A Chinese Queer Discourse: Camp and Alternative Desires in the Films of Yon Fan and Lou Ye

Abstract

While one may argue that Hong Kong films are seemingly losing their direction, Mainland Chinese cinema undoubtedly has gained acceleration in the past two decades. This chapter intends to put together the Mainland and Hong Kong within the same rubric in contemporary and globalizing world cinema, and aims at exploring an alternative paradigmatic structure or analytical tool. In this chapter, my tactic to approaching contemporary Chinese cinema is to ponder its queerness: alternative aesthetics and desires, as well as the libidinal economy, its various forms of currencies, and their circulations. Queer desires and the libidinal currency consumed and circulated by socioeconomic and sexual agents provoke the coupling up of queer and Chinese-language cinema, and it is the new blood in these contemporary films that interests me, particularly their take on aesthetics, desires, and the libidinal forces. Simply by looking at a few examples from Stanley Kwan and Zhang Yimou, it becomes increasingly clear that a majority of Chinese films are suppressed in terms of expressing desires. In the context of Hong Kong, before the coming-out of gay director Stanley Kwan, who is famous for making women’s films, he had to project his homoerotic desires onto his female characters without directly channelling desires as such via a gay/queer film.¹