Imagining Queerness: Sexualities in Underground Films in the Contemporary P. R. China

• Main Author: Zhao, Jin
• Format: Others
• Published: Digital Archive @ GSU 2011
• Subjects: China; PRC; Queer; Tongzhi; Underground film; Globalization; Culture; Identity; Communication
• Online Access: http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/communication_theses/73; http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=communication_theses

In response to the globalizing queerness argument and the cultural specificity argument in queer cultural studies, this thesis examines the emerging modern queer identity and culture in the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC) in an intercultural context. Recognizing Chinese queer culture as an unstable, transforming and complex collection of congruent and/or contesting meanings, not only originated in China but also traveling across cultures, this thesis aims to exorcise the reified images of Chinese queers, or tongzhi, to contribute to the understanding of a dynamic construction of Chinese queerness at the turn of a new century, and to lend insight on the complicity of the elements at play in this construction by analyzing the underground films with queer content made in the PRC.