This book applies a queer theory/cultural studies approach to examine the production and reception of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, particularly those produced in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. Embracing the discursive approach and interdisciplinarity of cultural studies, it brings together bilingual scholarship and materials from film/media studies, gender/queer studies, sociology, anthropology, performance studies, and literary criticism (among others), with the objective of more properly reflecting the complicated processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries take shape. Locating tonghzi/queer agency within the intricate negotiations between the individual, the local, the intraregional, and the global, this project challenges the conception that perceives the local as the opposite of the global, and that conveniently ignores the more complex, multi-directional interactions involving the regional and the individual in any local articulations of tongzhi/queer agency. Concomitantly, the book further contests the rhetoric that either equates Western gay identity with modernity and Asian homosexualities with tradition or, conversely, sees the local tongzhi/queer movement as merely a neocolonial embodiment of the Western-dominated global gay movement, devoid of local agency.

This project also incorporates a strong emphasis on the specific cultural histories of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. I have mapped out the social institutions imperative to the production of queer images in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and analyzed queer imagery in this historical moment as it emerges from the margins of Mainland Chinese society. I consider this book first and foremost a historically embedded project – in part to counter the tendency in certain queer scholarship to over-generalize theories while downplaying the significance of local histories.

This book is anchored by four main themes or discourses: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera and melodrama, camp aesthetics, and documentary film. Discussing the Chinese familial-kinship system, I recast the notion of “filiality” in terms of a discursive formation, as opposed to some mythical cultural essence, to explain why filiality (and Confucianism in general) have been susceptible to different political maneuvers in different historical periods. This discussion foregrounds the strengthened linkage between filiality and loyalty through the reinforced “family-state” discourse prevailing in martial-law-period Taiwan.