Queer Media in China by Hongwei Bao

Author:Hongwei Bao [Bao, Hongwei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Research, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780429340376
Google: R943zgEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 56356598
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-01-15T02:19:08+00:00

Catachresis is not about an incorrect use of words as if there were a correct use as such. The radicality of the concept lies in the understanding that words do not have fixed meanings and there is no originality; rather, meanings are constantly generated in the process of words being used in various historical and social contexts. Catachresis is therefore an opportunity, ‘insomuch as in losing the sense proper to a sign [it] exposes a reconfigured relation to that sign’ (Hawthorne and van Klinken 2013: 159). This ‘reconfigured relation’ – sometimes referred to as cultural translation – has a significant impact on the study of culture.

The term catachresis has been used by postcolonial studies scholars including Gayatri Spivak (1988b) and Homi Bhabha (2004) to articulate postcolonial positions and to challenge the often taken-for-granted Eurocentrism in the process of cultural translation. Spivak applies catachresis to the ‘master words’ that claim to represent a social group such as ‘woman’ or ‘proletarian’. Such words are often imposed upon a group of people through particular power configurations and to serve specific ideological agendas. The use of the term catachresis, for Spivak, aims at ‘reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding’ (1988b: 228) in the context of colonialism and its aftermath.

Following Spivak’s postcolonial critique, Tani Barlow (2004) traces the genealogy of women in Chinese feminist thoughts in the twentieth century. Seen from the perspective of ‘future anteriority’, the female subject is rather fragmentary and contingent in various periods of modern Chinese history. Terms such as funü, nüxing, and nüren are not merely different linguistic markers; they also denote distinct female subjectivities produced by various configurations of power at specific times. These terms can be seen as catachresis, insofar as they reveal the incompleteness and inadequacy of the sign ‘woman’ and the violent process of social modernisation and engineering. Catachresis of the word ‘woman’ can be situated in China’s ‘translated modernity’ (Liu 1994), which is at the same time a ‘colonial modernity’ (Barlow 1997), in which knowledge production on gender has been intertwined with the histories of colonialism, nationalism, socialism, and capitalism.

This chapter marks an effort to conceptualise cultural translation in terms of catachresis in the context of contemporary China. Locating the Chinese queer subject in the globalisation of sexualities and identities, this chapter examines the production of the queer subject in public culture and social movements. In popular discourses, queer is often imagined as a coherent subject, legitimised by the ‘authentic’ narratives produced by sexual minorities themselves in transnational queer activism. Similarly, the Chinese queer subject is often seen as a derivative from – if not an outcome of – the global queer discourse. The self-assumed coherence of the Chinese queer subject – together with the ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity’ of the global queer subject – requires critical interrogation. My approach in this chapter is to focus on the BJQFF, a queer public event that has shaped Chinese queer identities and communities in the past 20 years, by using catachresis as a critical lens. Through

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