Papers by Alvin K. Wong
Journal of Chinese Cinemas , 2023
What would it mean to unsettle the notion of Chineseness from the vantage point of Sinophone Hong... more What would it mean to unsettle the notion of Chineseness from the vantage point of Sinophone Hong Kong cinema? This article examines Fruit Chan's three films on the figure of the sex worker in his 'prostitute trilogy' , namely Durian Durian (2000), Hollywood Hong Kong (2001), and Three Husbands (2018). While Durian Durian portrays the friendship between Yan the sex worker and Fan the illegal immigrant girl in Hong Kong, the portrayal of Yan's more peaceful life back home in Northeast China also subverts the stereotypical idea that Hong Kong is a more desirable city of social mobility for young Chinese women. Hollywood Hong Kong further queers the border of the PRC and Hong Kong through the global border-crossing travels of Hung Hung the sex worker. Finally, Three Husbands most daringly symbolizes the geopolitical tension within Hong Kong by showing how the female protagonist Ah Mui negotiates the power dynamic between her first, second, and third husbands, thus subtly queering the triangular relationality across British colonial legacy, Chinese nationalism, and Hong Kong Sinophone localism. Overall, Chan's cinematic aesthetic implicates the limit of what can be shown and challenges the shifting boundary of Chinese cinema through the Sinophone analytic of queering borders.
Sexualities, Transnationalism, and Globalisation, 2021
My chapter demonstrates that studying queer Hong Kong requires an alternative framework of ‘queer... more My chapter demonstrates that studying queer Hong Kong requires an alternative framework of ‘queer globalities.’ Conceptually, queer globalities illustrates the convergent dynamics of global queer rights discourses, local geopolitics, and pink dollar industries within the global modernities of queer Asia. The first part of this chapter offers a queer transnational analysis of the transgender film Tracey (2018) by mapping the condition of being transgender through multiple queer temporalities and transnational spaces. The next section offers a critical legal analysis of LGBT rights. Overall, I point to the uneven queer globalities of Hong Kong beyond the limit of Eurocentric queer liberalism.
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2017
The study of queer Asia is a flourishing field with an increasingly interdisciplinary
orientatio... more The study of queer Asia is a flourishing field with an increasingly interdisciplinary
orientation. With only a few notable exceptions, most of the literature to date is confined
to national or regional contexts. This special issue adds more nuanced texture to existing
research by highlighting the inter-connectivity across different subregions of Asia. A key
objective of our intervention is to enable specialists of East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia to no longer construe the West as the only alibi for serious discussion about sexual globalisation or the ultimate neoliberal model of juxtaposition. Rather, we hope to make more transparent the modular comparability of the different regional expertise brought together here. Our project incorporates the agenda of using ‘Asia as method’, as proposed by Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) and others, by asking interlocutors in the growing field of queer Asian studies to rethink the vectors of linkage across various longstanding ‘minor’ regions in area studies (e.g. Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, etc.) whose significance are made poignant via such transnational affinity, rather than always being mediated through a centre, be it China, Japan or the West. We redress the value of queer theoretical perspectives for contesting the hegemonic preferences of traditional academic disciplines, mapping the biopolitics of gender and sexuality onto the geopolitics of world systems.
Continuum
The past decade has seen a surge in the scholarship of queer China and Sinophone studies, which h... more The past decade has seen a surge in the scholarship of queer China and Sinophone studies, which has productively explored the geocultural travelling and transformation of Western-originated queer theories and identity politics as powerful, generative tools in both the social-political and scholarly dimensions of diverse Chinese-speaking contexts. Along this line, this article, as the introductory piece to the special issue ‘Making a queer turn in contemporary Chinese-language media studies’, proposes a radical queer theorization, reading and critique of today’s Chinese-language film, television, pop music and related celebrity and fan cultures. We connect queer China and Sinophone studies with (the too-often Western-centric) queer media studies to question the assumed absence or minoritarian position of queer media productions and fantasies in the Chinese and Sinophone worlds. Through unravelling various roots and routes in which visual-aural media forms, formats and imaginaries form discursive intervention into, if not close association with, the hetero-patriarchally structured societies and media industries, we show the research possibilities and directionalities opened up by recognizing the co-presence of and continual negotiation between queer and normative fantasies surrounding gender, sexuality, nationhood, ethnicity and class in Chinese-language media production, circulation and consumption.
Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies , 2020
Introduce key debates in queer studies and Sinophone studies and propose an interdisciplinary fra... more Introduce key debates in queer studies and Sinophone studies and propose an interdisciplinary framework for inaugurating the field of queer Sinophone studies.
Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies , 2020
During the 1990s, Hong Kong entered into the debate in postcolonial theory largely due to its imp... more During the 1990s, Hong Kong entered into the debate in postcolonial theory largely due to its impending handover to the People's Republic of China (PRC) on July 1, 1997. Cultural critics and theorists who wrote about Hong Kong at that time often employ concepts and idioms such as "disappearance," "hybridity," and "in-between-ness." They also point to Hong Kong's condition of being caught between two colonizers, namely the former colonizer (Britain) and its future cultural colonizer (PRC). These intellectual discussions about Hong Kong and the ensuing cultural fever have produced an impressive body of scholarship by Rey Chow, Ackbar Abbas, Leung Ping-kwan (Yasi), Law Wing-sang, and others. They reveal the anomalous status of Hong Kong being "returned" to China but without a future of decolonization, both spatially and temporally. However, the theoretical grammar of postcoloniality in Hong Kong often re-inscribes the city within the triangular deadlock of China-Britain-global capitalism. What would it mean to theorize Hong Kong without the baggage of both British colonial nostalgia and China-centrism? To chart a new direction in this debate, I map postco-loniality through the visuality of South-South, minor-to-minor, and transnational articulations of queer desire in the films of Wong Kar-wai and Scud. In queer films such as Happy Together (1997), Permanent Residence (2009), and Amphetamine (2010), Hong Kong becomes intimately linked to the histories of sexual exploitation, sex tourism, queer diasporas, and the settler colonialism of Argentina, Taiwan, Israel, Thailand, and Australia. Through the visuality of queer Sinophone transnationalism, Hong Kong cinema remaps postcoloniality through the roots and routes of queer global intimacies and geographies.
Continuum, 2020
This article expands the existing research on the boys’ love (BL)
cultural phenomenon by analysin... more This article expands the existing research on the boys’ love (BL)
cultural phenomenon by analysing two popular BL films, A Round
Trip to Love and Uncontrolled Love, and one TV series, Addicted, all
streamed online in 2016. Previous research has explored the various
aspects of BL such as cultural globalization from below, the online
publishing industry and censorship, and the theme of incest and
queer sexuality. This article turns a greater attention to the dialectical
relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism by
unpacking further the affective work that BL performs in contemporary
China. BL is both structurally constrained by the economic infrastructure
of heteronormative kinship norms in neoliberal China and
residual forms of socialism, as well as offering alternative modality of
affective tendency that exceeds these structural impediments.
Conceptually, this research explicates three forms of affective work
in BL in contemporary China, namely affective imprisonment, queer
affective reparation and affective overcoming, in order to illuminate
the relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism in
contemporary China.
Cultural Dynamics , 2020
This essay explores the queer literary modernism of Hong Kong and Singapore since the 1990s to ma... more This essay explores the queer literary modernism of Hong Kong and Singapore since the 1990s to make several interventions. While the two cities have been studied as exemplars of postcolonial state formation in which finance capitalism contributes to the rise of modernity, their queer modernism in the literary and cultural spheres has largely escaped comparative studies. To address this blind spot, I examine two literary texts of gay male urbanism, namely Bryan Yip's 2003 Hong Kong queer novel, Suddenly Single and Johann S. Lee's 1992 coming-of-age queer Singaporean novel, Peculiar Chris, as cases of "queer vernacularism." Specifically, Yip and Lee's queer vernacular modernism-especially their references to Hong Kong and Singaporean popular culture, urban space, and soundscapes of modernity-altogether exceeds the familiar boundary of queer transnationalism and actualizes other modes of minor transnational desire. This essay concludes with a brief analysis of Yonfan's 1995 Hong Kong film Bugis Street, which visualizes the bygone past of Singapore's 1950-1970s sexual utopia and transgender imaginary.
