A New Look at Queer Temporality

Fran Martin's Backward Glances presents a long overdue and startlingly original analysis of the female homoerotic imaginary in contemporary Chinese cultures, written with the rarest kind of conceptual acuity, penetrating insight, and meticulous research. Since the publication of her Situating Sexualities (Hong Kong University Press) in 2003, Martin has established herself as one of the most dynamic critics working at the fertile meeting point of queer theory and Chinese cultural studies. Whereas Martin's first two books, Situating Sexualities and Embodied Modernities, respond to the demands of local specificity with a fairly general post-structuralist argument—that sexual subjectivities must be understood in translocal contexts that are internally contradictory and multiply determined—Backward Glances represents what I see as a major breakthrough in Martin's work, offering a much more concrete argument about the distinctive patterns of Chinese queer cultures: that contemporary Chinese representations of female same-sex relations are dominated by an analeptic or backward-looking temporal logic, which at once frames female homoeroticism in youth as a universal and even ennobling experience and asserts its impossibility in adulthood. My sense is that everyone writing on comparative and modern Chinese queer studies will soon have to reckon with this powerfully precise and marvelously provocative argument.

Compared with Martin's earlier works, Backward Glances is much more expansive in scope and vision. Backward Glances explores the recurring narrative and ideological patterns of female homoeroticism common to mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Turning her attention away from elite literature to women's mass culture (which includes telemovie, teenpic, pulp fiction, and melodrama), Martin discovers the remarkable pervasiveness of the memorial mode of narrating same-sex love. This cultural logic subtends a structure of feeling that permeates both the "schoolgirl romance" genre (whose genealogy from early twentieth-century Republican Chinese literary culture to contemporary reincarnations in Chu T'ien-Hsin, Wong Bikwan, and Liu Suola is the topic of the first three chapters) and the "tomboy melodrama" genre (analyzed in chapter 4). By revealing the pervasiveness of this cultural logic, Martin in turn stakes a claim for the centrality of the female homoerotic imaginary to the making of modern Chinese cultures as a whole.

Martin's argument has profound ramifications, and her work intersects with contemporary queer conversations in at least two important ways. The first has to do with the possibility of writing queer historiography outside Europe. This project invariably produces essentialist works that reduce a complex array of values and practices to a singular attitude, such as Chou Wahshan's postulation of a "Chinese tradition of tolerance."¹ Adroitly sidestepping the question of negative and positive evaluations (homophobia or tolerance), Martin offers a nuanced formulation that is wonderfully complex and lucid at the same time: female same-sex relations in youth are represented as both cherished and forcibly given up, both properly feminine and necessarily corralled in the past. Accordingly, while this narrative encodes critical queer agency, its proliferation also reflects the social prohibition on adult lesbianism. The second important intersection lies in the way her historically grounded study deepens our understanding of the tension between universalizing and minoritizing discourses of sexual difference. Martin skillfully shows that memorial narratives that represent women's homoerotic experiences as universal and legitimate have conservative consequences as well, in that such narratives risk derealizing lesbian possibilities. This risk is precisely what the rise of New Chinese lesbian cinema (examined in chapter 6) comes to challenge through its "critical presentism"—an attempt to define a self-consciously minoritizing lesbian identity, here and now. Martin's marvelous readings of Li Yu, Chen Jofei, and Mak Yan Yan show their works to be elaborating an image of lesbian presentness by interweaving the horizontal (narrative) dimension of time with the vertical (lyrical or melodramatic) dimension of female homoerotic time.

What I find missing in this otherwise carefully researched and thoughtfully written study is an account of the relation between fictional representations of queer temporality and concrete historical changes—social transformations, economic developments, and...