Guest Editors’ Introduction

Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics

This special issue is a provocation. It both reflects and, we hope, provokes ongoing debates about the meanings, implications, usages, and effects of each of the terms in our title. No doubt our presenting materials from Taiwan, the Chinese/Asian diaspora, and mainland China in a single issue on queer Chinese politics will be surprising to readers who understand the word “Chinese” to designate, immediately, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It would have been less controversial to publish the essays separately (as one reviewer suggested), as two sets of reflections, one by Taiwan-based scholars on queer developments in Taiwan and another of mainland Chinese reflections on China. However, we hope to open up this political debate about Chineseness, and specifically how this debate bears on queer lives, by calling the issue an investigation into queer “Chinese politics” and “transnationalism.” The question of whether and in what ways Taiwan and other Chinese-speaking communities can be considered part of “China” or called “Chinese” is perhaps the most dynamic question of our times. These essays, written from different perspectives and locales — Asian America, Taiwan, and mainland China — and by a range of activists, artists, public intellectuals, and academic scholars, collectively provoke the question of what constitutes “Chinese politics” and how these politics shape and are shaped by queer lives as transnational formations. Each author brings a unique, and always queer, answer to this debate.

Certainly, the essay writers do not always hold the same political views. Instead of constructing a singular argument about what is distinctive about queer politics in Taiwan and China, respectively, and then presenting films, novels, and theoretical works that are representative of two separate queer communities, we imagine the issue to be a stage or a platform for these divergent views, as was the original conference that gave rise to this volume. The Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics conference, held at the University of California, Berkeley on April 29–30, 2005, and organized by Roy Chan, Tamara Chin, Virginia Eleasar, and Petrus Liu, brought together over twenty critics, activists, and artists from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States to discuss and imagine, through a transnational dialogue, how each person perceived the influence of transnational processes on queer organizing and political discourses both within and beyond their specific locations, and the centrality of “Chineseness” to those processes. We regret that we were unable to include essays from some of these other locations in this issue.

By “transnationalism,” we mean to signal a historical moment in which activities, identities, theories, and cultural productions self-consciously position themselves both within and beyond the nation-state. Historically, the moment of nation-states has been a relatively short one. In the last twenty years, various theorists have delineated the limitations of the nation-state and imagined in their stead transnational, regional, or global units of analysis in a manner that would have been previously unthinkable, except in certain Marxist and anarchist internationalisms. These critiques include those both from the left and from capitalists. Our use of “transnationalism” does not mean to indicate that the world has become interconnected only in the last few decades or that a singular world or “Empire” has now come into existence. Indeed, there have been and continue to be multiple, interconnected worlds. Each location has its own history and its own stories to tell. The advantage of using “transnationalism” as a point of departure for our inquiry is that it allows us to produce a more historically rigorous account of a new kind of queer thinking that imagines one’s world, identity, and politics as either challenging or moving beyond the contours of nation-state politics. Some do so with a reinvigorated sense of political agency and cosmopolitan justice, while others feel compelled by their needs of survival, patterns of consumption, fear, or frustration. In either case, transnational connections are particularly important to consider with regard to queer Chinese politics. Animating this special issue is the...