Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography of the Cool Child (Global Queer Asias)

Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic arts, and science fiction, Queer Chimerica unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United States. By examining the intersecting timelines of the rise of queer theory and the rise of China in the late Cold War era, Shana Ye explores the relationship between the discourse of queer fluidity and capital’s demands for labor flexibility. Drawing on rare archival material and oral historical accounts of queer life from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the author shows how these accounts make sense of the variegated landscapes of desires, transformations, and conundrums in postsocialist China. The author illustrates party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism mediated by the explosive politics of Tiananmen upheaval, HIV/AIDS community outreach workers, feminist artists and digital activists, leftist queer theorists, and fictional bio-engineers, layering these vivid depictions to reveal the poetic messiness of queer world-making. Queer Chimerica offers insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, the geo- and bio-politics of identity, and the class-ridden appropriation of queer history and community. Thus understanding the production of queerness unveils the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency. Contents Preface Introduction: “Queer Chimerica” and the (Un)Cool Child Part I. Chimerica Chapter 1. Here Comes the Cool Child Chapter 2. Zhang Shanping the Hooligan I Chapter 3. History Is What Hurts Part II. Life Beets Chapter 4. Red Father, Pink Son Chapter 5. The Noise Chapter 6. Guang Hui’s Box Part III. One Is Not Enough Chapter 7. The Genital Squad Chapter 8. Zhang Shanping the Hooligan II Chapter 9. Beijing Comrades I Part IV. The Best Moment of Love Chapter 10. Your China Will Not Work Chapter 11. Ex-Queer Chapter 12. Queer-Ex Part V. The Transporters Chapter 13. Inequality Must be Created Chapter 14. Zhang Shanping the Hooligan III Chapter 15. Battle for the Queer Chapter 16. The Love That Dares Not to Speak Its Name Chapter 17. Till Death Do Us Part Chapter 18. Beijing Comrades II Chapter 19. Unqueer the Cool Child Part VI. Beijing Dome Chapter 20. Homecoming No More Chapter 21. Here Comes the Cool Child Coda Appendix: The Missing Pages Acknowledgments References Index