Sinophone studies, in Shu-mei Shih’s original formulation, refers to “a
network of places of cult... more Sinophone studies, in Shu-mei Shih’s original formulation, refers to “a
network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness”. This essay contributes to the debate on how to “include China” in the ever-productive task to decentre the hegemonic aspects of Chineseness. In particular, recent Hong Kong literature and popular culture invoke a temporal critique that one can term “nearly historical”. The concept of “nearly historical” describes the recent speculative cultural texts produced in Hong Kong, which are saturated with dystopian visions that indicate how Hong Kong is temporally and spatially threatened with political marginalization, censorship, neoliberal class segmentation, and even hopelessness. On the other hand, near-histories, by imagining how close we are to the dark ending, may also activate insurgent senses of hope, anger, and even activism.
Culture, Theory and Critique , 2017
This essay presents a queer Sinophone rethinking of Marx’s concept
of value. I coin the term ‘per... more This essay presents a queer Sinophone rethinking of Marx’s concept
of value. I coin the term ‘perverse use-value’ to name the reification of queer bodies as risky, socially non-reproductive, and hence perverse; alternatively, a critical reckoning of how queer bodies assume perverse
meanings can point to the ways queer subjects and cultural producers boldly occupy the negativity of perversion. Examining Cui Zi’en’s 2003 film Money Boy Diaries based in Beijing, Simon Chung’s 2009 Hong Kong film End of Love and the queer Taiwan poet Chen Kehua’s 2006 collection of poems called A Kind Man, this essay demonstrates the queer potentiality to remake lifeworlds within and against the developmental logics of neoliberalism and homonormative sexual respectability.
This paper argues for the centrality of gender, sexuality, and geopolitics to ecocritical studies... more This paper argues for the centrality of gender, sexuality, and geopolitics to ecocritical studies of the Anthropocene. In particular, the genre of documentary filmmaking provides one crucial site for exploring how cultural representations of the city of Beijing and environmental pollutions often recenter human-centric narratives of planetary rescue through what I term "Anthropocentric futurism." Anthropocentric futurism as a critical terminology names a double bind—while increasing numbers of cultural productions like literature, cinema, and the popular media explore human subjects as both the agents and passive "victims" under the Anthropocene, often such an ecological awareness automatically gives rise to a passionate human-centric discourse of planetary rescue. Specifically, I examine the widely popular 2015 documentary about air pollution, Under the Dome, directed by Chai Jing, as one that reproduces Anthropocentric futurism through the logic of maternal rescue, whereas Jiuliang Wang's Beijing Besieged by Waste (2011) radically departs from such reproductive futurism by visualizing the violent coevalness between the human subjects, non-human animals, inanimate objects, and the environment as such. Thinking beyond Anthropocentric futurism suggests new possibilities for theorizing the relationship between China and the Anthropocene through the lens of affect theory, animal studies, and posthumanism.
A paper that examines how gendering works at the intersubjective level that involves the power dy... more A paper that examines how gendering works at the intersubjective level that involves the power dynamics across the filmmaker, the filmed subjects, and audience reception in Chinese documentary films. It discusses Xu Tong's Wheat Harvest (2008) and Hu Xinyu's The Man (2002) as key texts in these debates.
This article explores Hong Kong writer Wong Bik-wan's 2012 novel Children of Darkness (烈佬傳) in re... more This article explores Hong Kong writer Wong Bik-wan's 2012 novel Children of Darkness (烈佬傳) in relational comparison to her 1999 feminist classic, Portraits of Martyred Women (烈女圖). Specifically, I argue that three crucial aspects constitute the “cartographies of Hong Kong” in both novels. First, as reflected clearly in the titles of both novels, Wong displays a writerly sympathy towards Hong Kong subjects who are lie (烈). Through her astute appropriations of lie away from traditional Confucian meaning of modesty, piety, and female sacrifice towards one of toughness, courage, and feminist (or even masculine) rage, Wong illustrates the importance of toughness as both a personal and political means of resilience. In addition to the emphasis on toughness and street-smartness as mode of social survival, the politics of toughness also draws a parallel intersectionality with Wong’s textual complexity about gender. Here, her unsung heroic women from three generations of Hong Kong history and her dark delinquents turned gang members corporeally embody what one may term “the horizontal politics of gender solidarity.” Lastly, Wong’s historical materialism turns to the “children of darkness,” whose voices visualize Hong Kong time, place, and historiography within the crux of social differences.
