ABSTRACT
A certain tension frequently arises in attempts to think about queer Chinese cultures in a transnational frame. Broadly, this is a tension between emphasising the multiplicity and fragmentation of Chinese identities today, versus emphasising the ‘deep structures’ of ethnicity and culture – especially the family – that are sometimes understood as a point of commonality across otherwise very different Chinese communities. For Leung, as for many other contemporary scholars, both Chineseness and queerness are ‘always already’ transnational, and the suspicion of simple, unchanging, essential identity that is a defining feature of queer intellectual projects is brought to bear on the topic of Chineseness. If there is a correlate in queer Chinese studies to a roots-based, centripetal, civilisationist view of ‘Chinese culture’, it is found perhaps most clearly in queer responses to what Singaporean-American film scholar Kenneth Chan has called the ‘homophobic Chinese patriarchal system’.
