Red Father, Pink Son: Queer Socialism and Post-Socialist Queer Critiques

Red Father, Pink Son: Queer Socialism and Post-socialist Queer Critiques A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Shan Ye IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Jigna Desai, Richa Nagar June, 2017 © Shan Ye 2017 i Acknowledgements This research would not have been possible without the generosity and kindheartedness of my mentors, colleagues, friends and contacts I grew to know over time. I want to give my sincere thanks to Jigna Desai, Richa Nagar, Jason McGrath, Aren Aizura, and Naomi Scheman for guiding me through my research and dissertation writing. Thanks to Kevin murphy, Howard Chiang, Jess Jingshu Zhu, Chris Tan, Angela Carter, Keren White and many other colleges for inspiring me and reading my first drafts. I also want to thank the friendship of Anna Ziyi Zhao, Laura Noppe, Thorn Hongwei Chen and many others for helping me through the tough time during my dissertation writing. Of course, thanks to my supporting and lovely family. Funding for my work was generously provided by the Interdisciplinary center for the study of social Change, the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota, and the Association for Asian Studies. ii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to Ray and many others whose lives are erased and undermined. iii Abstract The dissertation examines how the affect, memory and trauma of socialism have informed queer life and LGBT activism. Queer sexuality in China is often articulated through a teleological narrative of transition predicated on the dichotomy of socialist oppression vis-à-vis post-socialist liberation. It depicts queer subject as victim par excellence of state violence and pre- or anti-modern traditions, and renders queer practices as radical and embodying notions of progress to transform China from a backward socialist totalitarian “other” to a democratic neoliberal world power. Such making of “Queer China,” I argue, is ironically complicit with Cold War formation and its ongoing impacts on today’s neoliberal gay normalization. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including historical documents, oral histories, cultural productions and ethnographic research, the dissertation unpacks multifaceted impacts of socialist history, memory, trauma, and geopolitical struggles on shaping queerness in order to reframe dominant Cold War culture in the studies of transnational sexualities and to rebuild a radical queer politics freed of commercialism, middle-class assimilation and imperialism under the name of queer liberation. The dissertation reevaluates notions of sexual repression, state violence, progress, visibility and agency to shed light on theoretical and methodological debates on ethnocentrism, othering and normalization. The dissertation argues that a critical engagement with queer geopolitics and situated knowledge from the temporal, regional, ideological and epistemological margins can contribute to the provincialization of “Western” sexualities and decolonization of queer studies derived from US-inflicted modes of sexuality and a Western-based system of modernity. iv Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………………………………… v Introduction…………………………………………………………………………... 1 Post-socialist Knowledge Production of Chinese Queer Sexuality Chapter One………………………………………………………………………….. 33 Reparative Return to “Queer Socialism”: Agency, Desires and Socialist Queer Past Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………….. 77 The Search for Queer Anti-Capitalism: Stories of the AIDS Economy and Queer Radicality Chapter Three………………………………………………………………………... 119 “Cool Child’s” Revolution: Queer Is as Queer Does Chapter Four…………………………………………………………………………. 156 The Drama of Chinese Feminisms: Trauma, Cold War Colonialism and the (Im)possibility of Postsocialism Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………. 189 Towards a Transnational Post-socialist Queer Critique Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….. 202 v List of Figures Figure 1: Example of sodomy dossier………………………………………………….. 50 Figure 2: Example of Tanbai Jiaodai…………………………………………………... 51 Figure 3: Photo by Sina account “Westerner Living in China” taken in 2012………... 166 Figure 4: Stickers of feminist activities……………………………………………….. 168 Figure 5 and 6: Online posters of “Free the Five”…………………………………….. 169 Figure 7: Feminist activists wearing masks of the arrested…………………………… 170 Figure 8: “To Russia with Love”……………………………………………………… 189 1 Introduction Post-socialist Knowledge Production of Chinese Queer Sexuality The night of the bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square was the moment Yang Tao began to face up to his homosexuality. He had gone to the square to demonstrate on that evening in June, 1989, when solders suddenly started shooting. He leaped over a fence and ran to safety. … … “It was a narrow escape. I could have been killed,” said Mr. Yang, … “I thought: Why should I live with a mask? This is the way I am.” Above excerpt is from an article titled “I Lived in Darkness, There was no Where to Look for Help” appeared on Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail in 1993, a time when the Cold War just ended with the capitalist world as the supposed winner. In this story, the awakening of Yang Tao’s gay identity is told through the life and death of the 1989 Tiananmen upheaval, a political event that marked the climax of intensified social conflicts resulted by China’s economic reform. As the narrative suggests, the precarious queerness of Yang Tao, both being gay and a political dissident, is threatened by the socialist totalitarianism. But it is precisely at the moment of confronting the state violence that the queer will to resist was invoked and the queer self was able to fledge. The figures of the Radical Queer and the Oppressive Socialist State have been central in narrating the emergence of Chinese queer subjectivity and LGBT politics. We often hear stories of communist prosecution of sodomites, police harassment of homosexuals, and governmental crackdowns of LGBT organizations. In these stories, the queer subject is framed not only as victim par excellence of the state socialism, but also norm resister who carries the power to transform China from a backward socialist 2 totalitarian regime to a post-socialist democratic world power. The Globe and Mail article is an example of such narratives-- the awareness of queer resistance, liberation and collective identity are framed through the dichotomy of the “pre-modern” or the “anti- modern” Communist China vis-à-vis the “properly modernized” capitalist West. As the story unfolds, we learned that Yang Tao “was enrolled in an elite language school where he learned to speak English fluently.” In the “darkness” of “confusion”, “despair” and “hard struggle” with the self, it was in foreign books where Yang Tao “came across the words ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual,’ and realized that might be what he was.” In 1986, he spent a year in the United States as a visiting scholar where he discovered a gay subculture, “bought gay magazines, watched gay videos and went to gay bars.” In desperate need of getting housing from his work unit through marriage, Yang Tao tried to date women and subjugated himself into a heterosexual family. Yet it was the 1989 killing, as the article tells us, that Yang Tao finally came to the realization that “the situation was hopeless in China” for both gays and liberal-minded political dissidents and decided to break free from it by escaping to the United States. Eventually Yang Tao, like many political activists, fled to Canton in the South, the home of China’s first four special economic zones and an area considerably “freer” than highly politicized communist center city Beijing. It was there where Yang Tao’s self-identification finally came to a completion—he met other gay men at cruising sites and grew the conciseness of a collective gay identity. “He told me about being gay. He used the English word,” through Yang Tao’s own words, the report highlights the moment that the concept of “Western gay” made sense of Yang Tao’s previously unspeakable sexuality, “It was the 3 first time I heard a Chinese say the word for homosexual.” Through articulating socialist and post-socialist sexual differences, the story of Yang Tao’s transformation has thus made the narrative of China’s inevitable and desired transition possible. Starting from the late 1980s and early 1990s, there has been an increasing interest in producing knowledge about China’s sexual and gender variant culture in both popular cultural and academic arenas in and outside China. In the first few years following China’s 1978 “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang, 改革开放), a plethora of medical and health magazine brought questions of sexualities into the earshot of ordinary people. The Chinese word for homosexuality, tongxing lian or 同性恋, first appeared in print media in 1981, on the magazine Public Medical (《大众医学》). The publication of A Handbook of Sexual Knowledge (《性知识手册》) in 1985 was the first print media that provides a detailed education on sexuality, in which a full chapter is dedicated to homosexuality. Around the same time period, Western sexual cultures such as gay parade, HIV/AIDS and theories of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey and The Shere Hite Report had made their way to the Chinese public. Starting from the early 1990s, gay bars, discos, and salon discussions have mushroomed in China’s major cities that provide Chinese gender/sexually variant people more space to get together, to meet foreigners and to organize social events. Increasing

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