Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China by Hongwei Bao (review)

Queer Comrades is a creative English translation of "tongzhi" that captures its double meanings as both "comrade" and "queer" in Chinese. Tongzhi is the analytical framework proposed by Hongwei Bao to examine queer subject positions, interlocking power structures, local and global governmentality, social movements, and everyday life in China. Bao's work is well-timed, entering a conversation over global processes of queer subject making. It disrupts the dominant narrative that China's entry into the transnational capitalist world brings sexual liberation to Chinese gay people. Beyond only looking at the impacts of neoliberal capitalism, Bao argues that Chinese tongzhi activists strategically construct a new subject position to subvert the state's erasure of a revolutionary past and its incorporation of a neoliberal capitalist vision (3– 4). His findings seek to demonstrate that these tongzhi activists do so by radically reclaiming identity formation and experiences of grassroots mobilization from China's socialist past with a queer lens.

With an empirical focus on tongzhi identity and activism, starting in 2007, Bao conducted in-depth qualitative research in three metropolitans areas: Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing. His methods include textual analysis, interviews, and participant observation. His interdisciplinary methodology maintains an analytical base in cultural studies, but it is a radical one that embraces the political nature of the project and recognizes social contexts for the project as partial, selective and constructed (198– 200). Therefore, Bao not only reads cultural texts carefully but also investigates the activists' practices of social- and self-transformation behind each text. Having grown up in China, Bao occupies a position both as an insider and outsider, who simultaneously (re)entered the field with Westernized tools and local knowledge. Bao critically reflects on his position by mapping out power structure of the field and situating himself within. This reflectivity is also shown in how this book is attentive to analyzing materials that look cross-purposed at first glance. For example, Bao not only studies people who are actively constructing a tongzhi identity, but he also looks at those who underwent conversion therapy to reject this identity (Chapter 4).

Building on these sources and theoretical frameworks, Bao presents a detailed account of what it is like to be tongzhi in postsocialist China. The book is organized in two parts. The first part is the emergence of tongzhi identity and its various articulations. The second part focuses on the media and cultural activism. He illustrates the formation of gay identity and the development of queer activism with both queer cultural texts, such as queer films and published diaries of conversion therapy "patients," and participant observation of queer events, including film festivals, pride activities, interaction with the police, and online discussion of queer politics in activist communities. In each part, Bao elaborates how activists deploy tongzhi identity and organizing strategy to create new representations and discourses about their queer and cultural citizenship in postsocialist China.

Besides the socialist past, this book could have delved deeper into the influence of the Chinese state's strong and repressive presence in controlling civil society. Bao provides a thick description of how activists construct the subject position of tongzhi while wrestling with the state's active erasure of the socialist past and queer existence. But to what extent has a strong presence of the Chinese state in civil society and its performative commitments to socialism contributed to the formation of tongzhi position? How does the socialist "comrade" with an egalitarian tone eventually develop into a gendered image of tongzhi? Nowadays, tongzhi is often a term referring to Chinese gay men. As Bao mentioned there are about ten self-identified gays and lesbians interviewed in each city (14). I wonder how these lesbian activist and community member interviewees see this issue? Does the power of China as a masculine and paternalistic state contribute to people's attachments to tongzhi identity and activism? If so, how? How would that affect younger people, such...