The LGBTQ+ community in China is navigating an increasingly treacherous landscape. On the one hand, there is the looming threat of clampdown by the authoritarian government that frames any affiliations with LGBTQ+ organizations as a form of Western infiltration warranting vigilant opposition. On the other, as emigration became a more popular choice for those with the requisite capital, ongoing challenges of assimilation linked to both their queer and migrant identities persist beyond national boundaries.
As an aspiring sociologist and queer-identified woman growing up in China, I have spent the past two years researching Chinese LGBTQ+ and queer migration: how can we understand what is happening and what are some avenues for change? My scholarly investigation and personal experience provide a vantage point to reflect on what queer transnationalism entails and its implications as a unique space teeming with challenges and opportunities. When rampant marginalization renders us exiles in our own nation, the quest for belonging may compel us to seek beyond the immediate confines of the existing order. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration that “as a woman I have no country”, Shuzhen Huang in her recent talk argues that queer subjects, too, have no country. Much as Woolf rejects patriotism and embraces the “whole world” as her homeland, queerness unsettles the naturalness of affiliation demarcated by state boundaries and represents a space of possibility to establish alternative forms of relationality. Juxtaposing the disruptive potential of queerness and transnationalism, Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel discuss transnationalism as inaugurating “a new kind of queer thinking that imagines one’s world, identity, and politics as either challenging or moving beyond the contours of nation-state politics.”
In this critical historical juncture when transnationalism is threatened by the rising tide of nationalism amid the pandemic, how might we harness the illuminating potentialities immanent in queer transnationalism with rejuvenated vigor and forge alternative modes of belonging within diasporic spaces? Here I turn to the praxis of queer world-making, as charted by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in their seminal essay “Sex in Public” over two decades ago.
Berlant and Warner posit that the distinguishing feature of queer world-making, as opposed to “world construction in ordinary contexts,” lies in its inherently experimental nature. Rather than mirroring established social realities, the queer world is characterized as “a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies.” Historically, heteronormative institutions and cultures have consigned sexuality to the private sphere, rendering non-normative sexualities illegible. Fleeting glimpses of queer culture often manifest beyond the confines of formal institutions, materializing in underground bars and intimate gatherings. The fragile and transient essence of queer existence stands as a testament to “the inventiveness of queer world-making.” As Gust Yep puts beautifully, “queer world-making is the opening and creation of spaces without a map, the invention and proliferation of ideas without an unchanging and predetermined goal, and the expansion of individual freedom and collective possibilities without the constraints of suffocating identities and restrictive membership.” This ethos, I believe, continues to echo with unwavering relevance, even amidst the transformative shifts in the contours of queer life over successive decades.
As a community builder, I have always been pondering how we can translate queer world making into action and instigate institutional changes. Since 2022, I have been working with the United Proud Womxn, an NGO based in the United States, in creating a transnational space for knowledge and experience sharing. The seminar I led brought together sexual minority women with transnational background and scholars whose research contributes to the field of gender and sexuality. Together we envision alternative framings of pressing problems facing the LGBTQ+ community and expanding the lexicons to facilitate collective action. In amplifying queer scholarship, translating academic research into praxis, and creating a community-based research space, the seminar hopes to invent possibilities for collective change.
On a broader level, it is a social experiment. When the very meanings of foundational concepts such as love— which, as one of the scholars we discussed in the seminar, Charlie Yi Zhang, shows insightfully in his work Dreadful Desires— are delimited and repurposed into apparatuses of control, our ability to envision alternatives is severely curtailed by existing paradigms. Oftentimes we find ourselves forced to choose between vehement disavowal or tacit acquiescence, each bearing its own cost. To transcend the rigid dichotomy conditioned by the established social fabric, conceiving a third option calls for our audacity of creation, one that is reminiscent of the Nietzschean journey from nay-saying to yea-saying. Carving out spaces, initiating dialogues, building coalitions, we aspire to create what Tani Barlow refers to as “conditions of thinking” and incubate new social realities. It is precisely through a cohesive community that we can transition from rejecting the negative present to creating an affirmative future.
This is but the first beacon of dawn heralding what is to come. Queer world-making shall henceforth remain ablaze. It rises, time and time again, sometimes in places we least expect, ignited by the blood, sweat, and tears of those who refuse to let the flame die out.
I would like to end with José Esteban Muñoz’s powerful message on the radical promise of queerness: “We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing…Queerness is always on the horizon.”
The horizon of queerness beckons and we press on.