Qualities of desire: Imagining gay identities in China

GLQ

Volumn 5, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 451-474

  Rofel, Lisa ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646700100     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-5-4-451     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
2. Single quotation marks indicate that these terms were said in English.
3. Lydia Liu coins the term translingual practices to highlight how the politics of crossing categories and concepts over language boundaries is bound to entail confrontations charged with claims to power (Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity - China, 1900-1937 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995]). My use of transcultural practices stems from Lius conceptualization, though I am tempted to keep her felicitous phrase for an analysis of sexuality.
4. This essay speaks only of gay men. When I began this project, in the summer of 1997, the few lesbians I knew in China asked me not to write about them. Since then I have interviewed a number of lesbians but feel it best for present purposes to direct my argument to the majority of those with whom I have spoken.
5. David M. Halperin's exquisite rendering of the historical and cultural specificity in Foucaults study of sexuality, which moves us beyond the dichotomy of acts versus identities, is a model of what I have in mind ("Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality," Representations 63 [1998]: 93-120).
6. Jacqueline Nassy Brown, "Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space," Cultural Anthropology 13 (1998): 291-325.
7. Dennis Altman, "Global Gaze/Global Gays," GLQ 3 (1997): 417, 421.
8. Martin F. Manalansan IV brilliantly analyzes this story as a Western developmental narrative that begins with a "prepolitical" homosexual practice - the "cultural traditions" - and culminates in a liberated "modern" gay subjectivity ("In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma," in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd [Durham: Duke University Press, 1997], 485-505).
9. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 198-200.
10. Anthropological studies featured prominently in gay and lesbian anthologies have often been taken up as reassurances that "we" have always been everywhere or that a dream space of possibility exists in which homophobia finally meets its limits. Or they have been allowed to stand in as gestures toward difference that, by resting on the exotica of sexual practices in other places, continue to allow Western gay identities to represent themselves as the ideological self of modern sexuality (while these other practices represent otherness). Thus they have not decentered the universalism of Euro-American notions of what it means to be gay. Nor have they addressed relations of power that link the latter with political and cultural hegemonies. Such a project would instead emphasize how distinctions are forged in unequal dialogues but not in archaic isolation and that unequal subject positions are produced in common fields of power and knowledge. Other problems with these studies have been spelled out elsewhere, such as their inattention to meanings of gender and relations of power. As Tom Boellstorff points out in this issue, this inattention naturalizes heterosexual practices in other cultures. See Scott Morgensen, "Under the Sign of the Berdache: A Queer Analysis of the 'Third Gender,'" manuscript, 1997;
11. and Deborah Elliston, "Erotic Anthropology: 'Ritualized Homosexuality' in Melanesia and Beyond," American Ethnologist 22 (1995): 848-67.
12. For recent examples of the work I allude to see Boellstorff (in this issue); Lawrence Cohen, "Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of Modernity," GLQ 2 (1995): 399-424;
13. Manalansan, "In the Shadows of Stonewall";
14. Rosalind C. Morris, "Educating Desire: Thailand, Transnationalism, and Transgression," Social Text, nos. 52-53 (1997): 53-79;
15. and Elizabeth Povinelli, "Sexual Savages, Sexual Sovereignty: Australian Colonial Texts and the Postcolonial Politics of Nationalism," Diacritics 24, nos. 2-3 (1994): 122-50.
16. Jacqueline Nassy Brown, "Slaves to History," manuscript, 1999, 7.
17. Kath Weston argues this point beautifully in her essay on gay urban/rural imaginaries in the United States ("Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration," GLQ 2 [1995]: 253-77).
18. Studies of sex and globalization must first attend, then, to a rethinking of the category of globalization. Recent work in anthropology points to the following critique: First, globalization is often discussed along one axis, the economic or the political or the cultural. Second, even when it is understood as simultaneously economic, political, and cultural, it is often cast as a uniform or monolithic force, pursuing the same outcomes everywhere around the world. Third, it is often assumed that globalization's influence is overpowering and, as a result, that its effects are homogenizing. Finally, as a corollary, it is often treated in contrast to the local as if it were a deterritorialized force, without reference to the specific and uneven spatial groundings of the elements and processes involved. Along with other anthropologists, I seek to trouble such assumptions and to move toward the production of a more subtle cultural analysis of globalization by focusing on its cultural production and on the transformations taking place in this production; by emphasizing the culturally, geographically, and historically specific and uneven manifestations of these processes; and by treating discourses of global capitalism and globalization as themselves elements in this cultural production that require critical scrutiny not only for their accuracy but also, and more important, for the kinds of work to which they are put. For a development of this critique see Brown, "Slaves to History";
19. Roger Rouse, '"There Will Be No More There': Globalization, Privatization, and the Family Form in the U.S. Corporate Imaginary," manuscript, 1997;
20. and Anna Tsing, "The Global Situation," manuscript, 1999.
21. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 43.
22. I use Stuart Hall's concept of articulation, by which he means that connections are not given but appear only under particular conditions and must be constantly renewed ("Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 [1985]: 91-114). An articulation of different practices means not that they become identical but that they function together.
23. See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
24. Cultural debates over citizenship take place, however, in an atmosphere quite distinct from that of, for example, the United States. Lauren Berlant characterizes America's dominant, conservative mood as a coupling of suffering and citizenship that reflects a mass experience of economic insecurity, racial discord, and sexual unease (The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship [Durham: Duke University Press, 1997]). American men, it seems, find their way to power via stories of trauma. In China, by contrast, there is exhilaration rather than exhaustion over the possibility of forming new identities that can overcome old Maoist political ones - an excitement over making wealth, making love, and desiring to consume desire. Far from the nostalgic world in which "unmarked" straight white American men seek a utopian return to an imagined time when they represented the ideal U.S. citizen, China is a new world of desire for accumulation, entrepreneurship, and self-extension.
25. I suspect that homosexuality is exempt in part because its major fault line of difference lies not between itself and heterosexuality but between itself and homosociality. Unlike the homosociality that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has so perceptively excavated, homosociality in China is public, intimate, and the norm. Many men I have spoken with, both gay and unmarked as gay, feel that sex among men may be seen as a natural outgrowth of friendship among men, at least until they marry. Love between men is seen as normal.
26. Angela Zito, "Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries," in Body, Subject, and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 103-30.
27. Chou Wall Shan, "Tongzhi"/"Queer": Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in, Chinese Societies (New York: Haworth, forthcoming).
28. See Ann Anagnost, "A Surfeit of Bodies: Population and the Rationality of the State in Post-Mao China," in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 22-41.
29. As Fuss explains, "Identification is a process that keeps identity at a distance, that prevents identity from ever approximating the status of an ontological given, even as it makes possible the formation of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure, and totalizable" (Identification Papers [New York: Routledge, 1995], 2).
30. Donald Donham, "Freeing South Africa: The 'Modernization' of Male-Male Sexuality in Soweto," Cultural Anthropology 13 (1998): 19.
31. Levinas writes that "the temptation of total negation, measuring the infinity of this attempt and its impossibility - this is the presence of the face. To be in relation with the other . . . is to be unable to kill. It is also the situation of discourse" ("Is Ontology Fundamental?" [1951], in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], 9).