Queer Screen Cultures in Chinese Societies: Stretched Kinship, Sinophone Mobilities, and Social Classes

Abstract

This thesis examines recent (post-2008) queer media and screen cultures in global Chinese societies, with China as the intersectional focal point, through focused ethnography in urban queer film clubs and queer communities in China, analysis of autobiographical queer films and videos produced in various Chinese societies, and digital ethnographic study of China-based online and mobile queer social media. I develop my argument along the line of queer mobilities—the motions (geographical movements) and emotions (psychological readjustments) across the queer/non-queer and the local/non-local borders in domestic and transnational queer migrations. I examine queer mobilities from three perspectives: distanced kinship (a result of domestic and transnational queer mobilities), global migrations and cultural flows (the manifestations of queer mobilities), and the desire for upward social mobility and class migration (the underlying driving force of queer mobilities). First, I examine the changing queer kinship structures by analysing autobiographical queer films, digital video series, and urban queer film clubs. I argue that today’s queer kinship has often been stretched by physical distance between queer people and their families, and also by the rupture between one’s sexuality and the hetero-reproductive expectations from the aging parents. Second, I examine queer migrations and cultural flows by investigating recent queer films, transnational digital filmmaking, and urban film clubs established by queer migrants. I argue for queering and destabilising current mobility scholarship and Sinophone scholarship to better address the increasingly frequent and fluid queer migrations and cultural flows in the twenty-first century. Third, I examine social stratification within queer communities by researching online and mobile queer social media, digital video series produced by social media companies, and urban queer film clubs. I argue that it is the underlying desire for upward social mobility that drives people to embark on migration journeys and pursue better education and employment, which results in the distanced queer kinship structure and the social exclusion in today’s urban queer communities in China. This research significantly pushes forward the boundaries of current scholarship, not only by examining recent queer films and emerging forms of new queer screen cultures, but also by developing and theorising multiple new paradigms that both extend and deviate from previous understandings of kinships, migrations, and social exclusions in and beyond queer studies, screen studies, and Asian cultural studies.