Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes by John Wei (review)

The recent decade has witnessed a growing number of researches on queer Sinophone cultures, expanding the scope and analytic depth of nonnormative gender and sexual practices in Chinese speaking societies. John Wei’s Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities: Kinship, Migration, and Middle Classes is one recent example. Focusing on post-2008 queer Chinese cultural and social practices, Wei’s monograph pays specific attention to mobilities and the ways in which mobilities—geographical, cultural, and social—complicate understandings and practices of kinship, migration, and middle-classness among queer people in China and Sinophone Asia. To achieve this, Wei has identified three interrelated cultural domains, including “queer video/filmmaking and autobiographical queer cinema; urban queer communities and queer film clubs . . . ; and mobile queer social networking platforms and large-scale online queer communities” (p. 10). Integrating materials across these online and on the-ground social arenas, Wei deploys the notion of queer mobilities—“the motions . . . and emotions . . . of queer people and their families across the queer/non-queer and local/nonlocal boundaries in the intersections of geographical, cultural, and social class migrations” (p. 11)—to critically examine compulsory familism and compulsory developmentalism in China since 2008, the year that marked a turning point in China’s social, political, economic, and technological transformations.

The five body chapters of the monograph examine the themes of kinship, migration, and middle classes as they are materialized in films, and urban and online queer communities. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on geographical mobilities and the ensuing “stretched kinship,” engaging with, among other things, the notion of “coming home” (vs. coming out) theorized by Chou Wah-shan. For Wei, development-induced migration and mobilities problematize the notion of home and kinship negotiation among queer Chinese, making the time-consuming homecoming much less preferred, if not impossible. Juxtaposing homecoming with home-leaving and homemaking within the context of compulsory familism, Wei develops a new paradigm of “stretched kinship” that decenters the family of origin in queer Chinese kinship negotiation, introducing diverse practices of homemaking and homebuilding, such as metropolitan gay-straight cotenancy and urban film clubs. Nonetheless, migration does not always end up with settlement and homebuilding, and mobilities could entail trauma and death. Wei made this argument through analyzing two autobiographical queer films, where the protagonists’ search for home/love through mobilities—either homecoming or homemaking—were frustrated, if not denied, and where home and mobilities were but privileges “conditioned and structured by one’s cultural and social mobilities” (p. 72).

Chapter 3 complements geographical mobilities with cultural ones, engaging mainly with Sinophone theories first proposed by Shih Shu-mei. Different from Shih’s theorization of the Sinophone that excludes China and prioritizes “post-diasporic” communities and their “regrounded roots (i.e., settlement and localization),” Wei proposed the addition of “the contested and complicated migrating routes” that put mainland China back in the circulation of queer Sinophone cultures (p. 77). Focusing on the analysis of Sinophone Malaysian films directed by Ti Bing-yen and the Taiwanese-owned Two-City Café in Beijing, Wei demonstrated the ways in which post-diasporic Sinophone mobilities, such as the circulation of Ti’s films in mainland China and the “ad hoc community of intimate strangers” nurtured in Two-City Café, facilitated “counterflows” of Sinophone cultures from marginalized communities (such as Sinophone Malaysia and Taiwan) back to the “ancestral origin” of China (p. 86). In this sense, the multidimensional Sinophone mobilities disrupt the “oppositional, dualistic categories of queer and non-queer, local and nonlocal, and China and the Sinophone to make them once again mobilized and intimate to engage and interact with each other” (p. 96).

Chapters 4 and 5 revisit the notion of suzhi (quality) through analyzing web-based queer social networks such as Feizan, and proximity-based queer mobile apps such as ZANK, Aloha, and Blue’d. One key theme in these two chapters is social mobility, which according to Wei is...