ABSTRACT
To address the question of queerness in Chinese-speaking contexts automatically ushers in the issue of translation. After all, even as acts and articulations that we now describe as queer have existed in different epochs and cultures, the modern understanding of sexuality, and thus also the bases for the theorization of non-normative sexualities and queer politics, are Western inventions, European imports to China in the early twentieth century.2 The influx and translation of scientific knowledge from the West (often via Japan) into China not only changed the epistemological frameworks for thinking sexuality. It also led to a reconsideration of same-sex relationships and acts as pathological phenomena that had to be catalogued, controlled and repressed.3 When cultural expressions, theoretical formations and activism around non-normative sexualities began to proliferate in the 1980s and 1990s, first in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and then in China, these reacted to and challenged such heteronormative patterns by having recourse to Western models and renegotiating these with locally and culturally specific formations.
