Queering the No-Name

This article examines how Leste Chen’s Upcoming Summer (2021) questions what I call the position of no-name in neoliberal China’s politico-cultural landscapes. No-name describes the interstice between a neoliberal subject’s representational necessity and impossibility: it names the liminal situations where queer subjects are incentivized to self-represent under neoliberal China’s cosmopolitan agenda, yet with those representational efforts foreclosed in various dimensions of public life. The no-name problematic requires queer self-articulation to denecessitate representational interventions. Drawing on the critical idiom of queer catachresis, I envision a continuous project that interrogates the historicity of no-name and formulates queer articulations beyond representational constraints. With narrative turns and genre deviations that convey queerness as spectatorial shock, Chen’s film illustrates how queer cinema contributes to this project through formal experiments with visual impossibility instead of minor, euphemistic representations of queer presence. Somewhat paradoxically, the film undercuts queer articulation with Western DJ/turntablism spectacles that sonic-visually represent a hypermodernized, cosmopolitan China, hence evoking the conception of queerness as a Western formulation. I see the film’s self-limiting gesture as a call for mobilizing politico-ideological limitations of no-name as alternative channels for pronouncing queerness. This is echoed by self-naming strategies in Chinese cyberspace (e.g. shenghuoxihua ) that catachrestically repurpose the queer-as-West misconception

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Impossibility · Political science · Sociology · European history and politics · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Philosophy