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date: 01 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

“New Queer Cinema,” as coined by B. Ruby Rich in 1992, denotes a set of English and American films featuring same-sex desire and which engage in formal experimentation. How might we understand queer Chinese film? In the American academy, the resurgence of queer has much to do with the question of sociality: how and to what end do normative structures of kinship function and what might the search and practice of other alternatives yield? Queer has also entered Chinese linguistic discourse—although somewhat differently in the context of Hong Kong, the PRC, and Taiwan. This chapter investigates several clusters of works to articulate the formal structures of queer Chinese film and, ultimately, how the meanings of “Chinese,” “queer,” and “film” shift in relation to one another through transnational distribution networks.

Keywords: Chinese, queer, distribution, Cui Zi’en, Fish and Elephant, Solos

Sean Metzger

Sean Metzger is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angelas. He has co-edited three volumes: with Gina Masequesmay, Embodying Asian/American Sexualities (Lexington Books, 2009); with Olivia Khoo, Time Signatures: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (Intellect 2009); and, with Michaeline Crichlow, a special issue on Race, Space, Place: the Making and Unmaking of Freedoms in the Atlantic World (Cultural Dynamics, Nov 2009). He is completing a book currently called “Chinese Looks: The Skein of Race and Asian/American Spectatorship,” which investigates Chineseness, fashion, film, gender, migration, and performance through four objects—the queue, the qipao, the Mao suit, and the tuxedo—during the long twentieth century.

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