'On Not to Be Gay'

Hongwei Bao has recently published a new article, 'On Not to Be Gay: Aversion Therapy and Transformation of the Self in Postsocialist China'.

In this article, through a critical reading of the published diaries written by the gay ‘patients’ who received aversion therapy in order to become ‘straight’ in south China in the 1990s, Dr Hongwei Bao examines how the transformation of subjectivities from gay to straight was made possible by such ‘self-technologising’ practices as writing diaries and affective communication with others. In doing so, he considers the centrality of the body and affect in the process of subject (trans)formation, and asks how a new, coherent and authentic ‘self’ was fabricated through bodily and affective experiences. This discussion not only reveals the social construction of the self as central to China’s postsocialist governmentality, but also the central role that gender and sexuality play in processes of self-formation.

Hongwei Bao, 'On Not to Be Gay: Aversion Therapy and the Transformation of the Self in Postsocialist China', Health, Culture and Society, 3(1): 132-49.

Anti-CNN and 'April Youth' in China

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In a recent article, Tao Zhang explores Anti-Western sentiment in youth-oriented Chinese on-line media. 

In the article, she starts by reflecting on how a pattern of nationalistic sentiment rather complicatedly articulated with anti-westernism has been an enduring feature of China’s political culture since its traumatic entry into industrial modernity during the 19^th century. But as China, at the end of the 1970s, rushed to embrace market capitalism, it began a new phase in its complex encounter with the West. Caught within the contradictions of a globalized free market economy and continuing authoritarian political control, and exacerbated by the impact of the Internet in the 1990s, the cultural narrative linking national identity with a doctrinaire antipathy towards the West was put under increasing strain. She argues that this has not, however, resulted in the abandonment of anti-westernism as a cultural referent, but in the emergence of new, more complex forms. 

This chapter explores one manifestation of this: the so-called “cyber-nationalism” embraced since the 1990s by a relatively small but significant sector of educated Chinese young people both in China and overseas. She focuses on the example of one prominent Chinese youth website, “anti-CNN.com”, which was initially intended, ‘to expose the lies and distortions in the western media’ and its subsequent development into the far more comprehensive site, ‘M4.cn’ styling itself, ‘the first ever Chinese youth portal’.

Starting by sketching the historical formation of anti-western sentiment in the context of China’s passage to modernity from the nineteenth century to the present, she then analyses the emergence of ‘anti-CNN.com’ and its development into “M4.cn/April Youth”, focusing on its critique of alleged western bias in the reporting of China’s affairs. She develops an argument that places this within the broader context of neo-nationalism amongst the globalized post-1980s generation – the so-called Chinese ‘angry youth’ (‘fengqing’).

Tao Zhang (2012), ‘Anti-CNN.com and 'April Youth': Anti-Western sentiment in youth-oriented Chinese on-line media’  in Hernandez, L., ed., China and the West: Encounters with the other in Culture, Arts, Politics and Everyday life
Cambridge Scholars 1-16

Visuality and Politics: Queer Media in China

On Monday 26 March 2012, we will be hosting a research workshop on Visuality and Politics: Queer Media in China. Organizied by Dr Hongwei Bao, the workshop will explore the following issues:
 
For Jacques Rancière (2004), the visual is intrinsically political; art and politics have in common the potential to delimit the visible and the invisible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, as well as the possible and the impossible. This is certainly true of queer art, film and activism in contemporary China. Since China began its neoliberal reforms in the early 1980s, one of the most interesting phenomena that indicates drastic social changes has been the (re-)emergence of gay identity. Same-sex desire, which used to be rendered invisible and unthinkable during China’s socialist era, began to surface in the postsocialist public discourse. With the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1997 and depathologisation of homosexuality in 2001, an increasing number of lesbians and gays have ‘come out’ to the public and have begun to demand gender and sexual equality. Many of them have chosen to use various forms of media, including painting, installation, digital video film and the Internet, to engage in political activism.

The use of media in China’s queer community poses a number of interrelated questions to scholars in media studies and queer studies: what role do the media play in queer activism in the transnational context? How do gays and lesbians ‘queer’ the use of media, if at all? How does the ‘queer media’, an exploratory term that requires definition and discussion, as a form of alternative media or ‘citizen media’, may contribute to political and social change? How do ‘queer media’ render contested socialist histories, the neoliberal present and imagined futures both visible and invisible, both thinkable and unthinkable, and both possible and impossible? How does the transnationalisation of queer theory and politics may be fraught with tensions, slippages, as well as complicated postcolonial and anti-neoliberal struggles? What can queer media practices in China inform the Western academia of issues and debates concerning alternative media, queer theory, aesthetics and politics, theory and praxis, decolonising academic knowledge production and revitalising political activism?

This workshop will bring queer scholars, filmmakers, magazine editors and artists from China and the UK into critical dialogue with each other. It will also showcase a selection of queer documentary films and queer art works made by China’s leading queer filmmakers and artists including Cui Zi’en, Wei Jiangang, Shitou and Mingming.

The event takes play  in Newton Lecture Theatre 4 at the city site of Nottingham Trent University. Participation in this workshop is free. For enquires and to book your place please contact Dr Hongwei Bao (email: hongwei.bao@ntu.ac.uk)