Queer Marxism in Two Chinas

"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."
 

"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."