Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. He is the author, editor, and translator of several books, most recently
Ralph A. Litzinger is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and the author of
Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. He is the author, editor, and translator of several books, most recently
Ralph A. Litzinger is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and the author of
Queer Reflections and Recursion in Homoerotic Bildungsroman
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Published:August 2016
As authors take to the Internet to discuss formerly taboo topics, their texts articulate private desires within a public space, highlighting central concerns regarding the relationship between social oppression and the expression of sexual identity in contemporary China. In this chapter, I use the 1999 Internet novella Huizi to examine a related set of issues of intimacy, self-expression, community formation, and sexual identity. Published under the pseudonym Xiaohe, Huizi depicts the relationship between two boys as they mature and become aware of their same-sex desires, and the result is a work that brings together “coming-of-age” and “coming-out” narrative conventions. In this way, Huizi offers a framework for reexamining modern China’s rapidly changing notions of social norms and sexual identity. More specifically, it examines the ways in which a newly liberalized political order draws on vestiges of an earlier, less tolerant, regime to generate a set of conditions that constrains but simultaneously encourages the emergence of new subject positions.
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