics in the United States, Duggan (2002)
uses the term “homonormativity” to describe a politics that “does not contest
dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and
sustains them while promising the possibility of . . . a privatized, depoliticized

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124 Queering Chinese Kinship

gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (179). While Duggan

adopts a national approach focusing on social class in the United States, what Qipa
Shuo reflects is an emerging regional structure of networked homonormativity
facilitated by China’s rise as an economic power and an active player in cultural
production. As Chinese media production gains prominence on the regional and
international stage, one witnesses particular forms of media sanctions and self-
censorship that admit only certain forms of sexualities—ones conforming to the
model of a nuclear, reproductive, and heteronormative family—while excluding
and silencing those deemed too radical and nonconforming. Qipa Shuo’s pattern
of inclusion and exclusion on the issue of homosexuality thus holds significance
for regional cultural production and sexual politics. The new model of regional,
networked homonormativity calls for sustained critical attention on intrare-
gional exchanges and power relations that enable changing forms of gender and
sexuality.

Conclusion

Through a case study of Qipa Shuo’s coming-out episode, this chapter has
explored how representations of queering Chinese kinship in the newly arising
online video industry constitutes an intraregional network of queer knowledges
and dynamics that remaps queer politics beyond local/global formulations.
I have argued for the usefulness of a provincializing approach that does not
privilege Western formulations or national paradigms of sexual knowledges and
cultures, but instead focuses on intraregional networks generated by the flows
of technology, capital, talent, and ideas. This approach brings forth a rerouting
of queerness: a critical rethinking that situates queerness in movements, con-
nections, and networks, instead of within static and essentialized boundaries of
nations and cultures.
A rerouting of queerness sheds lights on the new knowledges and politics
generated by recent developments in digital communication and cultural pro-
duction in Asia. As I have shown, the close engagement and creative reimagi-
nation of blood kinship relations play a key role in this process: the regional
circulation of kinship-based imaginaries constitutes the foundation of a vantage
point through which to understand queer experiences, envision queer strate-
gies, and create queer cultures. The “close-to-normal” strategy, for instance,
which privileges tacit, nonconfrontational negotiations with kinship and social
relations as a basis for queer existence, productively challenges dominant Euro-
American epistemologies and affords a regional optic through which to theorize
queer experiences. While these new developments highlight the potential of
queering kinship in becoming a regional approach toward queer politics, they
also entail regional structures of cultural, economic, and ideological hegemonies
that pose new challenges for queer cultural production. With China’s ambition

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Rerouting Queerness 125

to develop digital power and internationalize its media and cultural industries
(Keane and Chen 2017), intraregional networks in Asia become contested sites
where complex cultural politics play out. Only by thinking beyond the local/
global binary can one attend to these otherwise neglected dynamics of connec-
tion, dominance, and exclusion.

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7
Closing Remarks

As I hope is clear from preceding chapters, queer public culture, centered on

a close engagement with blood kinship relations, is complex and vibrant in
illiberal China. Through various tactics—including negotiating boundaries of
cultural intelligibility, creatively circumventing censorship, and harnessing the
power of popular and commercial cultural products—Chinese queer culture
carves out a resilient albeit precarious space where queerness is envisioned and
embodied. Casting a contrast to the common perception of queer culture in the
PRC as avant-garde and underground, these multifarious queer articulations
have a distinctly public dimension. Indeed, despite stringent censorship against
queer-themed cultural products, queer sensibilities have found their way into
Chinese popular culture and are enthusiastically embraced, particularly by the
country’s youth. This peculiar moment of simultaneous control and proliferation
of queerness has profound implications not only for understanding queer China,
but for thinking through queer cultural production in the world more broadly.
I have argued that critical attention to the interactions between queerness and
blood kinship is key to unpacking the complexities, paradoxes, and potentialities
of queer China. I am acutely aware of how such an argument apparently evokes
a regressive queer politics, especially when Euro-American scholarship on new
reproductive technologies and queer parenting has posed serious challenges to
the biogenetic connotations of kinship. What I set out to achieve is not a “nostal-
gic” return to the questions of if and how one should come out to one’s family;
rather, I reflect on the efficacy and limitations of the coming-out-based model
of queer politics that has been a keystone of queer liberalism and its linear-pro-
gressive logic. Chinese queers are not trapped in the Stone Age of queer politics
because they live under an illiberal state and a powerful family institution.
Instead, the omnipresence of blood kinship ideologies and the in/elasticities of
illiberal media cultures give rise to creative and fundamentally new articulations
of queerness that not only form part and parcel of contemporary Chinese public
culture, but also complicate the understandings of global queerness.

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Closing Remarks 127

As stated early on, I do not concern myself with defining quintessential char-
acteristics of contemporary Chinese queerness (nor do I deem this possible).
Instead, I focus on the gaps, slippages, and ambivalences in theorizing Chinese
queerness, treating them as important sites of knowledge production. By way
of conclusion, I focus on the new directions the book opens in conceptualizing
queerness. A discussion of the intricate relationship between queerness and nor-
mality is followed by a reflection on the convergence between queer Sinophone
studies and China studies, and capped off with an outline of the theoretical
potential of thinking about queerness through blood kinship.

