Queer Hong Kong as a Sinophone Method: An Archival Undoing Available to Purchase

This chapter reads queer Hong Kong literature as a material force of worlding and archival undoing. It analyzes Wong Bik-wan’s 1999 feminist novel Lienü tu (Portraits of martyred women), which imagines the possibility of feminist solidarity and lesbian intimacy during 1940–70s Hong Kong. It then places Wong’s novel alongside Intimates (dir. Jacob Cheung, 1997), a film of lesbian eros and regionalism. It ends with Ma Ka Fai’s 2016 queer novel Long tou feng wei (Once upon a time in Hong Kong), which presents a story of colonial complicity and interracial desire in the affair between a Scottish officer and a local mafia boss during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Ma’s novel also serves as a self-reflexive theorization of the queer archive. Overall, Wong, Cheung, and Ma’s works actualize a queer Sinophone worlding of Hong Kong through archival undoings that ultimately disrupt masculinist narrations of Hong Kong modernity.