ABSTRACT
With respect to the topic of queer Sinophone studies, the introduction of ethnicity opens up new and more complex vistas of how non-normative subjecthoods manifest in China. In this regard, queerness need not only be an issue of non-normative sexual practices or identities, but understood as inclusive of any practices or identities that deviate from the linear trajectory of normative social practices. This chapter asks what the relational turn can illuminate between the US and Chinese literary and cultural fields, and how relationality can be used to think through the Chinese cultural scene in ways that provide a new and distinct perspective onto global academic discourses concerning gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. In this chapter, the author argues for the relational existence of ethnicity and sexuality in Chan Koon-chung’s Bare Life.
