Queering the quality of desire: Perverse use-values in transnational Chinese cultures

ABSTRACT

This essay presents a queer Sinophone rethinking of Marx’s concept of value. Specifically, a queer theory informed by materialist critique can account for how certain bodies are rendered normative and valuable and others as devalued within neoliberal globalisation in contemporary China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. 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.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2015 MLA Convention, the UIC Faculty Colloquium at Yonsei University in 2015, and the 2015 Association for Asian Studies-in-Asia Conference in Taipei. I benefited tremendously from questions and comments from the audiences. I thank the journal’s two anonymous readers for their valuable feedback. I am indebted to Howard Chiang for intellectual camaraderie and for our collaborative work on queer regionalism and queer Asian studies. Any shortcomings remain entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Alvin K. Wong is assistant professor of Chinese literature and film at Underwood International College of Yonsei University in South Korea. His research interests include Chinese literary and cultural studies, transnationalism, Sinophone studies and queer theory. He has published articles in Journal of Lesbian Studies; Gender, Place and Culture; Concentric and in edited volumes like Transgender China (Palgrave, 2012), Queer Sinophone Cultures (Routledge, 2014), and Filming the Everyday (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

Notes

1 In reviewing the sociological literature on money boys in urban Chinese cities, it is not uncommon to observe comments by research studies’ informants who accuse money boys of being ‘impure’ gay men because they are only having sex with men for the money, namely they are only ‘gay for pay’ and are ‘normally’ heterosexual otherwise. This devaluation of the money boy figure, however, betrays a certain sexual essentialism among urban Chinese gay male clients (See Chapman et al. 2009: 699).

2 For recent scientific journalism on homosexuality as genetically determined, see Stallard (2014).

3 The origin of the local slang fei qing is often attributed to a statement given by an interviewee in a 2005 TV documentary of a Hong Kong young man who refuses to work, stays home, and feels that he is of ‘zero value to society’. However, the term has gradually transformed into a politicised language, deployed by a growing segment of middle-class Hong Kong people to refer to politically active post-1980s-born youth.

4 This image is taken from Huang (2012).