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.

This study extends the “Queer” Asia s critique to deconstruct the coloniality of queer theory in transnational Taiwan. Focusing on Duggan’s critique of homonormativity, I used 22-months ethnographic data to examine its Taiwanese glocalization and influences on American scholars’ denigration of Taiwanese marriage equality campaigns. I argue that the glocalization of homonormativity theory has generated the disruption between queer theory and embodied experiences, falsely assumed the universalism of queer theory, and failed to recognize practices of diversifying families and resistance to neoliberalism. The homonormativity glocalization also produces “radical queer temporality” and Orientalist double standards that collude with imperialist epistemology. I conclude with strategies for a decolonial queer theory.

In recent years, queer studies has increasingly interrogated the racial and colonial unconscious embedded in the earlier studies of non-normative genders and sexualities through the critical frameworks of queer of color critique and queer diaspora studies. This article aims to ‘queer the transnational turn’ by considering what critical edge ‘regionalism’ might bring to the investigation of queer modernities in Asia from both contemporary and historical vantage points. The introductory section of the article provides a broad overview of the ‘transnational turn’ in queer studies, what we diagnose as the ‘area unconscious’ of queer studies in its exclusive critique of Western colonial modernity, and the related binary of cultural particularism versus Eurocentric universalism. Alternatively, we argue that the concept of regionalism can be productively mobilized in order to study the various scales of queer sexualities that traffic within and circulate across Southeast Asia, Australia, imperial China, and contemporary Sinophone cultures (Sinitic-language communities on the margins of or outside mainland China). Through a paired reading of Johann S. Lee’s Singaporean queer novel, Peculiar Chris (1992), and Su Chao-Bin and John Woo’s Sinophone martial art film, the Reign of Assassins (2010), our inquiry accounts for how the spatial–temporal telos of global queering get materially translated across multiple regional hubs of sexual differences. Queer regionalism in Singapore, China, and the Sinophone worlds encompasses relational dynamics, power differentials, and subnational and supranational linkages. Finally, queering regionalism can open up new analytical frameworks for the study of sexualities and corporealities across transcolonial relations and wider temporal and spatial connections.

This paper examines Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai's 1997 romantic drama Happy Together and argues that a reading of the film as a national allegory for Hong Kong's postcolonial status must include an emphasis on the homophobic and patriarchal forces acting upon the queer body. Standard Marxist conceptions of national allegory, most infamously put forth by Fredric Jameson in his 1986 essay, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," essentialize the textual expression of colonized territories as solely defined by colonial inequality. Such interpretations of postcolonial texts demand a more nuanced understanding of the specific varied forms of inequality that result from colonial violence, and these interpretations require attention to the differences in hegemonic colonialism as it operates in each individual territory. In this regard, Gayatri Gopinath’s intersectional model of the queer diasporic allegory is a much more useful and relevant tool for understanding the homophobic and patriarchal forces at play during and after colonization. Using Gopinath’s technique of reading the colonized queer body as a site of violent homophobic power relations, I will argue that the warring gay Chinese lovers in Happy Together make manifest the same uneven power structure of toxic masculinity and homophobia that oppresses them, and I will connect these issues to the problems of masculinity and alienation experienced by the population of Hong Kong after the territory was given back to China in 1997.