Helen Hok-Sze Leung

Undercurrents engages the critical rubric of "queer" to examine Hong Kong's screen and media culture during the transitional and immediate postcolonial period. Helen Hok-Sze Leung draws on theoretical insights from a range of disciplines to reveal parallels between the crisis and uncertainty of the territory's postcolonial transition and the queer aspects of its cultural productions. Undercurrents uncovers a queer media culture that has been largely overlooked by critics in the West, and demonstrates the cultural vitality of Hong Kong amidst political transition

Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong

Undercurrents

A Queer Film Classic: Chen Kaige’s 1992 film about two male Peking opera stars and the woman who comes between them; its treatment of gender performance and homosexuality was unprecedented in Chinese film. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

A Queer Film Classic

Farewell My Concubine

Howard Chiang

Todd A. Henry

Since the late twentieth century, scholars and activists have begun to take stock of the deep histories and politically engaged nature of trans* cultures across the diverse societies of "Asia." Much of this groundbreaking work has cautioned against immediate assumptions about the universality of transgender experiences, while heeding the significant influence of colonial histories, cultural imperialism, Cold War dynamics, economic integration, and migration practices in shaping local categories of queerness, discourses of rights, as well as the political, social, and medical management of gender variance and non-normative sexualities. This growing body of work on Asia joins trans* scholarship and activism across the world that has similarly sought to de-universalize and de-colonize the category of "trans."

Helen Hok-Sze Leung

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