Queer Chimerica: Speculation and the Futur(h)istory of Homopostsocialism

Abstract:

What's the relationship between the discourse of queer fluidity and the rise of China since the 1990s? In what ways are queer history and futurity shaped by shifts in global postsocialist conditions? What stories are amplified or sidelined through the performativity and theatricality of queer politics? And what does it mean to write queerness as critical fabulations?

Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic arts, and science fiction, Shana Ye's Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography (2024) unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United States.

In this talk, the author will share stories about queer party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism and HIV/AIDS community outreach after the Tiananmen upheaval, feminist artists and digital activists under Xi Jingping's China, and fictional figures of future empire "Chimerica" to show the messiness of queer memory and world-making.

The talk will offer insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, and the geo- and bio-politics of identity, unveiling the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency.

About the speaker:

Shana Ye is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research areas include transnational feminism, queer theory, post/socialist studies, affect studies, and Sinophone science and technology studies. Currently, she is writing about virtual reality, immersive technology and the materiality of memory.

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