From Critiquing Normality to Queer Criticality

The book endeavors to destabilize the ideological antagonism between queer-

ness and the blood family, a common conception underscored by a view of
(a) blood kinship as a normalizing institution and (b) queerness as resolutely
against all norms. The book calls for a more nuanced approach by showing how,
in the Chinese context, queer people’s interactions with normality are ambiva-
lent, flexible, and creative. As Butler (1993) suggests, it is important for queer
studies “to avow a set of constraints on the past and the future that mark at once
the limits of agency and its most enabling conditions” (20, emphasis in original).
A queer project, then, is not simply about outlining liberating practices and cel-
ebrating autonomy: it is about confronting the constraints and possibilities of
present conditions, and working through the messy and disjunctive processes
that bring queerness into being, often in ambivalent ways. Only through these
efforts can we get closer to a queerness “never fully owned, but always and only
redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage” (Butler 1993, 19).
Therefore, rather than attempting to categorize a cultural practice as either truly
queer or not queer enough, I seek to think beyond this dichotomy by evoking a
framework that, in retrospect, could be best described as queer criticality. Such
a framework regards critical queerness not as the end product of queer cultural
production, but as an analytical lens through which to tease out the nuances and
paradoxes of queer becoming. As Rogoff (2003) suggests, in criticality, scholars
have a “double occupation” (para. 17): they should analyze, unveil, and critique,
and at the same time share and live out the very conditions they are able to see
through. Criticality, in other words, combines critical theory’s future-oriented
research agenda with an emphasis on the potentiality of the present. Roseneil
(2011) further argues that in the study of gender and sexuality, criticality requires
“less focus on the hegemonies of heterosexuality and . . . the heteronormative
order, and more on the discontinuities, challenges, and transformations, . . . and
how they are lived . . . in complex ways that are chosen and not chosen” (130).
Similarly, I aim to tease out in this book present-focused potentialities and offer
future-oriented critique as I untangle the intricate intertwining of normalization

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128 Queering Chinese Kinship

and subversion in queer cultural production in China. This means that although
identifying and critiquing heteronormativity and homonormativity are impor-
tant, I focus more on the realities and subtleties of queer lives that are inevitably
shaped by normality.
This vantage point is particularly useful when exploring the dynamic site
of Chinese blood kinship. Chinese queers’ aspirations to get “close to normal”
within the blood family have given rise to a constellation of practices that
approximate and appropriate normality, blurring the lines between the normal
and the abnormal. Within this context, an approach of queer criticality helps to
fruitfully capture the main tensions underlying Chinese queer culture today. In
what follows, I outline these tensions, explain how a perspective of queer criti-
cality contributes to a more nuanced understanding, and discuss directions for
future research.

Theorizing queerness between assimilationist politics and subversive

politics

Assimilation has long been a central concern in the discussion of queerness for
its tendency to create a narrow and exclusive sexual politics. Sycamore (2008)
eloquently describes assimilation as a “tyranny” through which “the borders are
policed” (3). Assimilationist politics, therefore, may lead to a constructed distinc-
tion between “good” and “bad” queer subjects contingent upon state-sanctioned
standards and privileges. In this sense, scrutinizing queer sexuality’s intersec-
tion with other identity facets such as gender, race, and class and interrogat-
ing exclusive practices of assimilation are undoubtedly essential tasks for queer
studies. In the meantime, queer practices and cultural production in China raise
questions about the perceived opposition between assimilation and resistance,
and between conservativeness and radicality. As shown through the case studies
in this book, such an opposition is unstable and problematic. Indeed, it seems
that the expectation of a queer subject to be as radical as possible and to resist all
norms is fraught with the same pitfall that underpins the logic of assimilation-
ist politics itself, for it also takes for granted a series of privileges that are in
fact highly contingent upon specific social, cultural, and political conditions. As
Ahmed (2004) reminds us, the queer ideal of maintaining a perpetually trans-
gressive life comes at an enormous social, psychic, and economic cost (151).
Therefore, she encourages us to see assimilation and transgression not as politi-
cal choices that individuals make, but as “effects of how subjects can and cannot
inhabit social norms and ideals” (153). Queer lives, she writes, “do not suspend
the attachments that are crucial to the reproduction of heteronormativity, and
this does not diminish ‘queerness,’ but intensifies the work that it can do” (152).
Resonating with this statement, I have endeavored in this book to unveil simulta-
neously the problem and potential of apparently assimilationist practices, instead

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Closing Remarks 129

of dismissing them simply as not radical enough. I argue that these efforts should
be key to any project that aims to understand queerness beyond simplistic and
dichotomous terms, and I make a case for a careful and prolonged engagement
with the material, cultural, and social structures that make queer practices and
expressions possible in the first place. In the array of media genres explored
here, these structures are almost invariably heteronormative and saturated by
the lure of assimilation. The details of these case studies suggest that queerness
resides precisely in the paradoxical and dialectical tensions between assimila-
tionist politics and subversive politics: it is only by getting close to normal and
by “uncomfortably inhabit[ing]” dominant social structures (Ahmed 2004, 147)
that queer subjects can work on and rewrite heteronormative scripts. Such a
process challenges scholars to closely attend to the intertwining of enabling and
delimiting aspects of queer practices and politics by both acknowledging sub-
versive potentialities despite practical limitations and identifying and critiquing
assimilationist tendencies that would lead to a domesticated politics.

The question of illiberal homonormativity

The book’s three chapters on popular culture are threaded by an engagement

with the notion of “illiberal homonormativity,” which updates Duggan’s (2002)
critique by situating it in China’s illiberal environments. While homonormativ-
ity warns against the risk of a consumption-based queer culture anchored in
domesticity, illiberal homonormativity accentuates the complexity and ambiva-
lence of commercialized queer cultural products and related consumptive prac-
tices in China. China’s illiberal political and social environments have created a
major setback for a liberationist queer approach: as media censorship and social
stigmatization persist, commercial cultural products remain one of the very few
channels through which queerness survives and indeed thrives, as evidenced
by the proliferation of straightforward coming-out narratives and implicit
queer sensibilities that appear in tandem with the state’s persistent crackdown
on queer-themed cultural products. The notion of illiberal homonormativity
indicates that although queerbaiting and queer mainstreaming remain relevant
concerns in China (for example, see Ng and Li 2020), they should be situated
within local genealogies and conditions that are markedly different from the
US context on which Duggan bases her theorization. As the book has shown, in
China, the booming commercial market for queer sensibilities has created key
opportunities for queer representation, activism, and self-making that would
otherwise not have been possible. Since commercial products’ unique importance
to Chinese queer cultural production will likely endure in the foreseeable future
as new spaces of representation and self-presentation open up, a central issue for
studying queer China, then, will be the productive tensions emanating from the
marriage between queerness and commerciality. The illiberal homonormativity

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130 Queering Chinese Kinship

approach taken in this book may offer a framework for future research. More
specifically, I believe that the following questions are essential for unpacking the
intricate cultural politics of commercial queer cultural products: In what ways has
the commercial channel enabled otherwise-impossible queer expressions? How
does it negotiate with state power? How have commercial concerns shaped and
constrained the queerness represented? What kind of enabling and delimiting
queer politics does such a representation engender? Addressing these questions
will help researchers to tease out queer potentials and identify homonormative
tendencies in queer China’s paradoxical and disjunctive landscape.

