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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
medium-paced
medium-paced
wonderful book that suffers from being written in that 2010s queer theory voice
slow-paced
First and final chapters good. Middle ones might require more context to be fully understood and critiqued
Great fucking book, no idea what was happening in that last chapter
informative
fast-paced
someday i’ll stop reading books that use “queer” as a verb. the cultural analysis in this book was kind of interesting but a lot of the criticisms of both western gender theorists and LGBT activists in china felt incredibly unfair. the gender theory parts are very dense in a lot of places—the economic theory is…less dense.
challenging
informative
medium-paced
Works best as a marxist text, not so much as a queer one. Echoing Howard Chiang’s review of this book, there’s definitely some questionable practice in terms of decentering the west as the book sets out to do. If de-centering the west means conceptualizing China as the potential solution to the western ‘tension between Marxism and Queer Theory’ then maybe the west remains too much in the picture. Theorizing the Nonliberal alternative to neoliberalism still considers liberalism as a global and flat concept that it cannot be if we’re considering it a transnational and global problem. Thinking on this I find myself reiterating Spivak’s question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ No, not to us. And not through our language and positionality within the very western and very colonial space of the academy.
“As queer people transform from victims to consumers, queer theory is no longer centred on loss, melancholia or other feelings associated with the AIDS epidemic. Instead, contemporary queer theory mourns the loss of radicality in queer movements, which have been taken over by the assimilationist logic of commodified desire.”
<3 <3 <3
“the phenomenon of gay normalisation, queer-liberalism, homonationalisation and homonormatity…are also attempts to rehumanise the queer without questioning our normative definition of the human.”
<3
I am super biased because I knew I was gunna agree before I read it and I automatically adore any rejection of liberalism <<33
but it made me think about queerness + feminism and their relationships to selfhood in a way I never would have otherwise, and it is very well written and not overly inaccessible
I cannot recommend this book enough!!!!!!!
<3 <3 <3
“the phenomenon of gay normalisation, queer-liberalism, homonationalisation and homonormatity…are also attempts to rehumanise the queer without questioning our normative definition of the human.”
<3
I am super biased because I knew I was gunna agree before I read it and I automatically adore any rejection of liberalism <<33
but it made me think about queerness + feminism and their relationships to selfhood in a way I never would have otherwise, and it is very well written and not overly inaccessible
I cannot recommend this book enough!!!!!!!
challenging
slow-paced
I don’t feel comfortable giving this book a star rating because I feel like I barely understood it. It’s very very dense and is probably something only for people who either have a PhD in queer theory or Marxism or have read a PhD’s worth of work in queer theory and Marxism.
One thing that was interesting is that this book was published in 2015 and things have changed dramatically in the almost 10 years since it was written. 2014-2015 was still a time of possibility for queer art in China and that’s reflected in this book. Those possibilities have been severely shut down since and it brings another level of interest to the book to compare those changes.
One thing that was interesting is that this book was published in 2015 and things have changed dramatically in the almost 10 years since it was written. 2014-2015 was still a time of possibility for queer art in China and that’s reflected in this book. Those possibilities have been severely shut down since and it brings another level of interest to the book to compare those changes.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced