Queer positions, Queering Asian Studies

Lisa Rofel

The breakthrough of positions into Asian studies marked a critical turn-

ing point in multiple fields. This turning point was not self-evident at the
time; the positions collective created it. All that younger scholars take for
granted today — the importance of positioning one’s politics of knowledge,
the ability of queer scholars to place sexuality as well as gender at the heart
of central theoretical questions about the geopolitics of power and inequal-
ity, the postcolonial challenges to area studies, the poststructuralist attention
to unstable, heterogeneous modes of power and subjectivity — was made
possible by positions. If this work is accepted in other publications today,
it is because of the willingness of the positions collective to make the glim-
mers of that engaged scholarship into a visible mode of political/scholarly
debate. The journal has been dedicated to the transgression of those well-
established boundaries that lead us to accept as commonsense truths of rela-

positions 20:1 doi 10.1215/10679847-1471438

Copyright 2012 by Duke University Press

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 positions 20:1 Winter 2012 184

tion of power and knowledge embedded in US imperial hegemony. Perhaps

the boundaries keep shifting, but positions’ dedication to transgressing them
has not.
At the moment positions was founded, the terrain of Chinese studies was
dominated by those who felt betrayed by the Cultural Revolution and had
become neorealist antisocialists, as well as by those who had never been
sympathetic to socialist ideals. These positions cloaked themselves in the
Cold War ideology of objectivity predominant in the US academy, an ideol-
ogy with an implicit injunction against addressing overtly political questions
in the name of objective scholarship. In the anthropology of China, a field
against which I located my work for some time, this conjuncture manifested
as a singular focus on kinship as the foundation of Chinese culture, which
meant that the China field left itself out of the transformations then tak-
ing place in anthropology in response to both feminism and postcolonial-
ism. The bounded and largely ahistorical notion of Chinese culture made
it almost impossible to consider questions of power in social relationships.
Two important exceptions in this area were Rubie Watson and Margery
Wolf. Watson’s groundbreaking discussion of class in relation to kinship
challenged the idea that Chinese kinship offered an equitably shared col-
lectivity, while Wolf’s feminist challenge to the focus on patriarchal lin-
eage succession opened a critical space for figuring out what kinds of power
women had, as well as ways they were subordinated in a patriarchal world.1
The work of Watson and Wolf enabled those of us who followed to move
beyond essentialist constructions of Chinese culture.
Nowhere was the importance of positions’ breakthrough more noticeable
than in the arena of queer scholarship. From the very first issue, positions
published scholarly work that centered on sexuality but did not — could
not — allow sexuality to become its own, universalizing domain. For from
the perspective of the politics of knowledge about Asia, one could never
forget the intersection of sexuality, race, and colonialism. Perhaps it is dif-
ficult to imagine now that at the moment positions was founded individuals
who took the risk of having their scholarship address questions of sexuality
had difficulty finding a job. With few exceptions, only senior scholars with
tenure felt secure enough to write about sexuality. The displacement and
marginalization of those who worked on questions of sexuality was further

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 Rofel ❘ Queer positions, Queering Asian Studies 185

enforced by the then-dominant assumption — pre-Foucault — that sexual-

ity was irrelevant to “larger” questions of social theory. positions enabled
those who keenly felt this displacement to bring together in their scholarship
matters of sexuality, colonial and postcolonial geopolitics, with critiques of
capitalism. Thus positions was “queer” from its inception, enabling a “queer-
ing” of Asian studies that until then had had only a few lonely predecessors.2
The explosion of queer politics in Asia, most notably in Taiwan early on,
further enabled a multisited discussion about the intimate articulations of
sexuality and geopolitics.3
But the intersection of these questions was nearly unthinkable at the
moment this scholarship began to appear in positions. That moment of con-
juncture, whose remnants still live on, was one in which (1) the US Left
was suspicious of attention to desire and pleasure, having an approach to
capitalism as a totality that led to the analysis of desire — and specifically
of homosexuality — as the direct product of capitalism; (2) gay scholars, as
a result, for the most part moved entirely away from discussions of capital-
ism, framed as they were in such a homophobic manner, to work on sexu-
ality as its own independent domain (traces of this genealogy are visible
in Foucault’s own intellectual trajectory); (3) Asian studies scholars found
it difficult, though not impossible, to defend an ongoing commitment to
Left critiques in the face of China’s socialist history; and (4) Asian studies
scholars had to face and overcome a history of Orientalist fascination with
sexuality in the East. These sedimented boundaries were reflected in the
hoary debates within queer studies between those who accused gay activist
scholarship of being “merely cultural” or idealist as opposed to materialist
queer.4 Those debates were never resolved; they merely faded. But they left
certain dichotomies in place: those who wanted so-called materialist studies
of sexuality and desire used the term materialist in an obfuscatory manner.
Those who had been criticized responded by pointing this out: attention
to the body, intimacy, and queer kinship are as “material” as one can get.
But what those who invoked materialism really meant, which they did also
say, was that studies of desire should be grounded in a study of capitalist
relations of production. Ironically, however, as soon as they set out that con-
text, they also let desire fade out of the picture, because they couldn’t really
figure out, within a certain classical Marxism, how to study the myriad

