Helen Hok-Sze Leung

Queerscapes in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema

If you were in Hong Kong during 1997, you might have noticed someone humming the above song. Stanley Kwan depicts this trivial fact of life several times in the filmHold You Tight [Yu huale yu duoluo] (1998), whose title refers to the futile yet intensely desired gesture in “Undercurrent.”This popular song was animated by an undercurrent of anxiety that pervaded Hong Kong since the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. The year 1997, when sovereignty over the territory was to be transferred from British toChinesehands, becamea cultural symbol of fear andapprehension.

Archiving queer feelings in Hong Kong

Abstract This article argues for the revitalization of a productive tension between ‘queer’ and ‘theory’ and underscores its necessity for a study of ‘local queer theory.’ While there is an apparent lack of academic queer theory in Hong Kong, there are numerous examples of writings that advance theoretical positions, albeit in unfamiliar guises. The article analyzes three examples of queer writings by Hong Kong authors, penned between 1984 and 2000. Focusing on the texts’ archival effect and affective expression, the analysis demonstrates that these writings form an archive of queer feelings. As a repository of the discomfort and anxiety that are constitutive of queer lives, these writings can offer fruitful interventions into current theoretical debates. The article concludes with a call for more creative and irreverent – in short, queerer – ways of localizing the global phenomenon of queer theory.

Trans on Screen

Autumn, 2001. While leafing through the catalogue of the Netherlands Transgender Film Festival, one of a handful of film festivals in the world with an explicit aim to “encourage visibility and positive representations of transgender issues,”1 I was surprised to find that Swordsmen 2, an old Hong Kong martial arts blockbuster starring Jet Li and Brigitte Lin, had made it into the program.2 The 1992 film was well known to me. The casting of actress Brigitte Lin as the indomitable Dongfang Bubai, a swordsman who practices a form of martial arts that requires self-castration, was considered to be a homophobic erasure of gay content in much of the burgeoning queer film criticism emerging in Hong Kong during the 1990s. The film’s inclusion in a transgender film festival almost 10 years after its release was certainly provocative. It prompted me to see that what seems problematic from gay/lesbian perspectives can have a significantly different meaning when viewed through a transgender lens.

Thoughts on Lesbian Genders in Contemporary Chinese Cultures

SUMMARY This article introduces readers to the debates on lesbian genders in Chinese cultures. Through an analysis of the dynamics of the tongzhimovement, as well as ethnographic and literary works not currently available in English translation, the article hopes to instigate dialogues between lesbian studies in diverse cultural contexts.

Notes towards the queer Asian city: Singapore and Hong Kong

The last decade has witnessed the emergence and consolidation of new and established gay cities in East and Southeast Asia, in particular, the sexualisation of the Singapore city-state, the commerce-led boom of queer Bangkok, the rise of middle-class gay consumer cultures in Manila and Hong Kong, and the proliferation of underground LGBT scenes in Shanghai and Beijing. In the West, scholarships on urban gay centres such as San Francisco, New York and London focus on the paradigms of ethnicity (Sinfield, 1996), gentrification (Bell and Binnie, 2004) and creativity (Florida, 2002). Mapping the rise of commercial gay neighbourhoods by combining the history of ghettos and its post-closet geography of community villages, these studies chart a teleological model of sexual minority rights, group recognition and homonormative mainstream assimilation. Instead of defaulting to these specifically North American and European paradigms and debates, this paper attempts to formulate a different theoretical framework to understand the rise of the queer Asian city. Providing case studies on Singapore and Hong Kong, and deploying an inter-disciplinary approach including critical creative industrial studies and cultural studies this paper examines the intersections across the practices of gay clusters, urban renewal and social movement. It asks: if queer Asian sexual cultures are characterised by disjunctive modernities, how do such modernities shape their spatial geographies and produce the material specificities of each city?

Introduction: Chinese cinemas as new media

Abstract This essay surveys current scholarly literature on the inter-relation between new media and Chinese cinemas, mapping out three major areas of study: special effects in martial arts cinema; new media cultures and their representation on film; the development of digital production and the emergence of various forms of micro-cinemas. It introduces readers to new works that approach recent films from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore as a form of new media, underscoring the inextricability between cinema and the new media that are transforming its fundamental parameters.

Unthinking: Chinese • Cinema • Criticism

Abstract The article examines various new critical developments in the study of Chinese cinemas and explores how unthinking existent, theoretical and institutional boundaries of Chinese cinema criticism may enable new frameworks and objects of study.

Our city of colours: queer/Asian publics in transpacific Vancouver

ABSTRACT This article examines the contested relation between discourses of ethnic subjectivity and queer critique of homophobia and transphobia in Vancouver, a transpacific city in Canada that is being touted as “the most Asian city outside of Asia.” I analyse the perceived association of Chinese communities with moral conservatism and the concomitant existence of a vibrant queer Asian cultural scene in the city as a discursive clash between two cultural publics. I examine the underlying dynamics of their antagonism as well as their potential for mutual engagement.