I have always found queerness in contemporary China a rather depressing topic, especially for those of us who live in it, yearning desperately for a utopia, never to come, and it never stops wounding us. What forms of conviviality are possible when not only is queer survival foreclosed, but the political regime is such that confrontational activism is hard to imagine? Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance traces how Chinese queer artists and activists respond to and against the milieu that produces this forlorn sentiment.
But what does it mean to talk about ‘queer’ in China, insofar as ‘queer’ is a reclaimed concept from Western activist discourse and queer studies from the 1990s? To this end, Bao curates an archive of performances that played a role in performatively bringing into existence ‘queer’ identities. Here, ‘queer’ refers to a minoritarian way of life that challenges gender and sexual norms predominantly in urban China where LGBTQ discourse emerged during the 1990s vis-à-vis transnational circulations.
Thematically, Bao highlights the ‘soft activism’ of community building, engagement with social media and cultural activities, as direct confrontation against the existing regime in China often results in incarceration. The book thus joins the conversation in the West away from the hermeneutic of suspicion towards attention to minor forms of conviviality. Here, readers will find productive dialogue with Hentyle Yapp's Minor China. Meanwhile, the book's case studies on performance art complement Meiling Cheng's Beijing Xingwei. Content-wise, chapters 1 and 2 use formal analysis to parse the historical contexts of being queer in China, where Ren Hang's non-anthropocentric photography and the affinity between queerness and socialism in the film Lan Yu gesture beyond liberal humanism. Chapters 3 and 4 employ a transmedia lens onto the soft activism of Beijing Queer Chorus and filmmaker Fan Popo without recoursing to visibility politics. Finally, chapters 5–7 discuss transnational aspects, from the use of avant-garde theatre in rethinking narratives about queer China to the seemingly apolitical digital performance of food sharing by diasporic artists to create world building.
The ambition of documenting so many case studies is valuable for the field of queer studies in constructing an archive that often escapes critical attention. The book's strength shines through when the author delves into the production and circulation of each performance in their material, historical and discursive contexts through engagements with archives and interviews. Bao's attentiveness to being queer in China, which is different from the West, is to be applauded, and would prove useful for the anglophone audiences who are less familiar with the history of Chinese thoughts or wanting in lived experience. That said, some close readings of the performance's political registers are at times eclipsed due perhaps to the book's wide coverage and the constraint of its length. What readers might want to see is perhaps a more thorough untangling of the theoretical concepts the author uses in his analysis as they move across Chinese and Western contexts. For example, the discussion of Ren Hang's photography offers a comparative reading of the aesthetics of ziran vis-à-vis affect theory and Deleuze and Guattari. Readers, however, may find that the use of theory does not necessarily extend it. How does reading across different contexts compel us to rethink the terminology we use to discuss aesthetics and politics for the specificity of China? These questions might push the book to a different focus, and I raise them here less as a critique and more as a call for attention for future studies on comparative and transnational research on China.
Overall, the book provides a vivid archive of queer performance in China around the millennium with keen attention to its specific divergence from, and connection to, the West. It raises urgent questions about the relation between art and activism, aesthetics and politics, in a milieu where – unlike the liberal regime that often tolerates and works to capitalize and depoliticize protest – expression of discontent results in violent repression. What forms of queer sociality can we imagine when we find ourselves with the more demanding task of an ‘unspeakable’ life?
