Queer Marxism in Two Chinas

Author Bio

Petrus Liu is an Associate Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College and the author of Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History. Prior to joining the inaugural faculty at Yale-NUS College, he was an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Liu received his B.A. with a triple major in German Literature, Comparative Literature, and East Asian Languages and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, Petrus Liu rethinks the relationship between Marxism and queer cultures in mainland China and Taiwan. Whereas many scholars assume the emergence of queer cultures in China signals the end of Marxism and demonstrates China’s political and economic evolution, Liu finds the opposite to be true. He challenges the persistence of Cold War formulations of Marxism that position it as intellectually incompatible with queer theory, and shows how queer Marxism offers a nonliberal alternative to Western models of queer emancipation. The work of queer Chinese artists and intellectuals not only provides an alternative to liberal ideologies of inclusion and diversity, but demonstrates how different conceptions of and attitudes toward queerness in China and Taiwan stem from geopolitical tensions. With Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Liu offers a revision to current understandings of what queer theory is, does, and can be. —Duke University Press