ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine the vexed relationship between queerness and post-Cold War politics by looking at two queer films – Coming Out (dir. Heiner Carow, GDR, 1989) and Lan Yu (dir. Stanley Kwan, China, 2001). Seeing both films as situated in complex geopolitical contexts and therefore politically and ideologically ambivalent, I reveal the ‘political unconscious’ embedded within these cultural productions. I suggest that both films, along with the non-normative sexualities they represent, have participated in shaping a post-Cold War world order dominated by liberal and neoliberal values. As I identify possible queer complicities in neoliberal capitalism, I also unravel latent socialist impulses and queer resistances to queer liberalism and neoliberal globalisation in contemporary queer performance.
