ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the economy of queerness in China in order to illustrate the heterogeneity and plurality of global coloniality in relation to the post-Cold War postsocialist conditions. Contextualizing the transnational emergence and circulation of US queer theory in the 1990s within the context of Cold War anti-Marxism and China’s market economic reform, this chapter argues that the discourse of queer as “fluid” and “anti-normative” is promised by the Chinese embrace of Western humanist knowledge, cosmopolitan desires and vast flexible labour and capital. Yet as the liberal and democratic discourse of queer politics predominantly frames queer precarity in terms of “unfreedom under communism” rather than postsocialist economic inequality and structural violence, the blanket rhetoric of the Cold War displaces queer inequality onto the orientalist construction of China as an ahistorical “other”. While queerness is often thought as embodying cutting-edge anti-normativity, this chapter shows the collusion of dominant queer knowledge production and the logic of global coloniality and its uneven division of labour. Through placing the contradictions of Chinese queerness at the centre of transnational queer knowledge production and political economy, this chapter seeks to provincialize Euro-US queer theorization and to critically engage the intersections and tensions of postcolonial and postsocialist theorizing.