Queerly Transnationalizing Chineseness

This book is titled Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing
China, which, as I hope is clear from previous discussions, registers two key
arguments about queerness and Chineseness: first, queer culture is public culture
in the PRC, and constitutes a pivotal site of negotiation with state-sanctioned
notions of Chineseness; second, such a domain of queer public culture has
always been connected to intraregional and global circuits of cultural produc-
tion, blurring the line between the local and the global. In other words, despite
the book’s place-based focus, it de-essentializes geographically bound concep-
tualizations of identities by juxtaposing queerness and Chineseness, and teases
out their productive tensions. The book’s approach, then, corresponds to what
Chiang (2014a) has described as “queer Sinophonicity,” which suggests that
both Chineseness and queerness find their most meaningful articulations in and
through one another, since they promise to denaturalize each other continuously
(20).
While the emerging field of queer Sinophone studies aims to set in dialogue
queer experiences across diverse Sinophone locales mostly outside of mainland
China (Chiang and Wong 2020, 4), this book argues for a cross-fertilization
between queer Sinophone studies and China studies by showing how a careful
exploration of queer cultures in the PRC bears relevance to a broader under-
standing of queer Sinophone articulations. I am aware that this approach could
spark controversy, especially because queer Sinophone studies has made it a
key objective to challenge China-centrism through a focus on the periphery;
however, challenging China-centrism should not be equated with dismissing
the “center.” Seeing the PRC as a dark, powerful, overbearing, and homophobic
political entity may evoke a seemingly empowering politics of resistance, but
it fails to meaningfully confront and challenge the country’s continued influ-
ence on formulations of Chineseness at a transnational scale. The very notion of
“China-centrism” also begs the question of who actually occupies the center. As
the book has shown, the PRC is so heterogeneous and complex that it is naïve
to assume that there is one totalizing “center”; instead, the center-periphery

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Closing Remarks 131

dialectic is constantly reproduced, challenged, and displaced within the PRC

itself along the lines of gender, sexuality, class, and so on. Therefore, while I
agree that the PRC’s grip on definitions of Chineseness should be scrutinized
and contested—especially against the backdrop of widespread struggles against
the Chinese state’s homogenizing nationalist rhetoric in Sinophone societies—
I argue that the appropriate response should include attending to, instead of
looking away from, dynamics and tensions in the PRC.
Queer public culture is an important site through which to study these
dynamics and tensions. The encounter between queerness and Chineseness in
the PRC produces both opportunities and challenges: whereas articulations of
queerness can productively contest state-sanctioned definitions of Chineseness,
Chineseness can function as an important discursive framework that delimits
and domesticates queerness. In recent years, the CCP has repackaged and rein-
stitutionalized Confucianism, and maneuvers Confucian values to legitimize
its rule and regulate citizens (Song 2020, 669). At the core of this modernized
Confucianism is the heterosexual, reproductive, and filial family that establishes
state-defined standards in personal and intimate lives, including gender expres-
sions, conjugal roles, and reproductive duties. Within these contexts, queer
culture’s persistent claiming of Chineseness for people who do not conform
to heteronormative life trajectories signifies a democratizing process where
the state’s monopoly over what it means to be Chinese is challenged and dis-
placed. This process resonates with queer Sinophone studies’ denaturalizing
and decentering project by further revealing how the alleged “center” itself is in
fact inherently unstable and contested by discursive struggles. In the meantime,
however, these struggles and challenges remain constrained by specific material
and cultural conditions. These struggles are salient in terms of commercial
queer cultural products, whose imaginations of alternative Chineseness often
do not escape a narrow, PRC-based revisionist framework. Such a phenomenon
deserves sustained critical attention, particularly since the PRC is poised to
become a regional center of cultural production. The transnational popularity of
PRC queer cultural products calls for scrutiny of how representations of queer
Chineseness could both contribute to and eclipse queer Sinophone articulations.

The Trouble and Potential with Kinship

It appears that kinship has never been queerer, at least in the West. In their
editorial for a recent special issue on queer kinship, Björklund and Dahl (2020)
observe a “queer kinship research boom” that has developed in tandem with a
“queer baby boom,” especially in Northern Europe (9). They find that advances
in socio-legal structures and reproductive technologies have given a strong
impetus to nonheterosexual reproduction and family formation, enabling queer
intervention into heteronormative scripts of domestic arrangement, parenthood,

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132 Queering Chinese Kinship

child-rearing, and other kin-making practices (9–15). This encouraging situation,

however, is beset by significant problems: queer reproduction, they point out,
remains “intensely stratified along lines of race, gender, age, and health” (12).
In this sense, the current moment in queer kinship—that is, assuming there is a
single shared “moment”—needs continuous efforts of recalibration, interroga-
tion, and rethinking.
This book responds to queer kinship studies’ call to “revisit queer kinship”:
“to return, take up again, or to reconsider, which implies to bring new perspec-
tives, motivated by the wish to change or improve” (Björklund and Dahl 2020,
7). This has not been an easy task, since the hegemony of Anglo-American
queer theories means that the critical vocabularies and epistemological frame-
works for writing about queer kinship derive from canonized works that are
often ill-fitting in non-Western contexts (see Mizielińska, Gabb, and Stasińska
2018, 976–77). Nevertheless, it is exactly through the difficult dialogue between
Western theories and non-Western contexts that the purview of queer kinship
studies can be productively expanded. Mizielińska, Gabb, and Stasińska (2018)
call this process “queer transculturation,” which directs our attention to “how
power is being renegotiated, reworked, and creolized through the very process
of its translation to other geo-political contexts” (976). This book shows that
queering kinship practices in contemporary China have much to offer to com-
plement, complicate, and challenge hegemonic academic discourses of queer
kinship that have so far predominantly revolved around the West. In the fol-
lowing, I summarize three main perspectives from the book’s study of queering
Chinese kinship and situate them in the ongoing dialogues in theorizing queer
kinship globally.