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 positions 20:1 Winter 2012 186

forms desire takes. They were still operating with an opposition between
the instrumental and the affective, a binary that Marxism unfortunately
adopted from capitalism’s own epistemologies.
positions opened out this scholarship on questions of the erotic as embed-
ded in power, knowledge, and inequality. It created a space that younger
scholars in Asian studies can now take for granted — that politics, whether
acknowledged or not, are part of one’s scholarship. positions created a forum
for those of us who believed there was still an important critique of capital-
ism to be carried out and that the problems in Chinese socialism did not
mean such a critique should be abandoned. But the positions collective was
also part of the generation who developed nonsingular politics — that which
is now taken for granted as intersectional politics.
positions enabled a transgression of these scholarly taboos and boundaries.
positions enabled a site for “queer Marxism.” In its most basic sense, queer
Marxism means an understanding of the following: (1) Desire is a key locus
of power. The arena of desire opens up new possibilities as it simultaneously
generates critical sites of political struggle. We understand, post-Foucault,
that the production of subjectivities creates social worlds, including capital-
ism. Queer Marxism therefore does not embrace the classical Marxist tenets
that disdain bodily pleasure and desire as dehumanizing distractions from
true liberation nor does it analyze sexuality as a domain separable from the
rest of social life. As Kevin Floyd has argued, the defining of the human
in Marx is always dynamic, ongoing, and socially mediated and includes
sensory and sexual objectifications of the body;5 (2) Sexual desires, prac-
tices, and identities manifest within social relations (such as kinship rela-
tions) that cannot but be materialist because they take place within and also
produce social worlds — worlds that pull people in through their desires
but also shape relations of power, inequality, and exploitation. Thus queer
Marxism leads us to address the question of value head-on, in refusing to
subordinate erotic practices and desires to a secondary set of social relation-
ships and in refusing to respect boundaries of identity as they have taken
root and then been uprooted. Queer Marxism addresses questions that lie at
the heart of both queer and Marxist politics: how do we develop a politics
in the gap of what Petrus Liu has so eloquently stated as the “incommen-
surability between the value of a human being and its formal exchange-

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 Rofel ❘ Queer positions, Queering Asian Studies 187

ability” under capitalism?6 (3) Abjection that results from nonnormative

desires, practices, and identities occurs through and is embedded within
but does not derive from relations of class, race, and neocolonialism. The
notion of a fundamental universalism in relation to oppression and the path
toward liberation is, as queer theorists have pointed out, always dependent
on normativity and therefore always predicated on exclusions of those who
are nonnormative; (4) Relations of labor that do not fit the classic loci of
Marxist critique have become more visible as central to the operations of
capitalism in the twenty-first century. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
use the term immaterial labor to mark these relationships, but these labor
relations also include sexuality and gender — long a focus of feminist cri-
tique;7 (5) Queer theory’s insight that sexual subjectivities and identities
are multiple and unstable and need to be constantly shored up and actively
reproduced can be extended to an understanding of the heterogeneities and
instabilities in capitalism — since subjectivity is a key site for the production
of capitalism. The idea that capitalism is a universal, uniform totality is
thus challenged by a queer Marxist approach that highlights heterogeneous,
interconnected practices whose coherence and universalism is asserted in the
Euro-US metropoles but undone by the “difference,” the specific histories,
and unequal positioning of the postcolonies; and (6) Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
and Transgender (LGBT) politics, especially those focused on normalizing
gay identity, can easily be folded into dominant capitalist, neoliberal, and
nationalist ideologies. These politics increasingly have been used by Western
capitalist democracies to parade their embrace of freedom over and against
what non-Western, especially Muslim, countries supposedly disavow. David
Eng has coined the term queer liberalism to describe this politics, while Jas-
bir Puar labels it “homonationalism.”8
positions has enabled a queering of Asian studies through this queer
Marxism. For rather than insisting on separable domains of study or a uni-
versalizing approach to the study of capitalism or nonnormative desires, posi-
tions encouraged tracing the embodied entanglements between the erotic,
desire, and political economic and geopolitical power in its broadest sense.
Queer Marxism in this guise does not adhere to the Enlightenment dream
of a common humanity, with a universal subjectivity in relation to Western
capitalism and its aftermath. Queer activists in Asia and Asian studies, espe-

