Polylocality in Queer Sinophone Cinema

Abstract

My essay maps Yingjin Zhang’s impact on film studies by tracing selective examples of polylocality in queer Sinophone cinema. In his original framework of polylocality, the concept refers to “the production of scale and translocality” in cinematic representations of space in globalization. This essay explores several modes of queer urbanism and polylocality across the Sinophone cities of Hong Kong, Taipei, and Kuala Lumpur. In Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 queer classic Happy Together, the local spaces of cruising, drifting, and boredom in Buenos Aires are linked to the postcolonial anxiety of Hong Kong mediated by Taipei as an alternative geopolitical entity. In Yau Ching’s 2002 film Let’s Love Hong Kong, the status of Hong Kong’s newly postcolonial regionalism is linked to its cosmopolitan mediation by various lesbian subjects from Mainland China, the local, and cyberspace. Finally, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2006 ecological and postmodern illumination on queer desire and migrant workers in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone offers a cinematic representation of queer polylocality in Kuala Lumpur. The film details scenes of interracial intimacies, vulnerability, and survival amid ecological destruction and pollution. Overall, my essay thinks with Zhang’s contribution to cinema studies and urban studies by queering the concept of polylocality through Sinophone articulations.

Notes

1 Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, 9.

2 Ibid., 74.

3 On queer Sinophone cinema and mobile intimacies, see Audrey Yue, “Mobile Intimacies in the Queer Sinophone Films of Cui Zi’en.” On queer minor transnationalism, see Alvin K. Wong, “Postcoloniality beyond China-Centrism.”

4 Chiang, “(De)Provincializing China,” 20.

5 For a concise definition of the Sinophone, see Shih, Visuality and Identity.

6 On queer diasporic readings of the film, see Song Hwee Lim, Celluloid Comrades, 99–125. On queer sound studies, see Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “New Queer Angles on Wong Kar-wai.”

7 Chow, “Nostalgia of the New Wave,” 32.

8 Ibid., 48.

9 On the concept of in-between-ness and “between colonizers,” see Chow, “Between Colonizers.” On Hong Kong and the theory of cultural disappearance, see Abbas, Hong Kong.

10 Rey Chow makes a similar argument by reading the early sex scene as “a moment of erotic passion, but it is also what we may call a moment of indifferentiation, a condition of perfect unity that was not only (perhaps) chronologically past but also seemingly before difference and separation.” See Chow, “Nostalgia of the New Wave,” 34.

11 Khoo, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” 110.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alvin K. Wong

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Director of Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. His research covers Hong Kong culture, Sinophone studies, queer theory, and transnational feminism. Wong is completing a book titled Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone. He has published in journals such as Gender, Place & Culture, Cultural Dynamics, Continuum, JCMS, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Interventions and in edited volumes such as Transgender China, Queer Sinophone Cultures, Fredric Jameson and Film Theory, Queer TV China, and Sinophone Utopias. He coedited Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies. Wong is also co-editor of the new book series, Entanglements (HKU Press).