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This book examines different forms and practices of queer media, that is, the films, websites, zines and film festivals produced by, for and about LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) people in China in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It traces how queer communities have emerged in urban China and the pivotal role that community media have played in the process. It also explores how these media shape community cultures and perform the role of social and political activism in a country where queer identities have only recently emerged and explicit forms of social activism are under serious political constraints. Importantly, because queer media is "niche" and "narrowcasting" rather than "broadcasting" and "mass communication", the subject compels a rethinking of some often-taken-for-granted assumptions about how media relates to the state, the market and individuals. Overall, the book reveals a great deal about queer communities and identities, queer activism and about media and social and political attitudes in China

Part I. Queer emergence -- Imagining modernity: the (re-)emergence of homosexuality -- Women 50 minutes: in search of queer women's spaces -- Part II. Queer becoming -- Beijing story: becoming gay in postsocialist China -- Pink affairs: narrating desire in a girls love fan fiction -- Part III. Queer urban space -- 'new Beijing, new marriage': performing same-sex wedding in central Beijing -- The forgotten critical realism: reification of desire in Mu Cao's poetry -- Part IV. Queer migration -- 'Shanghai is burning': becoming trans in a global city -- Life of a butterfly: subjectivation and autonomy in Xiyadie's papercutting art.

In an online research seminar titled 'Intimacies in Asia in a Time of Pandemics' (GCS Sydney 2020), Hans Tao-Ming Huang, a queer studies scholar from National Central University, Taiwan, compares the geopolitics in the current COVID-19 pandemic to a 'new Cold War'. This war is characterised by an intense political and ideological antagonism between communist China and the liberal, democratic world led by the United States. In this antagonism, national borders are redrawn; political and ideological affiliations are re-enforced. As was the case with the last Cold War, the political and ideological affiliation of queer-identified people are under constant scrutiny. Queer people from China are often forced to take a stance by making a choice between China and the rest of the world, and between a country where LGBTQ rights are not recognised and the part of the world where same-sex marriages have been legalised and gay people can be 'out and proud', and between illiberal neoliberalism and liberal neoliberalism. This is a choice easier for some than others. As a queer-identified person born in the People's Republic of China and currently living in the UK, I constantly feel the pressure to declare my own political and ideological allegiances. The 'new Cold War' accompanying the global pandemic has only exacerbated the pressure.

This article focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the newly emerged pan-Asian political identity following the recent transnational 'Stop Asian Hate' movement. Using the recent 'Stop Asian Hate' Birmingham rally as a case study, this article contends that the pan-Asian identity enacted in the 'Stop Asian Hate' movement has the potential to forge new forms of racial and ethnic solidarities.

This chapter examines the production and dissemination of musical cultures in gender and sexual minority communities for political and activist purposes in the Asia Pacific, using the Beijing Queer Chorus (BQC) as a case study. As the longest running lesbian and gay choir in China, the BQC engages in gender and sexual politics through the live performance and online streaming of music. This type of queer activism departs from a conventional emphasis on visibility, confrontation, and direct intervention into politics. Developing the analytical framework of 'queer audibility', this chapter interrogates the cultural specificity of queer activism in the Chinese context and argues for a soft type of activism through the production and dissemination of performing arts, culture, and media. It also considers the crucial role of the Internet and social media in broadcasting queer voices to LGBTQ communities and the public throughout China and the Chinese diaspora.

In this article, I offer a critical analysis of a video artwork titledLerne Deutsch in meiner Küche(Learn German in My Kitchen) (2020), created by Berlin-based queer filmmaker Popo Fan. By focusing on Fan's negotiation of racial, ethnic, and cultural identities in the video, I argue that Fan's artwork offers a way to reimagine identities away from the identity politics that are widely circulated in the current pandemic discourse. My analysis draws on José Esteban Muñoz's (1999) notion of 'disidentification,' which describes minority subjects' complex processes of identification—in particular, instances of identifying partially, conditionally and contingently—with dominant identities, discourses and ideologies. In doing so, I unravel the intricate politics of identity in the current global pandemic and highlight the role of queer disidentification as an important critical intervention in the current political debate about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1997 and its depathologisation in 2001, more and more mainstream and commercial films in China have started to cover Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bisexual and Queer (LGBTQ) issues. Meanwhile, with the growth of China's queer communities, an increasing number of independent films featuring LGBTQ issues have emerged. Despite the continuing existence of media censorship, films have contributed to, and participated in, how queer people construct their gender and sexual identities and build their communities.In this chapter, I trace a brief history of queer cinema in the People's Republic of China in the post-Mao era. In so doing, I suggest that queer films do not simply represent LGBTQ identities; they also construct non-heteronormative identities, belongings and communities. Queer filmmaking has become an important part of China's ongoing LGBTQ activism; it has also contributed to a changing landscape in gender, sexuality and desires in China today.

