Queer Forms and Contacts

The initial panel invitation asked me to reflect on queer performance and scholarship in my work as a way of addressing José Esteban Muñoz’s call to invest in both performance and queerness as pathways to imagine and rehearse more optimistic and radical futures. To respond to this request, I consider queer forms and contacts. Although I remain uncertain whether I share the principle of hope that queer studies has inherited from Ernst Bloch via Muñoz, I do believe that contradiction produces potentiality. Performance generates ways that we might see and, perhaps, inhabit the world differently. My first book, Chinese Looks, investigates such issues through fashion and costume, and my current monograph, titled The Chinese Atlantic, moves to a different kind of aesthetic production: seascapes. Both projects deal with transnational forms of Chineseness because I analyze present discourses of globalization and their antecedents by attending in terms of both fantasy and materiality to what one might call “Chinese things.” My efforts here register some new horizons of possibility, even if the nodal points I offer only bring into partial view my attempts at intervening in performance, queer theory, and sexuality studies.

To consider costuming, dressing, and fashioning as modes of performance is to think about bodies and the ways that clothes help people to move through and shape social worlds. Each of these terms provides different valences to understand how outfits might matter. Often associated with stage and screen, costumes work in tandem with narrative to ground fictional and ritualistic contexts and often connote the festive. Dress signifies the everyday, but it also means to arrange or put into some order. Here, one might think of dressing a shop window or, perhaps more archaically, dressing to the right or left (that is, positioning a man’s package in the left or right side of the pants). Fashion signals capitalism, but it can also be defined as “to give form to.” These overlapping terms provide ways to unpack the significance of garments in general, but they also open a more specific inquiry into questions of representational forms, performance, and phenomenology.

One critical modality to which this constellation of terms leads is queer style. I have used queer style to think specifically about normative relations among ostensibly Chinese clothing, image, and performance.¹ What happens when a garment seems out of place? How does the use of a sartorial item in a nonnormative manner encourage spectators to consider not only what they see, but also how they see? One of the most conspicuous examples of such a shift is the work of Chinese artist Sui Jianguo, particularly his four-ton metal Mao jacket that occupied the corner of Park Avenue and 70th Street in New York City for several months as part of the Asia Society’s exhibition, “Art and China’s Revolution.” Monumental in scale, the wardrobe piece stood divested of its iconic namesake—a surface without apparent content. What kinds of desire does such a form elicit and represent? The sculpture raises questions about surfaces and their relations to sensuous pleasure and nagging discomfort, individual handiwork and mass production, subjective expression and public perception.

My usage of queer style draws on my much larger study of how Chinese objects of dress and adornment (including hair) might alter understandings of race and its performance during periods when US–Chinese relations decisively shift. In Chinese Looks I coin the “skein of race” to name the material historical forces that compel spectators to see, hear, and even feel Chineseness within particular historical contexts: over the course of the long twentieth century, from the Opium Wars through the Beijing Olympics. Queer style is a subcategory of the skein of race that opens the stakes of thinking about the migrating form and the queer together.

For example, photographer Tseng Kwong Chi produced a body of work that offers no immediately apparent relation to sexual desire yet encourages his viewers to contemplate the conditions of possibility for rendering desire visible in the first place. Tseng’s most well-known photographs are self-portraits depicting the artist dressed in a gray suit consisting of a...