Against linear-progressive politics

The now-worldwide phenomenon of legal same-sex marriage has created a

plethora of new topics on queer reproduction and queer parenting. While these
topics undoubtedly deserve scholarly attention, it is increasingly important to
be critical of a monumentalist politics premised on a linear view of progress.
Whereas in the West, scholars debate the opportunities and challenges of a
so-called “post-marriage-equality,” “post-gay” world where lesbian and gay
identity has stopped being a master identity defined by discrimination and
exclusion (Ghaziani 2011; Walters 2014), these theoretical formulations have
scant meaning in contexts where queer people continue to struggle with basic
claims to humanness and decency. In fact, the illusion that queer people “as a
whole” have moved beyond a certain point in liberationist politics in any given
geographical location betrays a lack of consideration of stratification and exclu-
sion. Mizielińska, Gabb, and Stasińska (2018) point out that a spatial-temporal
tension saturates cross-context theorizations of queer kinship, where “Western

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Closing Remarks 133

teleological development and hegemonic uses of time” encounter the “knotted

temporality” of non-Western LGBTQ lives (977). I would add that this tension
is inherent in Western queer kinship studies itself, where hopeful accounts of
queer kinship and queer reproductive futures are in fact reserved for a small
population of resourced LGBTQ people who have access to an array of material,
emotional, and cultural resources (Björklund and Dahl 2020, 9–15). The view
of these queer people as pioneering, progressive, and representative of queer
kinship practices risks reducing queer kinship to a set of sedimented identities
and practices, and should thus be continuously challenged to maintain queer
kinship studies’ critical potentiality. In this sense, despite their apparent incom-
mensurability, the study of queer kinship in non-Western contexts actually shares
an agenda with its Western counterpart in displacing hegemonic formulations of
what queer kinship should look like. The exploration into the Chinese context
presented in this book shows how queer kinship practices seldom conform to
a clean, linear-progressive logic, but often emerge in surprising, complex, and
messy ways as a result of the convergence of transnational flows of sexual
politics and local material and cultural conditions. Such messiness attests to the
failure of a one-size-fits-all queer blueprint and accentuates the need to continu-
ally queer kinship by situating it in a dynamic, open-ended process of critical
examination and theorization.

Rethinking the role of the blood family

Writing on queer kinship in Taiwan, Brainer (2019) points out that legal same-sex
marriage alone will neither lead to marriage and family equality for the local
LGBTQ population nor make it easier for people to integrate their queer rela-
tionships with their families of origin, since it fails to address core family issues
such as patrilineal reproduction and stratification by sex and generation (117).
Arguably, canonical queer kinship theories’ valorization of “families of choice”
and long neglect of blood kinship have produced a problematically narrow
queer liberalist politics. Joining a growing body of work on queer kinship in
non-Western and particularly Confucian societies (Brainer 2019; Horton 2018; Lo
2020; Yingyi Wang 2019; J. Wei 2020), I argue in this book for a more expansive
approach toward understanding, theorizing, and imagining queer kinship. In
foregrounding queering kinship dynamics within the blood family, I do not seek
to evoke a romanticized view of Chinese blood kinship as a domain of toler-
ance, nor do I attempt to represent a quintessential non-Western queer condition;
rather, I aim to both critique and expand Western queer kinship studies by recali-
brating the role of the blood family. Understanding the blood family as a location
of queer politics could be the first step in displacing queer kinship theory’s liber-
alist bias by insisting on a multicentered and intersectional approach. As I have
shown throughout the book, the blood family’s centrality in queer negotiation

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134 Queering Chinese Kinship

and contention in contemporary China is derived from specific material, social,

cultural, and political conditions. A close engagement with the blood family as
a location that both constrains and facilitates queerness thus yields important
findings about gender and sexuality as they intersect with other factors such
as class, age, and so on. Putting the blood family back on the agenda of queer
kinship theorization, therefore, is not to endorse a conservative queer politics:
it is an attempt to move beyond queer liberalism and address issues that have
largely been excluded from critical attention. These issues are more important
than ever at this historical juncture of worldwide marriage equality victories, as
they remind us of the heterogeneity of queer lives and the political urgency to
keep queer politics an open and dynamic space for discussion.
In 2002, Butler famously asked, “Does the turn to marriage make it more dif-
ficult to argue in favor of the viability of alternative kinship arrangements?” (17).
While Butler’s critical reflection is grounded in Euro-American political realities,
this book’s rethinking of the blood family offers an alternative perspective that
underlines the fundamental unevenness of global sexual modernities and reflects
on the in/effectiveness of global queer liberalism and its choreographed politics.
As long as concerns over blood kinship continue to permeate queer experiences,
the blood family should remain an important site of study to make sense of the
many contradictions, paradoxes, and creativities of queer lives.

Thinking through kinship in media studies

Not surprisingly, the majority of scholarly accounts on queer kinship so far

come from sociology and anthropology, and center on ethnography as the main
method of data collection. This book has taken a different route by directing
attention to representations of queer kinship in media cultures. This shift is not
intended to discredit the value of ethnographic inquiry; in fact, the book’s focus
stems from the belief that the study of media cultures could usefully extend
current sociological, anthropological, and philosophical scholarship on queer
kinship. As Hall (1997) points out, representation not only reflects people and
events in the so-called “real” world, it also opens up a domain of “imaginary
things” and “fantasy worlds” where abstract ideas that are “not in any obvious
sense part of our material world” are tested out (28). This reflective and constitu-
tive nature of representation makes it a pivotal site of investigation, especially
in China’s illiberal political and social environment where social practices and
kinship arrangements are constrained by an array of practical limitations and
concerns. Under these circumstances, media products occupy a unique place in
Chinese queer culture. As the book’s five case studies show, media representa-
tions resiliently offer queer moments—be they political, cathartic, entertaining,
or utopian—that not only correspond to the everyday realities queer people face,
but also reflect on, negotiate, and reimagine these realities in generative ways.