Gender, Place & Culture, 2016
In recent years, queer studies has increasingly interrogated the racial and colonial unconscious ... more In recent years, queer studies has increasingly interrogated the racial and colonial unconscious embedded in the earlier studies of non-normative genders and sexualities through the critical frameworks of queer of color critique and queer diaspora studies. This article aims to ‘queer the transnational turn’ by considering what critical edge ‘regionalism’ might bring to the investigation of queer modernities in Asia from both contemporary and historical vantage points. The introductory section of the article provides a broad overview of the ‘transnational turn’ in queer studies, what we diagnose as the ‘area unconscious’ of queer studies in its exclusive critique of Western colonial modernity, and the related binary of cultural particularism versus Eurocentric universalism. Alternatively, we argue that the concept of regionalism can be productively mobilized in order to study the various scales of queer sexualities that traffic within and circulate across Southeast Asia, Australia, imperial China, and contemporary Sinophone cultures (Sinitic-language communities on the margins of or outside mainland China). Through a paired reading of Johann S. Lee’s Singaporean queer novel, Peculiar Chris (1992), and Su Chao-Bin and John Woo’s Sinophone martial art film, the Reign of Assassins (2010), our inquiry accounts for how the spatial–temporal telos of global queering get materially translated across multiple regional hubs of sexual differences. Queer regionalism in Singapore, China, and the Sinophone worlds encompasses relational dynamics, power differentials, and subnational and supranational linkages. Finally, queering regionalism can open up new analytical frameworks for the study of sexualities and corporealities across transcolonial relations and wider temporal and spatial connections.
Queer Sinophone Cultures, ed. Ari Larissa Heinrich and Howard Chiang (Routledge) , Nov 2013
Journal of Lesbian Studies , Jun 15, 2012
Transgender China, ed. Howard Chiang , Dec 24, 2012
Book Reviews by Alvin K. Wong
Book review of Queer/Tongzhi China
For the actual book review, see web link:
http://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/alvin-wong/
This is a book review of Petrus Liu's book, Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke U Press, 2015)
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Papers by Alvin K. Wong
orientation. With only a few notable exceptions, most of the literature to date is confined
to national or regional contexts. This special issue adds more nuanced texture to existing
research by highlighting the inter-connectivity across different subregions of Asia. A key
objective of our intervention is to enable specialists of East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia to no longer construe the West as the only alibi for serious discussion about sexual globalisation or the ultimate neoliberal model of juxtaposition. Rather, we hope to make more transparent the modular comparability of the different regional expertise brought together here. Our project incorporates the agenda of using ‘Asia as method’, as proposed by Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) and others, by asking interlocutors in the growing field of queer Asian studies to rethink the vectors of linkage across various longstanding ‘minor’ regions in area studies (e.g. Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, etc.) whose significance are made poignant via such transnational affinity, rather than always being mediated through a centre, be it China, Japan or the West. We redress the value of queer theoretical perspectives for contesting the hegemonic preferences of traditional academic disciplines, mapping the biopolitics of gender and sexuality onto the geopolitics of world systems.
cultural phenomenon by analysing two popular BL films, A Round
Trip to Love and Uncontrolled Love, and one TV series, Addicted, all
streamed online in 2016. Previous research has explored the various
aspects of BL such as cultural globalization from below, the online
publishing industry and censorship, and the theme of incest and
queer sexuality. This article turns a greater attention to the dialectical
relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism by
unpacking further the affective work that BL performs in contemporary
China. BL is both structurally constrained by the economic infrastructure
of heteronormative kinship norms in neoliberal China and
residual forms of socialism, as well as offering alternative modality of
affective tendency that exceeds these structural impediments.
