QUEER CHINESE POSTSOCIALIST HORIZONS: NEW MODELS OF SAME-SEX DESIRE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FICTION, “SENTIMENTS LIKE WATER” AND BEIJING STORY by KYLE DUANE SHERNUK A THESIS Presented to the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts June 2012 THESIS APPROVAL PAGE Student: Kyle Duane Shernuk Title: Queer Chinese Postsocialist Horizons: New Models of Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, “Sentiments Like Water and Beijing Story This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures by: Deborah Tze-lan Sang Chair Maram Epstein Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2012 ii Copyright 2012 Kyle Duane Shernuk iii THESIS ABSTRACT Kyle Duane Shernuk Master of Arts Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures June 2012 Title: Queer Chinese Postsocialist Horizons: New Models of Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Chinese Fiction, “Sentiments Like Water” and Beijing Story This thesis represents an investigation into the strategies used by postsocialist Chinese male subjects to articulate their subjecthood and desires. The introduction explains the choice for using a phenomenological methodological approach in addressing the issue and also lays out the simultaneous goal of this thesis to inaugurate a move away from political allegorical interpretations as the standard for reading contemporary Chinese literature. The body chapters look at two different contemporary Chinese works to help illuminate the arrival of the Chinese subject. Using Wang Xiaobo's novella "Sentiments Like Water" and the anonymously penned online novel Beijing Story as case studies, this thesis investigates the ways alternative epistemologies and uses of history can undo pathological understandings of queerness and create new identities for Chinese subjects. The thesis concludes with thinking about the direction of the queer and Chinese studies fields and offers future points of investigation. iv CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Kyle Duane Shernuk GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Sichuan University, Chengdu, China Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China University of Kansas, Lawrence DEGREES AWARDED: Master of Arts, East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2012, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, East Asian Languages and Cultures, 2008, University of Kansas AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Republican Era and Contemporary Chinese Literature and Film, Queer, Post-Colonial, and Feminist Theory GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Chinese Government Scholarship, 2011-2012 Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship Recipient (FLAS) for Japanese Language Studies, University of Oregon, 2010-2011 Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Recipient for Chinese language Studies,Department of Education, Summer 2010 Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship Recipient (FLAS) for Chinese Language Studies at Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), 2009- 2010 Graduate Teaching Fellowship, East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2008-2009 v PUBLICATIONS: Shernuk, K. “The Pursuit of Pleasure: Perversion and Pathology in Wang Xiaobo’s ‘Sentiments Like Water’” Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs. 11:2. (2011) vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Professors Sang and Epstein for their unwavering support and guidance in making my work achieve its highest potential. I also want to thank the University of Oregon Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS) for funding that allowed me to present parts of this thesis at two separate conferences. Feedback from these experiences was integral to the final product. I would finally like to thank Academia Sinica for their financial support and invitation to participate in their Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, which provided me a much needed methodology that was integral to completing this thesis. vii For my Mouton. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 Notes ............................................................................................................ 23 II. THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE: PERVERSE HORIZONS IN WANG XIAOBO’S “SENTIMENTS LIKE WATER” ………………............................ 25 Notes ............................................................................................................ 66 III. BUILDING A HISTORY: BREAKING TRADITIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF QUEER POSTSOCIALIST SUBJECTS IN BEIJING STORY .............................................................................................................. 70 Notes ............................................................................................................ 119 IV. NEW HORIZONS AND THE ARRIVAL OF POST-QUEERNESS ? ........ 123 Notes ............................................................................................................ 130 REFERENCES CITED ........................................................................................ 131 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This thesis represents the beginning of an investigation into what I call the queer horizons of contemporary China. Postsocialist mainland China is regularly inundated with an ever-increasing number of ideas, many of which are directly in competition with previous socialist values. Chief among these ideas is the notion of individualized desire.1 The recognition of personalized desires also inaugurates the emergence of endless subjectivities, the range of which reflects the coalescing of myriad conceptual forces, such as modernity, globalization, capitalism, socialism, and nationalism, as well as more concrete factors such as affect, language, aesthetics, and pleasure. A person’s understanding of and relationship to the above concepts works over time to delimit his/her perceived reality, and it is precisely this delimitation that establishes the Chinese subject’s horizon of perception. The scope of the present endeavor is limited to the investigation of two fictional literary works from the 1990s that display two different and queer horizons of understanding in postsocialist China. This opening chapter will first serve to elaborate the function of the metaphor of the horizon and my choice to use it to describe the postsocialist Chinese condition. The flexibility offered by the concept of horizons will also allow for segueing into a discussion and interrogation of terminologies used to describe queer realities, a topic which inevitably haunts discussions of queerness in inter- and trans-national contexts. I will conclude this chapter by introducing another main goal of this thesis, which is to decenter Fredric Jameson’s thesis about the nature of third world literature and direct attention to potential alternative reading methodologies. 1 The first chapter takes Wang Xiaobo’s novella “Sentiments Like Water” as its main focus and works to understand how alternative discursive regimes and aesthetic preferences can reshape the subject’s understanding of language and love. While Wang’s novella stands alone as a work worthy of analysis, when coupled with sixth-generation Chinese director Zhang Yuan’s adaptation of the novella into film, the contrast between the two end products helps to highlight the ways in which the varying forces mentioned above, specifically globalization and capitalism, come to bear on a creator’s intended artistic message. What I hope to ultimately prove with this chapter is that, underneath the foundations of political allegorical readings, alternative horizons of understanding engage this story differently and acquire meaning in different ways. It is these different understandings that in turn help the reader to clarify the character’s queer horizon and individualized epistemology. The second chapter will begin by looking more closely at how the various forces above have been described as coming to bear on the postsocialist Chinese subject by scholars from varying disciplines and attempt to synthesize the resulting complex of loaded terms into a more digestible form. What follows will be a close reading of the anonymously penned online novel Beijing Story, which relates the story of two men’s struggles in life and love and vividly highlights the conflicts that can emerge within a single subject whose allegiance to and understanding of the forces addressed above are unclear. Looking at this literary manifestation of the disorientation that occurs in subjects without a static view of the world, or guiding line, helps to illuminate the struggles faced by postsocialist Chinese subjects to understand individual desire and their creation of personal value systems. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of the strategy 2 employed by the protagonist Handong to create his new horizon and how it requires a new approach to the concept of history. What is queer about these horizons can be understood in more than one sense. While it can certainly refer to male same-sex desires and the emotions that are foregrounded in the stories, this does not entirely capture what is queer about the characters’ points of view. It is by looking to queer’s more recent academic appropriation,