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Closing Remarks 135

These moments provide a space for imagining a queer kinship not yet available
in the here and now. If kinship itself is a cultural domain consisting of multifari-
ous meaning-producing processes, then these cultural imaginaries, regardless of
whether they will eventually materialize in the “real” world, signify important
practices of negotiation and contention that destabilize the meanings of kinship
and create possibilities for social change. In this sense, thinking through kinship
via media studies helps capture a queer kinship that is culturally in the making.
These cultural dynamics often escape critical scrutiny in sociological and anthro-
pological accounts that focus on lived experiences, but a media studies approach
can usefully complement ongoing endeavors to theorize queer kinship as a
dynamic space for kin-making as well as cultural change.

Coda

From my own experiences researching queer China, I have found the most fas-
cinating aspect about a queer project is that it is always in progress and never
complete. As such, it challenges scholars to work diligently and study what we
do not yet know—and to revisit what we think we know. By bringing global
queer China into focus and into dialogue with other fields such as queer kinship
studies and cultural and media studies, this book seeks to offer new perspec-
tives in thinking through queer kinship and queer public culture in the PRC.
As the book’s title suggests, however, queer world-making in China is an
ongoing process of queering that does not arrive at any preexisting destinations.
Continuous scholarly efforts are needed to unpack queer China’s intricacies,
paradoxes, and critical potentialities. Hopefully, this book contributes to setting
the stage for future research into this exciting, serendipitous, and never-ending
journey of queer-becoming.

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Filmography

Films

Boys Don’t Cry (dir. Kimberly Peirce, 1999)

Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee, 2005)
Brothers (Xiongdi 兄弟, dir. Yao Yao 2013)
Cloud (Chuque Wushan 除卻巫山, dir. Zhongqiang, 2007)
Comrade Yue (Xiao Yue Tongzhi 小岳同志, dir. Yue Jianbo, 2012)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (卧虎藏龍, dir. Ang Lee, 2000)
Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng Jindai Huangjinjia 滿城盡帶黃金甲, dir. Zhang Yimou,
2006)
A Dog Barking at the Moon (Zai Jian Nanpingwanzhong 再見南屏晚鐘, dir. Xiang Zi, 2019)
Dyke March (Nütongzhi Youxingri 女同志遊行日, dir. Shi Tou 2004)
Fire in Silence (Guhuo 孤火, dir. Han Chen, 2009)
Fish and Elephant (Jinnian Xiatian 今年夏天, dir. Li Yu, 2001)
The Founding of a Republic (Jianguo Daye 建國大業, dir. Han Sanping and Huang Jianxin,
2009)
Happy Together (春光乍洩, dir. Wong Kar-wai, 1997)
Love Is More Than a Word (Shi Ru Bu Shi Ding 識汝不識丁, 2016)
Magic (Nü Yao’er 女妖兒, dir. Michael Liu 2012)
Mama Rainbow (Cai Hong Ban Wo Xin 彩虹伴我心, dir. Fan Popo 2012)
New Beijing, New Marriage (Xin Qianmen Dajie 新前門大街, dir. Fan Popo and David Cheng
2009)
Nirvana in Fire (Langya Bang 瑯琊榜, 2015)
Pink Dads (Cai Hong Lao Ba 彩虹老爸, dir. Fan Popo, 2016)
Queer China, Comrade China (Zhi Tongzhi 誌同志, dir. Cui Zi’en 2008)
Single Men (Shuang Sheng 雙生, dir. Alexia Wong 2016)
Spring Fever (Chunfeng Chenzui De Yewan 春風沉醉的夜晚, dir. Lou Ye, 2009)
Summer Palace (Yiheyuan 頤和園, dir. Lou Ye, 2006)
Vive L’amour (愛情萬歲, dir. Tsai Ming-liang, 1994)

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138 Filmography

Plays

Avenue Q (Premiere 2003)

Cats (Premiere 1981)
Q Dadao (Q 大道, Premiere 2013)
Rent (Premiere 1994)
West Side Story (Premiere 1957)

Streaming Video and Television

Addicted (Shangyin 上癮, dir. Ding Wei, 2016)

American Idol (2003–present)
Kangsi Coming (Kangxi Laile 康熙來了, 2004–2016)
Love Is More Than a Word (Shi Ru Bu Shi Ding 識汝不識丁, dir. Chen Peng, 2016)
Qipa Shuo (奇葩說, dir. Mou Di, 2014–present)
“Queer Comrade” (同志亦凡人, online webcast)
Return of the Pearl Princess (Huan Zhu Gege 還珠格格, dir. Sun Shupei, 1998)