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 positions 20:1 Winter 2012 188

cially those who challenge normativity in all its guises, live and think from
a place of displacement, and therefore have abandoned such a dream. A
queer Marxist Asian studies means transforming the relationship of power/
knowledge from this displaced positionality based in bodily pleasures that
challenge normative desire and alienated labor, as they have been con-
structed in racialized imperial regimes.
This queer Marxism obviously informs the special issue of positions,
“Beyond the Strai(gh)ts,” that Petrus Liu and I coedited. It also informs my
recent work. My ability to write Desiring China was a personal breakthrough
in bringing together what had been treated as disparate concerns.9 In Desir-
ing China, I was able to demonstrate how the production of desire lies at the
heart of neoliberal global processes. I argued that an analysis of the relation-
ship between neoliberalism and the formation of new subjectivities in China
necessitates attention to heteronormative politics and their subversions as well
as the formation of gay identities in the midst of neoliberal ambivalence about
licit and illicit desires. I brought this analytical lens to bear on what otherwise
would have seemed a disparate array of issues, everything from gay identity
formation in China to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Sev-
eral of my new projects continue in this vein. Broadly speaking, I am both
participating in and analyzing transnational relations of desire and produc-
tion. My participation has entailed political discussions with queer activists in
China and currently a translation project of Cui Zi’en’s writings.10 Cui Zi’en,
a professor at the Beijing Film Institute, is a well-known queer experimental
filmmaker and novelist. He is one of the most visible, out gay activists and
intellectuals in China. In addition to his films and novels, Cui Zi’en is one of
the main organizers of Beijing’s bi-annual Queer Film and Culture Festival.
This activism has hurt his career in China, though he has not landed in jail.
In his essay in “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts,” Cui playfully argues that the under-
ground activities of lesbian and gay organizations in China formed “the first
Communist International.”11 And just as with previous communist organiz-
ing, the fear of homosexuality in China has to do, according to Cui, with the
fact that homosexuality has a globalized presence. “To me,” he wrote, “the
concept of the ‘nation’ has been dissolved by queerness.”12
The politics of translation has been widely discussed in academia.13 One
pragmatic aspect that often goes unremarked is that translation from a

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 Rofel ❘ Queer positions, Queering Asian Studies 189

country not yet dominated by English and of authors marginalized in their

own countries is a political project of establishing a transnational politics,
in this case, of queer activism. This translation work has shaped one of my
new projects, on nomadic activism in China. I am beginning to write about
political activism in China across a range of politics: queer, environmental,
land rights, animal rights, and labor. Rather than reinforce the dichotomies
that lead people to write on only one of these issues, I plan to write across
their seemingly disparate concerns to address how their activism overlaps
as well as diverges, how it draws from transnational as well as national-
ist concerns, and, most importantly, how it draws on memories of socialist
notions of justice as well as creates novel ideas about human and nonhuman
survivability.
In my essay on queer activism in China, for example, I chart its hybrid
sources of inspiration, including neoliberalism, the Marxism that infused
life in China for over forty years, and the history of socialism in China that
continues to be required reading in school.14 Queer activism in China is
shaped not only by the utopian goals of social equality and social justice
inspired by Chinese Marxism but also by some of the specific strategies used
by Communist Party organizers prior to the revolution. But queer activism
in China is also shaped by the contemporary contours of neoliberal power
in which and through which LGBT activists try to imagine and enact liv-
able lives. Queer activists in China today thus grapple with the conjunc-
tural articulations of utopian dreams that Marxist-inspired national libera-
tion struggles unleashed and that have not been laid to rest, the sedimented
forms of power the socialist state has put into place that always have gaps,
and neoliberalism’s commodified hopes and dreams that provide grounds
for pushing against boundaries marking licit from illicit desires. Moreover,
the fact that Chinese socialism continues to be the formal rhetoric of the
state means that citizens protesting various social injustices have repeatedly
called upon the state to live up to its socialist rhetoric in the face of the capi-
talism the state has encouraged and helped to create.15
I further argue that in the current moment in China, there is no way
for activists to demand rights from the state. China currently has the for-
mal rule of law, but only those involved with property, commerce, and con-
sumption can claim something called “rights.” While rights associated with