Conceptually, this research explicates three forms of affective work
in BL in contemporary China, namely affective imprisonment, queer
affective reparation and affective overcoming, in order to illuminate
the relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism in
contemporary China.
network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness”. This essay contributes to the debate on how to “include China” in the ever-productive task to decentre the hegemonic aspects of Chineseness. In particular, recent Hong Kong literature and popular culture invoke a temporal critique that one can term “nearly historical”. The concept of “nearly historical” describes the recent speculative cultural texts produced in Hong Kong, which are saturated with dystopian visions that indicate how Hong Kong is temporally and spatially threatened with political marginalization, censorship, neoliberal class segmentation, and even hopelessness. On the other hand, near-histories, by imagining how close we are to the dark ending, may also activate insurgent senses of hope, anger, and even activism.
of value. I coin the term ‘perverse use-value’ to name the reification of queer bodies as risky, socially non-reproductive, and hence perverse; alternatively, a critical reckoning of how queer bodies assume perverse
meanings can point to the ways queer subjects and cultural producers boldly occupy the negativity of perversion. Examining Cui Zi’en’s 2003 film Money Boy Diaries based in Beijing, Simon Chung’s 2009 Hong Kong film End of Love and the queer Taiwan poet Chen Kehua’s 2006 collection of poems called A Kind Man, this essay demonstrates the queer potentiality to remake lifeworlds within and against the developmental logics of neoliberalism and homonormative sexual respectability.
Book Reviews by Alvin K. Wong
orientation. With only a few notable exceptions, most of the literature to date is confined
to national or regional contexts. This special issue adds more nuanced texture to existing
research by highlighting the inter-connectivity across different subregions of Asia. A key
objective of our intervention is to enable specialists of East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia to no longer construe the West as the only alibi for serious discussion about sexual globalisation or the ultimate neoliberal model of juxtaposition. Rather, we hope to make more transparent the modular comparability of the different regional expertise brought together here. Our project incorporates the agenda of using ‘Asia as method’, as proposed by Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) and others, by asking interlocutors in the growing field of queer Asian studies to rethink the vectors of linkage across various longstanding ‘minor’ regions in area studies (e.g. Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, etc.) whose significance are made poignant via such transnational affinity, rather than always being mediated through a centre, be it China, Japan or the West. We redress the value of queer theoretical perspectives for contesting the hegemonic preferences of traditional academic disciplines, mapping the biopolitics of gender and sexuality onto the geopolitics of world systems.
cultural phenomenon by analysing two popular BL films, A Round
Trip to Love and Uncontrolled Love, and one TV series, Addicted, all
streamed online in 2016. Previous research has explored the various
aspects of BL such as cultural globalization from below, the online
publishing industry and censorship, and the theme of incest and
queer sexuality. This article turns a greater attention to the dialectical
relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism by
unpacking further the affective work that BL performs in contemporary
China. BL is both structurally constrained by the economic infrastructure
of heteronormative kinship norms in neoliberal China and
residual forms of socialism, as well as offering alternative modality of
affective tendency that exceeds these structural impediments.
Conceptually, this research explicates three forms of affective work
in BL in contemporary China, namely affective imprisonment, queer
affective reparation and affective overcoming, in order to illuminate
the relationship between affect, queer desire and neoliberalism in
contemporary China.
network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness”. This essay contributes to the debate on how to “include China” in the ever-productive task to decentre the hegemonic aspects of Chineseness. In particular, recent Hong Kong literature and popular culture invoke a temporal critique that one can term “nearly historical”. The concept of “nearly historical” describes the recent speculative cultural texts produced in Hong Kong, which are saturated with dystopian visions that indicate how Hong Kong is temporally and spatially threatened with political marginalization, censorship, neoliberal class segmentation, and even hopelessness. On the other hand, near-histories, by imagining how close we are to the dark ending, may also activate insurgent senses of hope, anger, and even activism.
of value. I coin the term ‘perverse use-value’ to name the reification of queer bodies as risky, socially non-reproductive, and hence perverse; alternatively, a critical reckoning of how queer bodies assume perverse
meanings can point to the ways queer subjects and cultural producers boldly occupy the negativity of perversion. Examining Cui Zi’en’s 2003 film Money Boy Diaries based in Beijing, Simon Chung’s 2009 Hong Kong film End of Love and the queer Taiwan poet Chen Kehua’s 2006 collection of poems called A Kind Man, this essay demonstrates the queer potentiality to remake lifeworlds within and against the developmental logics of neoliberalism and homonormative sexual respectability.