Celluloid Comrades

Conclusion

In examining the representation of male homosexuality in contemporary Chinese cinemas, I have investigated the enabling conditions of these representations in the global cultural economy at the turn of the twenty-first century, the burden and politics of representation in relation to the reception of the films, the various tropes of representation, and the works of some key directors. I have emphasized from the beginning of this book that it is not about constructing a Chinese expression of homosexuality or a homosexual expression of Chineseness. Similarly, in his study on gender and sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American literature, Paul Julian Smith argues that adopting a thematic approach is inappropriate where sexuality is concerned. For Smith, this approach would lead, in his study, “either to a scrapbook of Hispanic erotica or to the vindication of some reassuringly stable ‘Latin’ temperament.” He is thus less concerned with “the specificity of Spanish or Latin American ‘experience’ of sex, as with the enabling conditions of sexual difference itself” (1992, 2–3). Smith’s argument highlights the difficulty of writing on sexuality thematically without simultaneously reifying an essentialized identity, sexual or ethnic, or indeed a combination of the two. If an identity or classificatory category is ineluctably invoked in this study, the focus is not on what it is but rather on how one mobilizes it as a discursive tool while underlining its constructedness and using it to pry open other configurations of power. It remains for me in this conclusion to interrogate one final question : can the body of films discussed in this book be described as Chinese gay films, or can one begin to speak of a tongzhi or queer Chinese cinema? To begin with, there are conceptual as well as linguistic issues to address. While it is widely regarded in Anglo-American discursive practice that the term “gay” marks the immediate post-Stonewall homosexual identity and that the emergence of a queer identity is linked to AIDS activism in the 1990s, the distinction between the two is not always clear; nor does the latter term supersede the former in popular use.1 In relation 180 Conclusion to cinematic practice, the impetus behind the labelling of films as gay was rooted in the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, which believed that “an appropriate response to invisibility and a history of negative images was the construction and circulation of positive ones” (Arroyo 1997, 71). The New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, then, can be seen as a reaction to the straightjacket dictates of gay film by its deliberate construction of challenging representations that range from HIV-positive, homicidal queers on the road in Gregg Araki’s The Living End to the Genetinspired love between prison inmates in Todd Hayne’s Poison (1991).2 However, most film festivals devoted to representations of homosexuality still bill themselves as lesbian and gay, while community support groups continue to add new sexual formulations to their abbreviations, culminating in the increasingly common LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender , queer). In the Chinese language, while the term tongzhi is generally seen as a local appropriation of a political form of address (notwithstanding its Soviet roots) for a sexual identity, it is also usually taken to equate with the English “lesbian and gay.” More confusingly, while the term “queer” has been transliterated as ku’er, it is also used in tandem with tongzhi and guaitai.3 Therefore, when one reads any writing in the English language about Chinese “gay” films or “queer” Chinese cinema, it is difficult to ascertain which classificatory term in the translated language the author might have in mind, unless she/he makes explicit the translingual markers in her/his use. In any case, the distinction may well-nigh be impossible. While my book title, Celluloid Comrades, takes its derivation from the term tongzhi, I have also mobilized the term “queer” to describe Tsai Mingliang ’s cinematic poetics and the term “gay” to refer to Stanley Kwan, though I generally avoid designating any film I discuss as gay, queer, or tongzhi. What I am attempting to highlight here is not so much that these classificatory and identity categories overlap in the English language as well as in the Chinese language or that the discursive terms in the two linguistic realms do not map onto each other neatly. Rather, the untidiness of the linguistic and translinguistic practice should suffice to alert us that each discursive mobilization is contingent...