Description:
Bringing together two areas of study that tend to be marginalised within their home disciplines Queer Sinophone Cultures innovatively advances both Sinophone studies and queer studies. It not only examines film and literature from Mainland China but expands its scope to encompass the underrepresented 'Sinophone' world at large (in this case Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and beyond). Further, where queer studies in the U.S., Europe, and Australia often ignore non-Western cultural phenomena, this book focuses squarely on Sinophone queerness, providing fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from works by the famous director Tsai Ming-Liang to the history of same-sex soft-core pornography made by the renowned Shaw Brothers Studios.
Review Quotes:
This provocative collection seeks to exfoliate the layers that have bundled Chinese Studies within the strictures of traditional area studies. Looking to transnational routes and roots, the contributors elegantly deploy a "queer Sinophonic" framework that refuses geographic and conceptual limits to understanding the conjunctions and intersections of wayward bodies, intimacies, and attachments as these are produced in film, literature and other cultural genres. Traipsing various sites and contexts of the Sinophone world, from Singapore to Hong Kong to Taiwan and beyond, the essays in this expansive collection de-essentialize Chineseness and queer by circumventing the traps and tribulations of antipodal dualities such as China and its diasporas.
Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora
This impressive anthology brings queer theory and Sinophone studies into a critically challenging and mutually transformative conjuncture. Showcasing an eclectic range of scholarship that is historically nuanced, theoretically adventurous and globally aware, the book demonstrates that the vital projects to, respectively, "deprovincialize china" and "reroute the geopolitics of desire" not only go hand in hand but inform each other in the most thoughtful and provocative way. This book stands at the forefront of a vibrant new field and should be read by anyone who is interested in pushing the boundaries of sexuality studies and Asian studies.
Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong