THE AFFECTIVE POLITICS OF HOME: QUEER FAMILIAL IMAGINATIONS IN 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY CHINESE THEATRE AND FILM A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Jen-Hao Hsu August 2013 © 2013 Jen-Hao Hsu The Affective Politics of Home: Queer Familial Imaginations in 20th and 21st Century Chinese Theatre and Film Jen-Hao Hsu, PhD Cornell University, 2013 This dissertation studies representative queer texts across various media (literature, theater and cinema) in relation to the changing melodramatic and sentimental modes of representations of home throughout 20th and 21st century China. Depictions of home in modern China are often expressed through these modes; the aesthetics of these modes concerns the ontological question of loss in China’s coerced passage into modernity. This melancholic loss is often associated with the constructions of “Chineseness”—cultural attempts to anchor, in the words of Rey Chow, “a non-Western but Westernized” Chinese identity. This project seeks to understand how queerness, as sites of affective excess indicating unresolved social contradictions, intervenes the melodramatic or sentimental tendency towards ideological closures, which secure orthodox Chinese identities. This project identifies four geo-historical sites that provide historical conditions of possibility for queerness to emerge in relation to the notion of home and family. My geo-historical sites of analysis are Republican China, post-Martial Law Taiwan, post-Socialist China and contemporary Taiwan and China. For Republican China, I analyze the case of Ouyang Yuqian and explore his committed theatre career of female impersonation. Through a study of the affective exchange between him and his fans, I demonstrate how this dimension allows him to go beyond the familial ideologies in 1910s family i melodramas and 1920s Nora plays, which led him to create Nora plays that entailed queer desires. For post-Martial Law Taiwan and post-Socialist China, I choose to study the first visible queer texts--in Taiwan, Crystal Boys and Tian Chi-yuan’s queer theatre by situating them in the dominant structure of feelings of melancholia and ressentiment; in China, I explore queerness in East Palace, West Palace and Lin Yingyu’s adaptation of Jean Genet in relation to the affective politics in dominant root-searching and scar literature movements. From the contemporary moments, I study two self-identified queer activists/independent filmmakers’ works—Mickey Chen from Taiwan and Cui Zi’en from China, analyzing how the sentimental or melodramatic mode is deployed in their works. I select those texts for their representativeness as the first queer texts or significant examples that allow us to see the cultural politics of the specific spatial-temporal sites I chose for analysis. This project demonstrates that, in order to understand queerness in 20th-century China, one needs to engage with the afterlives of Confucian familialism, through which Chineseness has been repeatedly constructed to counter the melancholic loss of modernity. ii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Jen-Hao Walter Hsu completed a B.A. in Western Languages and Literatures and an M.A. in Theatre and Drama at National Taiwan University. He worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica, Taipei and won a national scholarship from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan for Ph.D. studies in the U.S. Before matriculating at Cornell, he studied for two years at the Ph.D. program in Theatre and Performance Studies at UCLA, where he was also awarded with a Global Scholarship. His research interests look at the intersections between the visual/affective politics in film/theatre and the changing regimes of sexuality in modern and contemporary China and Taiwan. He is also a part-time translator. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the many people, organizations, and institutions who have made this work possible. The preliminary research of this project is funded by Academia Sinica, where I completed the drafts of my first two chapters. The completion of this dissertation is further made possible with the aides of the Sage Fellowship, dissertation writing group, and reading group of Institute of Comparative Modernity, funded by various institutes at Cornell University. The research on Cui Zi’en in the last chapter is stengthened after his visit at Cornell, a screening event facilitated and funded by PMA, EAP, and Center for LGBT and FGSS studies at Cornell. The theoretical framework of this dissertation evolves from, “Queering Chineseness: Queer Sphere of Feelings in Farewell My Concubine and Green Snake,” an article published