Aesthetics of queer becoming: Comrade Yue and Chinese community-based documentaries online

ABSTRACT

While many studies explore how digital technology influenced the production and consumption of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) media in the Euro-American context, few have focused on LGBT media in China despite its significant growth. Intersecting LGBT media studies with studies on Chinese communication technologies, this paper looks at videos made in community-based documentary workshops, including the Queer University (kuer daxue) Digital Filmmaking Training Camp. Many of the videos are articulations and reinventions of multiple selves enacted through the construction of image and sound. Against the backdrop of neoliberalized governance of selfhood, this new wave of community-based queer documentaries, exemplified by Comrade Yue (2013), embodies the “aesthetics of queer becoming.” Specifically, the expressive personal histories in these videos contest the “authentic” homosexual subjects that function as objects of knowledge in mainstream media. The bodily corporality on screen and the intimacy of the video apparatus operate as an interrogation of identity that intervenes in the ongoing discursive debate between the biological determinist and socially constructed views on homosexuality. Furthermore, video-making itself becomes an act of coming out through confessional or performative modes of sound–image relationships. Video is a vital medium to work through and within the process of identification and community formation. The medium of the video, with its capacity for dissemination online, functions as a unique format that gives rise to a new set of queer aesthetics and politics through first-person audio-visual constructions.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer; Chinese
• documentary
• neoliberalism
• selfhood

Notes

1 For more information about the Beijing Gender Health Education Institute, see http://bghei.org/

2 Film Censorship Regulations issued by the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television in 1997 prescribe that plots, language, or images specifically portraying sexual promiscuity, rape, prostitution, or homosexuality should be deleted or modified. The General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) issued the Provisional Regulations Concerning Appraising Obscene and Sexual Publications in 1988 as the administrative regulation that instructs the press and publication sector to identify pornographic and obscene publications. According to the provisional regulations, such publications include “salaciously and concretely describing homosexual acts or other perverted acts, or concretely describing violence, abuse, or humiliating acts related to perversion.”

3 For more, see http://www.aibai.com/advice_pages.php?linkwords=queer_theory.

4 See http://www.queercomrades.com/videos/queer-comrades-videos/queer-comrades-documentaries/%E5%90%8C%E5%BF%97/.

5 For example, Fan Popo's documentary about several mothers and their lesbian and gay children, Mama Rainbow (2012), which gathered more than 100,000 views on major video websites, was taken down by those video websites in 2014. For more, see https://theinitium.com/article/20150916-dailynews-fanpopo/.

6 For more information, see http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1760151175.

7 For more, see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/world/asia/chinese-womens-rights-activists-fall-afoul-of-officials.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1.

8 Alibaba's Taobao, China's largest online marketplace, is sponsoring ten gay and lesbian couples to travel to the US to get married through an event called “We Do.” For more, see http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/alibaba-we-do/.