This chapter addresses the Euro-American-centrism in the study of radical film cultures by examining cinematic and political practices in a non-Western context. It shifts radical film research's traditional emphasis on class to an intersectional approach that recognises complex interplays between different identities, including gender, sexual, class and national identities. I suggest that sexuality has an important role to play in radical politics, and that queer film festivals are important sites for radical film cultures to develop. Indeed, while neoliberal capitalism and the nation state often exert a powerful influence on queer film cultures transnationally, not all queer film festivals are radical, broadly understood as democratic, egalitarian, anti-capitalist and anti-normativity in this context (Richards 2016, 2017). If many queer film festivals in the Global North are seen as middle-class-serving, lifestyle-oriented and consumption-driven and have thus lost their critical edge, queer film festivals in many parts of the Global South are still charged with creative energies and radical potentials exactly because of state illiberalism and neoliberal governance, as my study of the BJQFF hopes to demonstrate.In this chapter, I first trace a brief genealogy of the BJQFF with a focus on changing festival venues in order to see how the festival uses 'guerrilla tactics' to fight government intervention and contest neoliberal capitalism. Following this, I examine the various names that the festival has used, as well as the organising strategies of the festival, including organising principles, audience engagement and film dissemination. To conclude the chapter, I consider the political implications of the BJQFF in a transnational context by linking radical film culture to postsocialist cultural politics. I argue that radical film cultures represented by the BJQFF help us appreciate the value of some ideas and practices from socialist histories in the neoliberal, postsocialist present.

© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article examines the politics of narrating feminist and queer histories in contemporary China. Focusing on Zhao Jing and Shi Tou's 2015 film, We Are Here, a documentary made to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, I examine how the film represents queer women's history in China and in what discourses such a representation is situated. I contend that the processes of remembrance and forgetting are intertwined in narrating queer women's history in China. Indeed, while the film successfully recovers a hidden queer history, it also risks erasing the history of socialist and Marxist feminism, as well as China's socialist legacies at large. I suggest that we should think about Chinese feminist and queer movements in terms of continuities and ruptures by paying attention to their articulations to different transnational discourses at specific historical conjunctures. While We Are Here convincingly addresses the transnational influence from liberal feminism, it is also necessary to call attention to the legacies of socialist and Marxist feminism in China and transnationally in contemporary feminist and queer historiography and mediated memories.

© The Author(s) 2020. In this article, I examine grassroots cinematic connections between China and Africa by using Queer University, short for the Queer University Video Capacity Building Training Program, a 3-year (2017–2019) participatory video production program between Chinese and African queer filmmakers and activists, as a case study. Through interviews with Queer University organizers and participants, I discuss the transnational politics and decolonial potentials underpinning these grassroots initiatives. Drawing on Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih's critical term "minor transnationalism," I study transnational queer grassroots collaborations in the Global South, and, in doing so, unravel the hopes, promises, and precariousness of emerging people-to-people exchanges taking place in the Global South.

© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article focuses on the politics of representing HIV/AIDS in the 2011 documentary The Lucky One (宠儿), jointly made by Chinese filmmaker and queer activist He Xiaopei and Zhang Xi, a woman living with HIV/AIDS. The film was made using a participatory approach as Zhang took up the video camera to document her own life. By situating the film in the global development industry and focusing on the political economy of the filmmaking process, this article examines the complex power relations embedded in how people living with HIV/AIDS are represented on screen and in the context of the development industry. Informed by critical scholarship in and a queer approach to development studies, this article identifies strengths and weaknesses of the participatory approach, together with the role of media and communication technologies, in international development and health communication. This article hopes to present a nuanced understanding of empowerment and agency through studying the use of participatory videos in development projects.

This article traces the historical moment when queer theory first arrived in mainland China in the early 2000s by comparing and contrasting two translated texts in Chinese: Wang Fengzhen's book Guaiyi Lilun [Peculiar Theory] and Li Yinhe's book Ku'er Lilun [A Cool Kid Theory]. Juxtaposing the two translators' positioning and marketing strategies, along with their use of paratexts such as book cover design and translator's prefaces, this article aims to explain why Ku'er Lilun ended up being a more popular and widely circulated text than Guaiyi Lilun. It also pinpoints the cultural specificities of queer theory's reception in the postsocialist Chinese context at the beginning of the new millennium. This article hopes to provide critical insights into the politics of translating academic theories transnationally, with a focus on paratextual, extratextual, and contextual factors which work in tandem to shape the reception of these theories in a non-Western context.