in Asian Studies Review, 36.1 (2012), copyright Taylor & Francis, LTD. My thanks to the editors and peer reviewers of that article, especially Peter Jackson, for all of their great and insightful feedback, which has influenced the contour of this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank all the people who have assisted my research, and who have read parts of this dissertation, offering criticism, feedback and impact along this process. My gratitude, especially, to Amy Villarejo, Petrus Liu and Brett de Bary, who have provided invaluable guidance and feedback that have shaped the foundation and final contour of this dissertation. I benefited the most from the conversations with David Wang from Harvard; Sabine Haenni and Naoki Sakai from Cornell; Peng Hsiao-yen from Academia Sinica; Shu-mei Shih, and Sue-Ellen Case from UCLA; Katherine Huiling iv Chou from National Central University in Taiwan and the professors and peer at the Workshop in Global Performance at UCSB organized by Suk-Young Kim. I would like to thank my colleague at Cornell and various places in the world for stimulating my thoughts about the nature of humanity and sustaining my passion for intellectual endeavors. I would like to thank Professor An-yi Pan, Ozum Hatipoglu, Marcie Middlebrooks, Arina Rotarou and other colleague from Cornell; Cheenghee Masaki Koh and Yijie Chou from Unviersity of Chicago; Ying-cheng Peng and Julia Grimes from UCLA; Hsiao-wen Cheng from Academia Sinica for giving me support and encouragement when I was going through moments of crisis in this long journey. Last but not least, my heart-felt gratitude to Xiaoyan Liu and my beloved family, Wen-sui Hsu, Yu-Hsiang Chang, and Jen-Han Hsu, without whom I cannot carry through and surface from this final round of challenge. Home is where the heart is. The greatest harvest of this dissertation process for me is to know what human feelings might entail with regard to our deepest and universal longing for “homecoming.” v TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------1-33 2. Chapter 1: From Camille to Pan Jinlian: Politics of Public Sentiments in Ouyang Yuqian’s Female Impersonation----------------------------------------------------------34-98 3. Chapter 2: Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Tongzhi Aesthetics in Past Martial Law Taiwan--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------99-175 4. Chapter 3: Between Nostalgia and Trauma: Queer Desire in Post Socialist China--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------176-228 5. Queer Melodrama in the Age of Neoliberalism: The Task of Homecoming in Mickey Chen’s and Cui Zi’en’s Works--------------------------------------------------------229-295 6. Conclusion-------------------------------------------------------------------------------296-301 7. Bibliography----------------------------------------------------------------------------302-311 vi INTRODUCTION QUEERNESS AND MODERN CHINESENESS On May 14th, 2009, a Taiwan-based theatre troupe, the Creative Society, successfully put on the debut performance of a new production—He is my Wife, He is my Mother, a queer play adapted from Qing literatus Li Yu’s homoerotic vernacular story, A Male Mencius Mother. Marketed as a play about “love between tongzhi,”1He is my Wife, He is my Mother capitalizes on the sensational value of its queer components, as the show’s description praises Li Yu as a late-Ming-early-Qing eccentric talent whose “language provokes and shocks” (語不驚人死不休).2 From Li Yu’s story to Katherine Huiling Chou’s3 play, a history of Chinese homosexuality is rescued from oblivion. Now we know that queer life is not an imported concept from the West, but rather a way of life already existing in early modern China when Western influences were still pretty miniscule. The advertising strategy underscores such a culturalist logic, aiming to draw tongzhi communities into the theatre. After all, it is 2009, when self-identified tongzhi communities in Taiwan have already been established and consolidated since the ongoing queer rights movement began in 1990.4 The historiographical impulse in He is my Wife, He is my Mother thus constructs a history of Chinese male homosexuals, imagining a 1 In the advertisement section on the website of Taiwan’s national theatre, the play is described as “a 17th century strange love among tongzhi (literally meaning comrade; it is the Chinese term for queer).” http://www.ntch.edu.tw/program/show/40408e951e72c9b4011e740657f70041?lang=zh (accessed on Dec 3, 2012) 2 Ibid. 3 She is both the playwright and director of this play. 4 The establishment of the lesbian group “Womenzhijian” (Between Us) on February 23, 1990 is considered