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 positions 20:1 Winter 2012 190

consumerism, commercial progress, and intellectual property seem to be

developing rapidly, other kinds of rights are marginalized. Rights associ-
ated with sexual minorities are a good example. In this context, I argue, the
difficulty of doing politics on the terrain of “rights” opens up a space that
enables a different kind of political creativity. The fact that rights are not
currently viable means that lesbians and gay men have the opportunity not
to capitulate to heteronormative social life. That is, the ability to press for a
nonassimilationist, nonnormative life is enabled by this context.16
In addition, I am engaged in two projects that broadly address the new
world order that China is part of bringing into existence. One is a collab-
orative project with Sylvia Yanagisako on the twenty-first century silk road
between China and Italy in the high-fashion and textile industries. The
other, just beginning, is a collaborative project with Dai Jinhua to chart Chi-
na’s positioning in the global economy. Both projects appear more orthogo-
nal to a queer Marxism than the projects described above, but both have
been shaped and inspired by the kinds of questions that queer Marxism
enables, again how the production of desire lies at the heart of global pro-
cesses. In the first project, desires in the form of heteronormative cosmopoli-
tanism inform the supply chains that bring Italian and Chinese entrepre-
neurs, designers, factory workers, and shopping mall and boutique owners
into productive relationship with one another in the realm of high fashion.
After China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), virtually
all the Italian textile and high fashion firms moved their production pro-
cesses to China. This project addresses the symbolic and material struggles
among these various actors as they negotiate the radical transformations in
the production of value that have informed transnational capitalism. The
desires formulated specifically through fashion have provided a key arena in
which neoliberal capitalism is being defined and enacted.
The second project will chart the investments of Chinese firms in a wide
variety of industries and natural resources around the world, but particu-
larly in what we used to call the third world. We aim to examine how these
firms invoke identification and difference in establishing new global rela-
tions of inequality. Queer theory, as well as feminist theory, has offered us
important analytical tools for understanding how identification and differ-
ence operate, the kinds of relations of power they subtend, and the affective

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 Rofel ❘ Queer positions, Queering Asian Studies 191

labors that are a part of productive labors. C. K. Lee and Barry Sautman
and Yan Hairong have paved the way with their important work on China
in Africa.17 We need to grasp how China moves around the world in its
search for new sources of wealth and to what extent we actually can discern
a new world order in the making.
The queer Marxism that I have outlined here and that has been fostered
by positions refuses to treat “the West” or “Western theory” or “queer the-
ory” as universals against which one demonstrates specificity. Rather, posi-
tions has emphasized the emergence of unequal, frictional worlds as geopo-
litically induced encounters that cross conventional boundaries. The power/
difference that subtends these worlds moves across space as well as time.
This is not a comparative approach but one that attends to how knowledge,
practices, and identities do not merely “travel” but create connections, both
desired and imposed. This brings me to my suggestions for the future of
positions. The necessity for positions’ continued existence goes without say-
ing. There are precious few scholarly fora for radical scholarship within and
about Asia. I would suggest that the future of positions lies in scholarship
that moves completely beyond nationalist boundaries to chart these emer-
gent worlds. I look forward to future journal issues addressing regional
encounters between specific Asian countries and those outside Asia, such
as East Asia and Latin America, East Asia and Southeast Asia, Asia and
the Middle East, and so on. Needless to say, China’s ventures in search
of resources are creating new emergent worlds. In charting these worlds,
we should emphasize transnational linkages among various marginalized
others whose intertwined lives might not seem self-evident. I believe that
positions can also play a key role in reinvigorating as well as shifting the
long history of internationalism among the US Left, which seems to have
become muted in the post-Cold War era. Some years ago, Anne McClintock
(1995) set out a wonderful model for how to discern empire even in the most
“private” of sexual fantasies.18 This could be our model for examining how
the US empire, sexuality, and such things as the emotional tenor of the tea
party folks are intimately linked (tea, after all, being the quintessential icon
of empire, which no one in the United States seems to be remarking on).
Finally, I would like us to continue to publish translations of scholarly works
from Asia.