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Index

accents, 120, 121 Berry, Chris, 10, 11, 32, 62

acceptance, 37, 40, 42, 45, 47, 48, 57, 85, 95, Bilibili, 27, 91–102, 103, 105, 108, 109
99, 100, 104 binary, 7, 8, 16, 35, 45, 64, 121, 125
ACG (Animation, Comic, and Games), 91, bisexual. See gay
92, 93, 94, 97 BL (Boys’ Love), 55, 76, 77, 78, 79, 93, 96,
activism, 22, 31, 86, 87, 101, 129; audio- 97, 98, 108, 137. See also GL (Girls’
visual/video-based, 45, 47; kinship- Love), 93, 96, 97, 98, 108
based, 27; queer, 8, 26, 32, 49, 73, 88; blood kinship. See family
social, 37, 38, 110 Broadway, 1, 27, 73, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84,
activist, 26, 31, 31, 42, 44, 45, 49, 85, 87, 108, 85, 86
109 bromance, 76–79
aesthetic, 27, 32, 33, 38, 39, 42, 43, 43, 44, bullet curtain, 91–95, 97, 98, 102–9
45, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60, 69, 77, 79, Butler, Judith, 16, 17, 65, 127, 134
99, 113
affective, 20, 25, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 47, Cannes, 51, 52, 54, 69
48, 49. See also emotional, 15, 16, 20, capital: capital flows, 22, 23, 52, 52, 75, 75,
42, 43, 45, 49, 58, 64, 102, 133 94, 108, 110, 111, 120, 124; cultural
affordances, 94, 96, 97, 104, 109 capital, 96, 98, 101
Ahmed, Sara, 39, 40, 128, 129 carnivalesque, 91, 92, 102, 103, 105, 107–9
ambivalent, 4, 11, 76, 88, 101, 127 CCP (Chinese Communist Party), 6, 20, 52,
anthropology, 7, 12, 13, 134 58, 65, 66, 75, 78, 131
appropriate, 11, 18, 26, 37, 38, 46, 109, 128, celebrity, 77, 92, 108, 109, 118, 123
131 censorship 1, 3, 6, 22, 23, 27, 51, 70, 74–76,
art-house, 50–53, 57 78–80, 86, 88, 89, 91, 94, 103, 108, 122,
Asia, 8, 11, 74, 110, 111, 120, 124, 125 126, 129
assimilation, 3, 27, 76, 88, 89, 128, 129 Chiang, Howard, 4, 8, 9, 115, 130
authenticity, as a theoretical question, 3; children, 13, 18, 19, 20, 37, 44, 46–48, 52, 86,
as representational strategies, 99, 100, 87, 118
101, 104, 108 China-centrism, 9, 10, 130
authoritarian 2, 6, 22, 62, 75 Chinese kinship. See family
Chineseness, 9, 10, 27, 56, 57, 112, 116–21,
Bao, Hongwei, 4, 5, 7, 8, 22, 25, 31, 33, 37, 130, 131. See also Sinophone, 9, 10, 27,
49, 74, 75 50, 51, 54–57, 62, 69, 120, 121, 127, 130,
becoming. See embodiment 131
Beijing, 23, 31, 33, 36, 38, 73, 137 Chou, Wah-shan, 4, 15, 142

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Index 157

cinema, 6, 11, 23, 25, 32, 50, 51, 53, 55–58, community documentaries, 26, 31–34,
62, 120 36–40, 50, 108
citizenship, 5, 86, 88–91 domestic, meaning national, 9, 21, 22, 23,
class, 21, 34, 58, 88, 124, 128, 131, 134 52, 75, 76; meaning private, 12, 21, 36,
close-to-normal, 119, 120, 123, 124 46, 58, 60, 61, 106, 131
close-up, 40, 43, 59, 61, 65, 99, 117 Duggan, Lisa, 88, 89, 123, 124, 129
come out/coming out, 1, 2, 14–17, 27, 15,
35, 38, 39, 82–85, 91–93, 95–109, 111, economy, 9, 12, 19, 23, 36, 46, 53, 54, 112,
115–20, 124, 126, 129 118
commercial/commercialization, 6, 7, 17, embodiment, 11, 27, 31–33, 35, 38, 43, 45,
23–25, 27, 46, 50, 52, 54, 69, 73, 74, 77, 47, 49, 59, 63, 64, 68, 74, 104, 108, 117,
79, 80, 88–98, 101, 102, 105, 108–12, 119, 126. See also becoming, 2, 5, 10, 17,
115, 120, 122–24, 126, 129–31. See also 33, 124, 127
consumption, 23–25, 27, 50, 77, 79, 88, emotional. See affective
91–93, 97, 98, 101–3, 105, 108–11, 115, English-language. See Euro-American
120, 124, 129 entertainment, 23, 26, 80, 111–13, 120, 122,
community, 9, 11, 14–17, 26, 31, 33–37, 49, 123
49, 55, 56, 62, 87, 91, 93, 94, 96–99, 101, entrepreneurial, 91, 92, 96, 97, 108
102, 108, 111, 112, 114, 115 epistemological, 14, 17, 46, 48, 132
confrontational, 85, 88, 106, 119, 120 Euro-American, 4–7, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 18,
Confucian, 5, 15, 18, 19, 21, 62, 65, 66, 106, 55, 76, 77, 79, 86, 116, 119, 126, 134. See
117, 131 also English-language, 3, 95, 111
conservative, 102, 108, 122, 123, 134 exclusive 1, 10, 12, 52, 87, 91, 110, 111, 120,
consumption. See commercial/ 124, 125, 128, 132
commercialization
contention, 6, 9, 17, 32, 35, 38, 56, 70, 73, family: blood family/biological family/
123, 131, 134, 135 family of origin: 2, 3–6, 9, 11, 13–15,
counterpublic, 34–37 17, 18, 22, 25–27, 31, 33, 46, 48, 49, 62,
cultural intelligibility, 16, 51, 63, 65–68, 70, 66, 67, 86, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98–101, 103,
90, 102, 126 106–9, 112, 115, 122–24, 126–28, 133,
cultural production, 6, 9, 12, 22–25, 27, 49, 134; chosen family/nonnormative
56, 70, 73, 74, 91–94, 97, 109, 110, 122, family/queer family, 5, 15, 14, 17,
124, 126–31 62; family and kinship as an institu-
tion: 10–12, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, 87, 122;
depoliticized, 5, 85, 86, 88, 101, 105, 109, family values: 5, 18, 21, 37, 87; nuclear
122, 123 family: 12, 15, 65, 123, 124. See also
desire, 17, 32, 33, 45, 49, 50, 56, 57, 64, 93, blood kinship, 2–6, 9, 17, 18, 22, 25–27,
98, 101, 107, 119 31, 33, 46, 49, 67, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98–101,
deterritorialized, 27, 112, 116, 117 103, 106–9, 122–24, 126–28, 133, 134;
digital: documentaries, 31, 37; Chinese kinship, 2, 5, 6, 10, 13, 15–18,
masquerade, 102–5; media/cultures, 21, 26, 27, 31–33, 38, 40, 42, 45–51, 57,
8, 22, 23, 25, 26, 63, 92, 103, 111, 112, 58, 60, 66, 67, 70, 73, 87–92, 108–11,
124; platforms/infrastructure, 91, 117, 119, 124, 128, 132; filial piety, 18,
94, 96; self-making, 91, 92, 96, 98, 20, 21; marriage, 5, 6, 12, 16, 19, 20, 50,
108 54, 58–62, 66, 68, 75, 89, 121, 122, 129,
director, 33, 43, 47, 50, 65, 68, 85. See also 132–34; queer kinship, 5–7, 12, 14, 15,
filmmakers, 31, 31, 32, 33, 36, 45, 17, 18, 131–35; relatedness 5, 13, 21,
50–53, 58, 69 48, 66
documentaries: New Chinese fan, 76, 92, 96, 98, 99, 101, 108, 116
Documentaries, 31, 32; queer Fan, Popo, 26, 33, 37, 43, 137

