In Queer Memory

Mediating Queer Chinese History in Digital Video Documentaries

Bibliographic Data

ID21781573
AuthorsH Bao (0000-0002-1905-7926, University of Nottingham, corresponding author)
Year2023
Issue29
Pages94-114
Publication date2023-06-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePanoptikum (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1730-7775
PublisherUniwersytet Gdanski (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.26881/pan.2023.29.06
OpenAlexW4382987828
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited11

This article examines the digital and cinematic mediation of queer memory in four independent Chinese documentaries: Queer China, “Comrade” China (dir. Cui Zi’en 2008), Our Story (dir. Yang Yang, 2011), We Are Here (dir. Shi Tou and Jing Zhao, 2016) and Shanghai Queer (dir. Chen Xiangqi, 2019). All these films have been made by queer identified filmmakers and have used the digital video documentary format as an activist strategy; all have strived to record China’s queer history in the post-Mao era. However, because of the filmmakers’ gender and sexual subjectivities, together with the historical and social contexts in which these films were made, the four documentaries remember China’s queer history in different ways. Together, these documentaries contest a heteronormative and a homonormative narrative of Chinese history by constructing alternative memories; they also insert queer people’s voices and experiences into that history. All these mediations testify to the heterogeneity of queer people’s experience, as well as the overdetermination of queer memory as a result of a contingent assemblage of factors such as time, place, technology and filmmaker’s gender and sexual subjectivities

Aesthetics · Art · China · Literature · Narrative · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Visual arts · Asian Culture and Media Studies · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · History

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