Guest Lecture: Queer Filmmaking and Queer Politics in Contemporary China

Dr Hongwei Bao, Lecturer in Asian Media, Nottingham Trent University, UK and visiting researcher at NIAS 10-14 June 2013.

In this lecture, Dr Hongwei Bao will focus on queer films and queer film festivals in contemporary China. Through textual analysis of some major queer filmmakers’ cinematic works from mainland China, in tandem with his ethnography of attending queer film festivals in Beijing and Guangzhou, he will critically access the significance of films as alternative media in contemporary queer politics and social movements in China. He will  also consider possible cultural specificities of queer politics in contemporary China which are influenced by and at the same time try to diverge from Western queer theory and queer politics.

Moreover, he will situate queer filmmaking in contemporary China in a transnational and postsocialist context; in doing so, he will delineate the postsocialist structures of feeling that shape cultural politics in contemporary China, thus opening up spaces for a critical revaluation of the socialist legacy in the Maoist China and a critical reflections of the ramifications of neoliberal globalisations on social identities and politics in today’s China. He will show some short clips from some contemporary queer Chinese films in his lecture.

The lecture is co-organized by NIAS and the Coordination for Gender Research at UCPH.