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158 Index

filial piety. See family homosexual. See gay

film festival, 31, 38, 51, 52
filmmakers. See director identity: gay/sexual/queer identity: 1, 3, 8,
freedom, 5, 15, 21, 32, 75, 102, 118, 119 10, 11, 14, 17, 22, 27, 35, 39, 45, 47–49,
58, 61, 66, 67, 69, 86, 80, 83, 85, 88, 100,
gay, 1–3, 8, 10, 11, 14, 16, 26, 35, 37, 41, 44, 101, 103, 104, 108, 112, 116, 119, 120,
48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 62, 64, 69, 74, 76, 122, 123, 132; identity politics, 2, 27,
77, 79, 80, 82–88, 92, 95, 97, 99–101, 83, 85, 116, 119, 120
104, 108, 111, 113, 119, 120, 123, 124, ideology: kinship ideology, 10, 38, 88, 118;
132. See also bisexual, 3, 51, 54, 64, 104, official ideology, 19, 52, 69, 76
123; homosexual, 21, 46, 54, 59–61, 63, illiberal, 27, 73–76, 78, 79, 89–91, 101, 109,
64, 68, 77–80, 83, 85, 86, 97, 100, 104, 126, 129, 134
117, 118, 123; lesbian, 2, 3, 8, 10, 14, 16, illiberal homonormativity. See
37, 50, 62, 92, 95, 97, 99, 101, 104, 106, homonormativity
113, 132; LGBTQ, 2, 37, 38, 55, 84, 86, imaginary, 5, 25, 27, 81, 100, 112, 117,
87–89, 98–101, 123, 133; same-sex, 5, 118–120, 124, 129, 134, 135
6, 15, 45, 77, 78, 87, 97, 101, 132, 133; individualistic/individualism, 14, 20, 21,
transgender, 3, 26, 48, 54, 123 23, 81, 100, 113, 114
gender, 3, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 20, 22, 26, 48, intimacy, 5, 33, 40, 46, 121
50, 60, 61, 65, 68, 80, 99, 101, 105, 106, intraregional, 10, 27, 27, 115, 116, 119,
113, 115, 123, 124, 127, 128, 131, 132, 120–22, 124, 125, 130
134
generation, 20, 50, 52, 69, 84, 117, 133; Fifth Keane, Michael, 75, 76, 114, 125
Generation, 51, 52; Sixth Generation, kinship. See family
27, 51–53, 69
genre, 6, 26, 27, 57, 58, 77, 84, 113, 114 legitimacy 4, 16, 16, 17, 20, 21, 34, 66, 75,
GL (Girls’ Love). See BL (Boys’ Love) 87, 114, 121
globalization, 2, 4, 8–11, 21–23, 51, 52, 54, lesbian. See gay
56, 69, 73, 115. See also transnational, Leung, Helen Hok-Sze, 50, 51, 55
2, 4, 8–10, 21–23, 26, 27, 50–54, 56–58, LGBTQ. See gay
67, 69, 70, 73–77, 79, 86, 89, 92, 93, 106, liberalism, 6, 9, 14, 17, 85, 89, 126, 133,
114, 115, 130, 131, 133 134
government, 20, 24, 74, 75, 76, 87, 93, 122 liberationist, 35, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 119, 129,
132
hegemony, 5, 7, 10, 14, 27, 32, 34, 48, 56, 56, local, 2–5, 8, 11, 18, 20, 22, 27, 35, 37, 50,
73, 110–12, 120, 121, 132, 133 51, 53–58, 63, 65, 66, 67–70, 73–79, 81,
heterogeneity/heterogeneous, 3, 4, 6, 10, 82, 85, 88–90, 93, 95, 110, 112, 115, 122,
11, 13, 31, 32, 52, 56, 115, 120, 121, 130, 124, 125, 129, 130, 133
134 Lou, Ye, 27, 51, 52, 55, 60, 61, 64, 65
heteronormative, 5, 6, 10, 15, 16, 32, 34–36, love: parental/familial: 38, 40–42, 45, 48,
38–40, 42, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 56–62, 64, 87; homosexual: 54, 59, 97, 98, 117
66, 67, 69, 88, 89, 101, 105, 106, 109,
121–24, 127–29, 131 mainstream, 1, 2, 11, 37, 50, 52, 53, 55, 73,
heterosexual, 13, 14, 16, 17, 39, 40, 48, 54, 74, 77, 79, 80, 87, 91, 93, 97
59, 60, 61, 63–66, 80, 83, 88, 89, 94, 97, Malaysia, 9, 111, 114, 116
104, 117, 123, 127, 131 marginalized, 33, 42, 60, 62, 67, 69, 93, 98,
Hollywood, 54, 55, 57, 76, 85, 113 102, 104, 113, 114, 119, 121
homonormativity, 27, 73, 88–91, 109, 112, market, 9, 24, 36, 75, 76, 80, 97, 112, 115,
120, 122–24, 128, 129. See also illiberal 121, 129
homonormativity, 27, 89, 91, 109, 129 marriage. See family