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 positions 20:1 Winter 2012 192

The scholarly gains that positions has fostered are not set in stone and
cannot be taken for granted. They need vigilant struggle and hard labor to
maintain. I look forward to the next generation of positions scholars taking
on this task.

Notes

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Miriam Silverberg, comrade in scholarly chutzpah,
and Donald Lowe, without whom positions would have been a weak imitation of itself.
1. See Rubie Watson, Inequality among Brothers: Class and Kinship in South China (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Tai-
wan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972).
2. For pathbreaking work in this regard, see Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in Chi-
na’s Medical History, 960 – 1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Vivien W.
Ng, “Homosexuality and the State in Late Imperial China,” in Hidden from History:
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George
Chauncey Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 76 – 89; and Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews,
and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth- Century Chinese Fiction
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
3. Important scholarship in this regard includes Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer
Representation in Taiwanese Film, Fiction, and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2003); Josephine Ho, “From Anti-Trafficking to Social Discipline: Or, the
Changing Role of ‘Women’s’ NGOs in Taiwan,” in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsid-
ered: New Perspective on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, ed. Kamala Kempadoo,
Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattnaik (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005), 83 – 105; Nai-fei
Ding, “Feminist Knots,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (2002): 449 – 67; Antonia Chao,
“Global Metaphors and Local Strategies in the Construction of Taiwan’s Lesbian Identi-
ties,” Culture, Health, and Sexuality 2, no. 4 (2000): 377 – 90. See also the essays in our special
issue of positions, Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel, ed., “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism
and Queer Chinese Politics,” positions 18, no. 2 (2010).
4. See for example, Donald Morton, “Changing the Terms: (Virtual) Desire and (Actual)
Reality,” in The Material Queer: A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Donald Morton
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 1 – 34; and Carla Freccero’s response to Morton in
chapter 2 of Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 13 – 30. See
also Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural (Non-material Leftist Movements),” New Left Review
227 (1998): 33 – 45, and Nancy Fraser, “Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A
Response to Judith Butler,” New Left Review 228 (1998): 140 – 49.
5. Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009).

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 Rofel ❘ Queer positions, Queering Asian Studies 193

6. Petrus Liu, “Queer Marxism in Taiwan,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, no. 4 (2007): 517 – 39.
See page 526.
7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000).
8. Eng’s critique emphasizes the intimacies of racial and capitalist politics with queer kinship,
while Puar focuses on anti-Muslim politics that this kind of homonationalism supports. See
David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) and Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homona-
tionalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). For trenchant cri-
tiques, see also Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and
the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003) and Michael Warner, The Trouble
with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: The Free Press, 1999).
9. Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
10. This translation project involves a wonderful collective of the following scholars: Cathryn
Clayton, Elisabeth Engebretsen, Derek Hird, Wenqing Kang, Petrus Liu, Fran Martin,
Casey Miller, William Schroeder, Chien Hsin Tsai, and myself.
11. Cui Zi’en, “The Communist International of Queer Film,” positions 18, no. 2 (2010): 417 – 23.
See page 418.
12. Ibid., 421.
13. See for example Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated
Modernity in China 1900 – 1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
14. Lisa Rofel, “Grassroots Activism: Non-Normative Sexual Politics in Post-Socialist China,”
in Unequal China: Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Inequality, ed. Wanning Sun
and Yingjie Guo (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).
15. See Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2007).
16. For other recent work on LGBT activism in China, see Cui’s documentary Zhi Tongzhi
(Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China), distributed by dGenerate Films, 2008. See also Travis Kong,
Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi, and Golden Boy (London: Routledge, 2011);
Yanhai Wan, “Becoming a Gay Activist in Contemporary China,” Journal of Homosexuality
40, nos. 3 – 4 (2001): 47 – 64; and Ching Yau, As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and
Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010).
17. Ching Kwan Lee, “Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers, and the Politics
of Casualization in Africa’s Chinese Enclaves,” China Quarterly 199 (2009): 647 – 66; and
Barry Sautman and Hairong Yan, “African Perspectives on China-Africa Links,” China
Quarterly 199 (2009): 728 – 59.
18. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest
(New York: Routledge, 1995).

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