2010/07/01 by Benzi Zhang · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Chinese history and philosophy #Japanese History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1080/09502386.2010.483803
openalex publication_date 2010/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This essay examines the cultural politics of gender performance in relation to the conditions of intelligibility in Chinese society. Cultural imaginings of gender in China are influenced not only by the ideological apparatuses but also by a traditional mode of epistemology that sustains a regime of collective make-believe wherein homosexual subjects are regarded as unintelligible. Although homosexuality exists in social reality, the lack of its own truthful representation creates numerous misunderstandings that prevent the development of a positive identity in Chinese culture, and homosexual sensibilities are suppressed by the hegemony of cultural values that drive sexual deviants to self-negation and self-sacrifice. Fe/male impersonation, as an oblique mode of expression, reveals a radical difference in desire which, undefined by the existing measures of epistemology, characterizes a phantasmal situation of the obscure human passion that fails to produce full presence in Chinese cultural space.