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Index 159

marriage equality, 5, 6, 20, 102, 121, 122, privileges, 4, 14, 102, 117, 120, 124, 128
133, 134 propaganda, 21, 23, 69, 78, 122
Martin, Fran, 6, 8, 11, 24, 35
masquerade, 103–5 Q Dadao, 1, 2, 27, 73, 74, 79–81, 84, 86, 88,
McLelland, Mark, 8, 78, 97 89, 138
meaning-making, 13, 25, 31, 33, 103 queering 6, 17, 18, 26, 27, 31, 39, 46–51, 57,
melodrama, 57, 58, 62, 67 67, 68–70, 70, 73, 88, 90–92, 96, 99, 101,
microcelebrity, 92, 96, 98, 103, 108, 109 108–11, 124, 132, 133, 135
model, 8, 11, 14–16, 26, 34, 48, 49, 62, 66, 85, queer kinship. See family
121, 124, 126
musical, 1, 2, 6, 26, 27, 73, 74, 79–89 radical, 4, 19, 35, 122, 124, 128, 129
realities, 19, 47, 53, 55, 65, 68, 80, 81, 82,
neoliberal 6, 7, 75, 89, 91, 123 107, 128, 134
networked 3, 8, 39, 42, 110, 124, 124 recognition, 3, 16, 66, 86, 87
nonconforming/non-normative, 3, 4, 5, 8, regional, 10, 27, 37, 56, 73, 109–12, 114–17,
10, 14, 16, 21, 34, 45, 74, 78, 101, 113, 119–22, 124, 131
119, 124 reimagine/reimagination, 14, 26, 33, 38,
non-Western 7–9, 74, 116, 132, 133 45, 47, 49, 68, 88, 101, 103, 106, 108–10,
normality, 3–5, 13, 16, 17, 21, 56, 61, 68, 73, 113, 115, 119, 124
74, 78, 87, 119, 123, 127, 128 relatedness. See family
normalization, 3, 5, 13, 17, 127 reproduction/reproductive, 11, 12, 24, 40,
nuclear family. See family 88, 89, 124, 126, 128, 131–33
reroute/rerouting/rerouted, 26, 110, 111,
official, 2, 10, 34, 35, 51, 52, 69, 70, 78, 87, 92 113, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 125
opposition, 7, 14, 17, 56, 121, 128 Robinson, Luke, 32, 33, 36
outlook, 9, 67, 105, 109 Rofel, Lisa, 9, 50, 54, 75, 86, 122

paradigm, 6, 8, 13, 17, 18, 119 same-sex. See gay

parent-child, 39, 42, 45, 47, 48, 107, 108, 123 scholarship, 5, 7, 17, 34, 57, 74, 94, 95, 126,
participatory, 25, 62, 91, 94, 103 134
performance, 1, 2, 10, 36, 42, 44, 45, 80, 86, screen, 33, 43, 92, 97, 103, 104
96, 102 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 2, 3, 24, 100
perspective, 6, 18, 24, 37, 59, 60, 70, 88, 115, selfhood, 9, 11, 15, 17, 22, 26, 32, 62, 100,
116, 122, 128, 134 101, 103, 104, 109, 110, 113, 114, 117,
PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of 122
Lesbians and Gays), 2, 37, 38, 44, 47, Shanghai, 16, 66, 73, 87, 121
48, 86, 87, 88, 108, 150 Shih, Shu-mei, 9, 56, 120
platform, 27, 37, 91–98, 103, 105, 108, 109, Singapore, 8, 9, 76, 111, 116
112, 113, 114 Sinophone. See Chineseness
popular culture, 23, 25, 73–76, 79, 84, 89, socialist, 4, 6, 9, 32, 75
91, 110, 126, 129 storytelling, 38, 57, 62, 63, 67
postsocialist, 4, 8, 9, 22, 26, 32, 50, 56, 58, strategy, 8, 15, 16, 18, 19, 24, 27, 45, 49–51,
70, 73, 86, 122 53, 57, 67–70, 73–75, 79–82, 86–91, 101,
poststructuralist, 7, 17, 24 109, 110, 112, 116, 118–20, 122–24
potential, 13, 23, 33–35, 39, 42, 49, 58, 64, streaming, 36, 76, 77, 78, 112
69, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94–96, 102, 103, 105, subculture/subcultural, 7, 38, 54, 68, 69,
111, 113, 115, 124, 127, 128 76, 77, 93, 95–97, 101, 108, 112
private, 2, 5, 19, 20, 23, 26, 32, 34–37, 46, subjectivity, 7, 17, 33, 58, 61, 75, 93, 113
47, 53, 54, 57, 59, 61, 61, 62, 69, 75, 114, subversive, 27, 55, 57, 102, 103, 106, 108,
120, 123 128, 129

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160 Index

surveillance, 1, 59, 61, 76 vantage point, 18, 112, 115, 124, 128
survival, 3, 6, 16, 17, 18, 22, 53, 56, 67, 68, visibility, 23, 26, 36, 54, 85, 88, 104, 114, 123
70, 76, 87, 110 visual, 58, 59, 64–66, 68, 69, 93, 97, 100, 104,
116, 117
Taiwan, 5, 8, 9, 21, 35, 50, 55, 111, 114, 116, vlogs, 27, 92, 95–103, 106, 108, 109
119, 121, 122, 133
talent, 110, 111, 113, 114, 120, 124 website, 31, 36, 55, 87, 91, 92, 112
television, 23, 76, 78, 112, 113, 116, 122 wedding, 19, 59, 61, 100
theatre, 1, 26, 44, 57, 74, 80 Weston, Kath, 5, 14
theorize/theorization, 4, 12, 14, 15, 18, 25,
34, 47, 68, 89, 110, 112, 124, 129, 133–35 xianchang, 32, 33, 38, 39, 42–45
tolerance, 15, 85, 87, 133
tongzhi, 3, 15, 33, 35, 36, 44, 46, 47, 55 Yue, Audrey, 7, 8, 56, 68
traditional, 11, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 106
transcultural, 11, 73, 74, 89
transgender. See gay
transnational. See globalization

underground, 2, 7, 8, 26, 35, 50, 52, 55, 68,

69, 74, 126
undertone, 13, 26, 52, 58, 59, 62, 63, 77, 85,
89
urban, 19–21, 35, 52, 69, 88
utopian, 63, 64, 65, 67, 105, 109

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