Introduction

These essays grew out of an Association for Asian Studies panel with four presenters, for which I served as a discussant. Prior to my travels to attend the conference, when I mentioned the title of the panel to a colleague, my interlocutor asked with some bewilderment: what might “queer renditions” from late imperial China and the contemporary Sinophone world possibly have in common? As it turns out, I would submit, a great deal. However, as these essays demonstrate, such common threads do not derive from a unified sense of Chineseness, a “genealogic connection” between queer pasts and presents, or from an “unchanging traditionality” or a “copycat modernity.” As will become readily apparent, these four essays, if anything, are deeply committed to problematizing any notion of an overarching queerness and instead seek out richly contextualized readings of queer moments that defy assimilation to any reductionist, triumphalist, or presentist narratives. They are,...