In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Petrus Liu rethinks the relationship between Marxism and queer cultures in mainland China and Taiwan. Whereas many scholars assume the emergence of queer cultures in China signals the end of Marxism and demonstrates China's political and economic evolution, Liu finds the opposite to be true. He challenges the persistence of Cold War formulations of Marxism that position it as intellectually incompatible with queer theory, and shows how queer Marxism offers a nonliberal alternative to Western models of queer emancipation. The work of queer Chinese artists and intellectuals not only provides an alternative to liberal ideologies of inclusion and diversity, but demonstrates how different conceptions of and attitudes toward queerness in China and Taiwan stem from geopolitical tensions. With Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Liu offers a revision to current understandings of what queer theory is, does, and can be.
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9780822360049
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 10-23-2015
Pages: 256
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.54(d)
About the Author
Petrus Liu is Associate Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College and the author of Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History.
What People are Saying
What People are Saying About This
Judith Butler
"In this quite stunning book, Petrus Liu offers a new intervention into gender and sexuality studies. He establishes queer perspectives as a way of thinking about the doubleness of China, and tracks how sexuality has been produced as a new ethnic identity within an emerging pluralist framework, and how queer Marxism contests this production. Liu argues for a complex materialist social theory that takes into account the relationship between labor power, the reproduction of society, and the material status of sexuality. In the end, he refuses to identify materialism with economic reductionism, showing instead how the reproduction of society requires its cultural articulation, and how the effort to navigate two Chinas produces a non–state-centered form of queer critique. For Liu, queer theorists are in a powerful position to call the theory of the state into question—a move that holds out serious consequences for a new geopolitical reading of Marxism through the powerful framework of sexuality."
The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy - David Eng
"Petrus Liu charts out not only a bold new agenda for queer studies in postreform China, but also a revitalized Marxism that links questions of sexuality to problems of political economy, economic justice, and social equality transnationally. A provocative and dazzling intervention."
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1. Marxism, Queer Liberalism, and the Quandary of Two Chinas 1
2. Chinese Queer Theory 34
3.The Rise of the Queer Chinese Novel 85
4. Genealogies of the Self 114
5. Queer Human Rights in and aganist the Two Chinas 138