Queering Chineseness, Unthinking Neoliberalism

Lisa Rofel's new book provides an interdisciplinary framework that draws on insights from queer studies, literature on neoliberalism, and the analytic lens of anthropology to make sense of the social landscape of desire in post-Maoist China. Far from claiming that desire operates exclusively within the realms of sexuality and psychoanalysis, Rofel formulates desire as "that which appears to be the most explosive and powerful realm for constructing novel citizen-subjects not merely in China but in China's reconfiguration of its relationship to a postsocialist world" (2). This broader conception of desire thus allows for a much greater queering because it provides a more-encompassing language with which to read various subjects. These subjects include postsocialist urban women, rural workers, and gay men who migrate to cities; a feminist scholar and museum founder; and even China itself as it negotiates with mostly Western countries for entry into the World Trade Organization.

What holds the six chapters together is Rofel's consistent effort to "forestall a sense that neoliberalism is a universal set of principles from which derives, in a deterministic fashion, a singular type of neoliberal subject" (2). Like Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, which seeks to "write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it," Rofel's project writes traces of contradictions and heterogeneity into the history of neoliberalism.¹ She does not follow a traditional comparative model that sets up East-West differences. Rather, she points to "a social process of discrepant transcultural practices" (94). This outlook on the project of "desiring China" suggests that local and global are not transparent categories that emerge from a singular imposition of Western neoliberalism. Rather, class, social, and gender differences "within" China mold transcultural encounters as well.

Rofel sees the emergence of the language of desire and freedom as what she calls a postsocialist allegory of desire, which "tells a story of how Maoism deferred China's ability to reach modernity by impeding Chinese people's ability to express their gendered human natures" (13). While this postsocialist allegory may be critical of a Western formulation of neoliberalism to the extent that it focuses on postsocialist individualist consumer identity and the cultivation of freedom defined by China's socialist past rather than measured by a Western scale, Rofel is well attuned to how this dominant allegory elides marginalized subjects such as radical feminists, migrant female workers, and rural gay and lesbian subjects. The author's ability to read the complex heterogeneity in the emergence of China's neoliberal project of desire is what sets this work apart from many other texts that often recast Chinese differences as mere Western opposites.

Rofel demonstrates this neoliberal heterogeneity in China in all the chapters, often utilizing very different theoretical frameworks. For instance, in her study of the television drama Yearning, Rofel extends Benedict Anderson's work on nationalism by looking at the "contradictory ways nations have been imagined" (38). One character that stands out as the locus of "contradictory" identifications of desire in relationship to the imagination of nation-ness is Liu Huifang. The author shows how some female informants criticize Liu for her sacrificial roles in the drama as a call to return to a feudal model of womanhood, yet others who identify with this character read "her sacrifices as socially engendered and worthy of representing national heroism" (59). Rofel's study demonstrates how the television drama points to competing routes of identifications that cannot be subsumed under a singular desire for neoliberal Chinese femininity.

The following sections extend this critique of the homogenous liberal subject. The chapter on gay identities in China has to do less with the "gayness" of Rofel's informants than with how their differential positions on questions of kinship, language, and articulation of the proper "quality" of gayness queer any singular articulation of Chinese queerness. Rofel articulates the tension between the global and the local as she illustrates how gay men and lesbians in...