Papers by Charlie Yi Zhang
Routledge, 2022
This chapter applies the critical scholarship of homonationalism to Sinophone contexts, and explo... more This chapter applies the critical scholarship of homonationalism to Sinophone contexts, and explores unfolding contestation over nation-state boundaries and imaginaries as China (officially People’s Republic of China, PRC) seeks to advance its dominant presence in Taiwan (officially the Republic of China, ROC), Hong Kong, and other Chinese-speaking communities. Different from Western societies where liberal democracy reigns as the predominant governing tenor, legal protection and discursive recognition of queer subjects are limited at the state level in these societies (except in Taiwan, where same-sex marriage has been in place since 2019). For subjugated groups located in and/or coming from these backgrounds, uncritically adopting the framework of homonationalism can create a conceptual conundrum. On the one hand, they are pressured to take a “culturally essentialist approach” that denies the cross-border circuit of Western sexual discourses. On the other, they have to wrestle with a “queer vanguardist approach” that views social recognition via a liberalist lens that is not only unnecessary but also pernicious to queer subjects and radical potential of queer movements. In response, we utilize a homotransnational framework to foreground everyday struggles of LGBTQ groups living in Sinophone contexts and unravel the intra-regional dynamics of queer politics and competing nationalisms between the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This approach complicates Puar’s conception of homonationalism by focusing on emerging challenges that queer subjects are confronted with across national borders. It also helps us delve into the geopolitical struggles that span PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the “liberal” West to develop a new understanding of the relationship between nation-states and gender/sexuality. As our analysis demonstrates, grassroots activists across Sinophone societies are not only able to find resistance space amid rivalries between overpowering imperial forces for survival, but also identify fissures and ruptures afforded by brewing geopolitical competition and turn them into opportunities for concrete change on local levels.
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Feminist Media Studies, 2021
The rise of Boys’ Love (BL) TV series in Thailand over the past decade has sparked critical atten... more The rise of Boys’ Love (BL) TV series in Thailand over the past decade has sparked critical attention from both academics and journalists alike. Rather than rehashing the trajectory of this development, we analyze Thai popular culture as a contested sexual and political space in which BL performs a paradoxical function within Thailand’s contemporary crisis dominated by a royalist military junta with a penchant for pinkwashing. Through adopting and reappropriating Korean and Japanese BL aesthetics, we argue that BL culture in Thailand recasts such East Asian idolization with its own characteristics, yielding the dual effect of simultaneously bolstering yet challenging Thai discourses on both homosexuality and monarchized military politics.
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The Journal of Asian Studies, 2021
This article develops a feminist reading of the biographical action series featuring Ip Man, the ... more This article develops a feminist reading of the biographical action series featuring Ip Man, the Wing Chun grand master lionized for mentoring Bruce Lee, as a set of culturally inflected practices in order to probe the sociohistorical structure that embeds and overdetermines these productions and allows for new, subversive potentialities. Building upon situated engagement, my analysis traces how the hypermasculine violent yanggang aesthetic tradition takes on new life by reclaiming women's voices in the Ip Man film franchise. I also identify the ways in which this filmic remaking of Ip's life story builds an alternative embodiment that unsettles musculature as the ground of colonialist/nationalist dominance and lays the basis for a new horizon of justice encapsulated by the flexible and elastic “Be Water” sensibility. As human beings are facing the common threat posed by prevailing toxic masculinity, these lessons, I argue, are crucial for us to find a path through the turbulence and build a more peaceful world.
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This article traces the epistemic shift of higher education that has consolidated the incorporati... more This article traces the epistemic shift of higher education that has consolidated the incorporative management of differences as its primary operational modality to valorize and perpetuate neoliberal dominance. I argue that rather than teaching feminism simply as specialized knowledges about minoritized subjects and experiences, we might utilize it as a transformative tool to reimagine pedagogic practices as strategies of intervention in the sanitized archiving practices. To this end, the classroom should be reframed as "a brave space" for difficult conversations to untangle the ways that structural changes have been prodded through identities, particularly minoritized identities, to reshape our individual and collective lives in dangerous neoliberal terms, and devise ways to alter these formulations. In this regard, feminist teaching becomes the foundation of slow activism of daily practices to prime the conditions for fundamental changes.
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Dan Mei, a Chinese subculture centered on fictional homoromantic/homoerotic relationships between... more Dan Mei, a Chinese subculture centered on fictional homoromantic/homoerotic relationships between beautiful young men, is part of the growing global queer fandom cultures. Approaching Dan Mei as a transnational "apparatus of love," this article intends to carve out new directions and dimensions for the emerging queer fandom studies, and identify the social institutions, markets, political regimes, and ideological ends that shape and condition the varied forms and formulations of queer love central to neoliberal governance. Using the analytical framework "apparatus of love," I argue that as manifestation of social forces tied into and varying with historical specificities and sociocultural contingencies, love can be heavy. As analytics that equip us to investigate how these social forces, specificities, and contingencies shape and reshape different manifestations of love, love can be light also. Building on ethnographic data supplemented by textual analysis, I illustrate how Dan Mei communities are developed through the production and sharing of queer love, and how female fans have produced alternative gender and sexual articulations to challenge China's neoliberal governance driven by heteronormative gendered biopolitics. This subculture, however, also fuses with the emerging transnational normative queer culture, reproducing the middle-classed normativity of queerness to advance neoliberal dominance on new levels.
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Feminist Formations, 2014
The article argues that the biopolitical stratification of human beings through the intersection ... more The article argues that the biopolitical stratification of human beings through the intersection of race, gender, and class is a central neoliberal governing technique to facilitate the global division and migration of labor. Also, the intersectional cultural contours of race, gender, and class provide a fundamental discursive repository for the justification of the globalizing process. These governing parameters are not simply the essential conduits to enable neoliberal globalization, but they are also crucial sites to normalize it. Focusing on the Asia-Pacific Rim in general and China in particular, the article attempts to unpack the different values laden with the discourses about Asia and Asian to illustrate how the intersection of race, gender, and class is invoked to facilitate and justify the transnational movement of capital and labor in this area. In an interlocking relationship with one another, these categories create a matrix of power that sustains the dominance of neoliberalism as the single world order. As the article suggests, within this matrix, any attempt to challenge one form of oppression without considering the overarching structure would reproduce other forms of domination and reinforce neoliberal global control on a different level.
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Books by Charlie Yi Zhang
Duke University Press , 2022
In Dreadful Desires Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of ... more In Dreadful Desires Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of love to regulate the population and secure China’s place in the global economy. Zhang shows how the state frames love as a set of desires that encompass heteronormative intimacy, familial and communal attachment, upward mobility, and private property ownership. These desires—as circulated in performance in the nationalistic ceremony, same-sex romantic fan fiction, the wildly popular reality television dating show If You Are the One, and the cult of patriarchal personality around Xi Jinping—are explicitly based in oppressive systems of gender, class, and sexuality. Zhang contends that such desires connect love to economic survival and gender normativity in ways that underwrite Chinese neoliberalism at the expense of individual flourishing. By outlining how state-framed forms of love create desires that cannot be fulfilled, Zhang places China at the forefront of using affective attachments to nation, leader, and family in the global shifts toward exploitation and authoritarianism.
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Papers by Charlie Yi Zhang
Books by Charlie Yi Zhang