In his new book, Petrus Liu draws from a varied ensemble of Chinese materials to establish a theoretical approach he calls “queer Marxism.” Liu's innovative project presents the historical fracture between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) as a site of creative tension from which he assembles a “queer Marxist archive” (p. 4). Over the course of five chapters, Liu engages with theoretical texts, cultural production, and social history from this archive in order to mount a critique of liberalism in queer studies. While recent efforts to bridge queer studies and Marxism have been largely based on readings of theory,Footnote 1 Liu's approach establishes an innovative set of dialogues between cultural production, social activism, and queer theory that serve as fertile ground for a sustained critique of liberal politics. Given Liu's eclectic selection of sources and provocative theoretical ambitions, scholarly interest in this work will go far beyond the field of modern Chinese studies; readers drawn to Marxism, queer studies, literature, and cinema will all find much to ponder in these pages.
What is “queer Marxism”? The first chapter begins by presenting it as a “methodology” born out of the 1949 break between the ROC and PRC (pp. 7–8). Geopolitics thus becomes the catalyst for Liu to reframe Chinese queer theory “as a globally capacious tradition that prefigures and encompasses its Euro-American variant” (p. 22). Revisiting foundational interventions in queer theory by Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, Liu argues that these works follow Foucault's History of Sexuality in instrumentalizing China and the non-West as an “Other” in order to delimit their own concepts of “western culture” (pp. 25–28). Liu rejects the identitarian politics produced by such critical gestures, advancing instead queer Marxism as “an analysis of geopolitically reproduced relations of power.” Queer Marxism eschews calls for social acceptance in order to ask “what kinds of historical processes empower individuals of certain sexualities to decide who should be tolerated and accepted in the first place” (p. 31).
In chapter 2, Liu offers a critical introduction to the debates over queer theory in the PRC and ROC, treating the efforts to translate its conceptual lexicon with thoroughness and lucidity. Liu then moves on to several case studies, beginning with the provocative PRC filmmaker, essayist, and novelist Cui Zi'en. In contrast to chapters 3 and 4, where Liu's interpretation of novels focuses almost exclusively on their narrative content, this section attends to the material conditions under which Cui's films were produced. Liu's comprehensive theorization of Cui's process of creative labor, which is then used to inform his reading of Cui's films, makes this one of the most compelling articulations of queer Marxist practice found in this study. The second chapter also examines the queer Marxist perspectives of Josephine Ho as well as members of the Gender/Sexuality Rights Association, Taiwan (G/SRAT). Liu's reading of Ho's affirmative sexuality as a critique of state feminism (p. 67) and his study of G/SRAT's advocacy make a valuable contribution to our understanding of Taiwan's recent history of progressive politics, building on works like Hans Tao-Ming Huang's Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011).
The remainder of Queer Marxism in Two Chinas is focused almost exclusively on material from the ROC, with chapters 3 and 4 featuring literary interpretations. Chapter 3 takes up novels by Pai Hsien-yung and Chen Ruoxi to argue that the earliest major pieces of queer literature published in Taiwan were born from “engagements with Chinese Marxism,” rejecting characterizations of Chinese queer literature as a derivative Western import (p. 86). After briefly charting out the historical context for these authors' encounters with Marxist thought, the chapter moves on to an examination of migrant labor and sexual difference in Chen Ruoxi's 1986 novel Zhihun (Paper marriage). Liu expands the boundaries of his queer Marxist critique in chapter 4, tackling Xiao Sa's refashioning of the “Chinese tradition of feminine literature” in her 1980 novel Rumengling (Song of dreams) (p. 115). In a departure from previous interpretations of Xiao as a representative feminist author, Liu proposes a queer reading that persuasively combines Marxist criticism with the language of psychoanalysis in order to map out the novel's “genealogy of heterosexual desire” (p. 121).
The fifth and final chapter offers the most salient demonstration of Liu's theoretical ambitions. Beginning with a wide-ranging analysis of critical perspectives on the human as presented in Marx, Liu emphasizes how thinkers have deployed this concept to different ends “mediated by complex geopolitical relations and interests” (p. 154). Turning to discourses on the “human” in the ROC, Liu then catalogues a shocking series of state-sanctioned acts of violence inflicted on those who have not met “the state's definition of human” (p. 158). Taking his own activist intervention as an example, he argues for the role that geopolitics plays in structuring the logic of institutionalized discrimination against Taiwan's queer communities (pp. 141–42). Queer Marxism in Two Chinas then draws to a close by proposing a queer “theory of the human that bridges the gap between the infinitely varied genders and sexualities in human cultures and our shared rights, responsibilities, and futures” (p. 168).
As readers may surmise, the bulk of cultural and social analysis in this monograph comes from the ROC, just one of the two titular “Chinas.” PRC-based material is only treated in portions of the second chapter. How could we push Liu's concept of queer Marxism further by engaging with the long, complex history of Marxist theory and practice in the second of these “two Chinas”? While Liu's book leaves this as an open question, it is a testament to his far-reaching project that we now have the grounds to pose it.
