Date: Tuesday August 27, 2024

Workshop: 4:15 -5:15PM

Talk: 5.:30-7:00 PM

Venue: LIB 2001

Speaker: Hu Ying, PhD Candidate in Literary Studies from the Department of English, Linguistics and Theater Studies, National University of Singapore

Abstract

In this talk, I will consider Zhuangzi’s conception of wuwei (无为, literally “non-action”) as a critical intervention to contemporary queer theory and politics. Wuwei names an individual’s resonance with Dao, the natural condition of all things that governs the universe. It portrays a life that spontaneously expresses desires, affects, and belongings, as if unconstrained by any subject positions in human reality. Wuwei illustrates Zhuangzi’s materialist stance that sees a life through its very materiality, instead of its socio-political situatedness. I argue that wuwei can inflect and translate Western queer theorists’ formulation of subjectless politics—particularly regarding liberal recuperative recognition of marginal subjects—into an existential concern of living on spontaneously. I see the stakes of wuwei manifested in Lou Ye’s film Spring Fever (2009): as an example of queer cinema’s supra-social/political articulation, Lou’s film focuses excessively on queer protagonists’ sexual encounters that unfold naturally and contingently in private life. Queer life appears aloof from neoliberal China’s changing public culture, notably during the progress of China’s cosmopolitan modernity in the early 2000s. Lou’s underground production of the film, therefore, exemplifies a queer art of withdrawing from cultural/sexual citizenship.

Speaker’s Bio:

Hu Ying is a PhD Candidate in Literary Studies from the Department of English, Linguistics and Theater Studies, National University of Singapore. By reading Chinese philosophy along contemporary Asian queer literature, cinema, and cultural phenomena, his current research questions the confluence of queer theory and Western philosophical/political traditions, with an aim to explore alternative forms of queer life and politics.