'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.

Queer/ing Regions: full programme

Below you'll find details of the full programme for the Queer/ing Regions Symposium which takes place on 7 February 2013 in CELS001 and 002 on the Clifton Campus of Nottingham Trent University. The event is free. If you are interested in attending, please contact Dr Cuneyt Cakirlar or Dr Hongwei Bao.  

This research symposium aims to facilitate a critical intellectual exchange focusing on the discourses of the “regional” in contemporary queer criticism. Departing from the “transnational” turn in the second-wave queer scholarship exploring the global/ised intersections between race, ethnicity, nation/diaspora, gender and sexuality, we would like to address the possibilities/potentials of a critical “self-regioning” and thus to question the ways in which the complex regional/local formations of sexual dissidence emerges as objects of theoretical inquiry once situated within a global context by means of the critical, academic and activist practice. We would like to revisit the critical potentials of reclaiming the regional in queer critique. Rather than presuming the regional actors as passive recipients of global flux, this conversation will be delving into the complex dynamics of the global/local binary in sexual politics. How can we understand transnational formations of sexual subjectivities without assuming a radical alterity between the local and the global, or the west and the east? How can we understand the uneasy nexus of community and sexuality in a global framework? How can we identify modes of negotiation and contestation in the encounter of the local sexual politics and practices with the Gay International?

 PROGRAMME

10:20 Arrivals and tea/coffee 

10:45 Welcome

11:00-12:30 PANEL 1:

Chair: Dr. Liz Morrish (NTU)

Professor William Spurlin (Brunel)

Shifting Geopolitical Borders/Shifting Sexual Borders:

Renegotiations of (Queer) Regionalism in a Transnational World

Dr Howard Chiang (Warwick)

(De)Provincializing China:

Queer Historicism and Sinophone Postcolonial Critique

Professor Richard Phillips (Sheffield)

Centres, Margins and Sexuality Politics:

Asians and Muslims as Cultural Minorities in ‘Mostly Liberated Societies’

12:30-1:30 Lunch 

1:30-3:00 PANEL 2:

Chair: Professor Gregory Woods (NTU)

Dr Jon Binnie (Manchester Metropolitan)

In What Sense is There a Regional Problem in Transnational Queer Studies?

Dr Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck)

‘The Problem of Context’:

Issues of Scale, Relation and Perspective in Queer Studies

Dr Gavin Brown (Leicester)

Political Ecologies of Sexuality:

Rethinking the Place of the Region (and Other Scales) in Queer Research

3:00-3:30 Tea/coffee break 

3:30-5:00 PANEL 3:

Chair: Dr Robert Kulpa (UEA)

Dr Camila Bassi (Sheffield Hallam)

What's Radical about Reality TV?

An Unexpected Tale of a Chinese Antihero and Space for Lesbian Identity

Dr Enda McCaffrey (NTU)

From Homographies of Invisibility to Hypervisibility:

Queering and De-Queering City Centre Space

Dr Bethan Stevens (NTU)

Queerly Between: Sussex, England and Kigali, Rwanda (a travel narrative)

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)