Panel 30: Other Feminisms: Transnational Queer-and-Trans Cultural Studies

Chair and Discussant: Tani Barlow, Rice University

Panelists

Jieming Zhu, University of Chicago, “Translating Family Abolition: Queering China’s Marxist-Feminist Encounters in the 1920s–30s”

Zehao Pan, University of Chicago, “Militant Neoliberal Feminism: The Rise of TERFism on Chinese Social Media”

Aling Zou, University of Alberta, “Queer Feelings as Archives: Lai Xiangyin’s Qihou (Thereafter)”

Youyuan Zhang, University of Chicago, “Queer Women, Chinese, International Students: Educational Mobility and Transnational Migration”

Chaired by Prof. Tani Barlow, one of the most prominent feminist scholars in China studies, this panel seeks to bring the problematics of queerness and transness into a critical dialogue with existing research on Chinese feminisms. Rather than reifying certain long-standing divisions in gender and sexuality studies – for instance, the feminist/queer divide, or the trans/feminist divide – our panel advances a critique of cis-heteronormative feminisms in order to open up a coalitional space for “other feminisms” – that is, “trans*feminism” (Halberstam, 2018) and “queer feminism” (McBean, 2020). Such “other feminisms” aspire to grapple with various hegemonic structures of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and cisnormativity simultaneously, as well as to identify the potential convergence of queer, feminist, and trans subversions against such systems.

Construed as such, queer/trans feminisms are not, and should not be, limited to the study of “queer women” and “transwomen” understood as identity groups, although the study of these identities (including their intersection with other axes of difference), as represented in our panel by Zhang and Zou’s papers on queer women writers and international students, is certainly its important component. As Pan and Zhu’s papers demonstrate, queer/trans feminisms can also be effectively deployed as a theoretical framework, a critical lens with which we might revisit and rewrite the past and present of feminist theorizing. This panel also incorporates a multi-faceted understanding of “transnational China” - “transnational” both as “travelling theory” (Barlow, 2004; Liu, 2015) in Zhu and Pan’s papers and as “Sinophone articulations” (Shih, 2007) in Zhang and Zou’s papers - attending to the movement of both bodies and discourse across borders.

Zehao Pan’s paper, “Militant Neoliberal Feminism: The Rise of TERFism on Chinese Social Media,” investigates the trans-exclusionary politics that an emergent group of self-proclaimed radical feminists - referred to in the paper as CRFs (Chinese Radical Feminists) or CRFism - on Chinese social media engages in. It argues that in an attempt to counter popular misogyny and oppressive traditional gender norms sustained by China’s growing market economy along with a state that aims to preserve it, CRFs ended up creating a militant neoliberal feminist movement that reinforces neoliberal capitalism and its individualist logic. Their prominence both exemplify structural transitions of China into neoliberalism, where precarity is exacerbated on an near universal level, and an attempt to counter mainstream misogyny by doubling down on neoliberal logics of abjection that often involves harshly criticizing women whom they see as rightfully deserving of discursive violence for collaborating with men, including married women and housewives. Pan’s paper contends that while CRFs share a number of similarities in their arguments against trans-inclusion with their TERF sisters worldwide - including a keen emphasis on the primacy of “biological sex,” an avid allegiance to the belief that categories such as “men” and “women” correspond to physical traits, moral panic over female erasure, and heightened alertness to male intrusion of “women’s spaces” - they are distinctive in grounding such claims in the natural superiority of females developed in their framework of “the first sex.”

Aling Zou’s paper, “Queer Feelings as Archives,” argues that the negative queer feelings portrayed in Lai Xiangyin’s 賴香吟 2012 novel Qihou 其後 (Thereafter) serve as an archive of the narrator’s memories of May, a main character in the novel who bears a close resemblance to Qiu Miaojin 邱妙津, one of the most significant lesbian novelists in Taiwan. The “thereafter” epoch in Lai’s writing symbolises the narrator’s acceptance of May’s passing and the evolution of Taiwanese queer narratives post-Qiu Miaojin. Inspired by Heather Love’s conceptualization, Zou’s paper reads the skepticism and alienation towards queer politics in Thereafter as backwardness, which Zou defines as a form of negativity in response to progressive local political transformation, especially the performative and exclusive aspects of such “progressivism”. Formally, the novel employs a non-linear narrative to engender multiple temporalities, challenging the violence of linear historical progression; affectively, instead of aligning with the superficial memory work of the state, Lai documents the intimacy between characters. This approach resists the compulsory heroic narrative as well as violent conjectures from the public. The paper specifically outlines three queer feelings of backwardness embodied by the text: loneliness, discomfort, and pain, suggesting that such backwardness also reflects Lai’s own marginal position as an intellectual and an associate passively involved in queer politics.

Youyuan Zhang’s paper, “Queer Women, Chinese, International Students: Educational Mobility and Transnational Migration,” studies Chinese queer women who emigrated to the United States for educational purposes. By focusing on the transnational movement of this marginal (but not necessarily marginalized per se) population, whether out of consideration of ethnicity, social status, geopolitics, or sexual identity, this paper aims to push the boundaries of academic research on transnational queer migration, as well as the conception of a diversified international queer culture. Zhang’s paper construes immigration and queerness broadly, emphasizing not only sexual or national identities, but also political resistance to the heteronormative societal structure and the limitations of the notion of state borders. Through ethnographic research, this paper sheds light on the following issues: What are the lived experiences of Chinese queer students as they navigate transnationality, queerness, community, and US education? How have the multiplicity and intersectionality of politicized identities shaped their diasporic experiences in the US?

While all the three papers sketched above deal with contemporary configurations of gender and sexuality, Zhu’s paper, “Translating Family Abolition: Queering China’s Marxist-Feminist Encounters in the 1920s-30s,” initiates a historical inquiry to seek inspirations for an alternative future. Echoing the provocative call for reviving family abolition as a queer-trans-Marxist-feminist political project and theoretical horizon in recent writings by Sophie Lewis, M. E. O’Brien, and other scholars, Zhu’s paper looks to the writings of the Soviet revolutionary feminist and family abolitionist, Alexandra Kollontai, especially the translation, circulation, and reception of her controversial short story “The Loves of Three Generations” in the radical intellectual scene in China during the late 1920s. The paper then stages a comparative reading between Kollontai’s short story and Ding Ling’s 1933 Novel, Mother, excavating an queer-feminist affinity between the two texts by paying attention especially to their portrayals of mother-daughter relations and heteronormative romantic love. Reading Ding Ling as an anti-heteronormative, “queer-feminist” thinker through the mirror of Kollontai, Zhu’s paper argues, necessarily challenges established theoretical frameworks for the study of modern Chinese women’s literature, either Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua’s psychoanalytic feminism or Yang Lianfen’s maternal/cultural feminism.

Put together, we hope these four papers and Prof. Barlow’s ensuing commentary might contribute to a queer/trans intervention into the fields of feminist theory, cultural politics, women’s literature, and transnational ethnography, in Chinese/Sinophone studies as elsewhere.