Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong

Sexuality Studies

by 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. She explores Hong Kong cultural productions – cinema, fiction, popular music, and subcultural projects – and argues that while there is no overt consolidation of gay and lesbian identities in Hong Kong culture, undercurrents of diverse and complex expressions of gender and sexual variance are widely in evidence. 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.

Genres: LGBT

186 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Andre · Rating 2 out of 5]

Talk about a book starting good and going downhill over time.
It truly started well, like with having some American come along and being annoying because he said other countries should strive to be like his, I can relate to that annoyance. And I had the suspicion that "queer" means "vague" or "contradictory" for this author but waited to see what would come.
It started getting odd when some guy named Kwan seemed to be implying that it is time for Hong Kong people to stop denying their Chinese identity. He should tell that to Hong Kongers now, let’s see what happens, especially when you imply to speak Mandarin instead of Cantonese.
I also wondered: I know that there is a tv-version of the novel Crystal Boys (Niezi), but this here speaks of "many subsequent literary, cinematic, and television works that it has influenced or inspired" and I wonder what these are. I could not find out.
What I could find out is that in this book, „queer" and its meaning seems to switch back and forth between bisexual and vague. Maybe it is supposed to mean vague or non-normative, but that in and off itself is so vague of a definition that it is essentially meaningless in my mind. And I noticed something: The words gay and lesbian are pretty much everywhere in this book, but bisexuality occurred quite sparingly. That is odd. What is it with this author and the exclusion of bisexuality as an option? She didn't mention it for chapters on end, even though what she portrays of the character of Thirteen in “Portland Street Blues” could as well be subsumed under bisexuality instead of just claiming that she doesn't fit the hetero- and homosexual dichotomy. She had one chapter with it in the title, but it is still a clear minority. And I find it ironic when she writes that Cheung coming out as gay instead of bisexual would never had triggered the debates regarding the "absolute distinction" between gay and straight when she herself only cares about the effect of the statement, has the passages about bisexuality not even be three pages and then drops the term and goes back to "queer" which I still things basically means "vague" here and her concept of "queerness" sometimes seems to be so vague that it is almost meaningless.
And no idea what the author truly wanted, to take one example: If eroticism is spontaneous and cannot be created, why complain that this one movie hast no three-way?
One time, I had no idea what a passage was about. I knew that I probably would forget it soon and I did.
There was one chapter about same-sex female desire that sounded quite interesting and I hope that Cvetkovich woman mentioned in it wasn't shocked when people were appalled by her suggestion that abuse can cause homosexuality. Even with her apparent suggestion that in that because homosexuality is somehow the cure for the abuse, that seems like a really bad explanation and might not fit into the collected knowledge on trauma.
And I was pretty sure that by the time this book came out it was no longer true to claim that "sexual minorities suffer from virtual invisibility", of course, considered that the only study she names is one of Hollywood films than this assessment is not surprising. In fact, like with the dumb Crazy Rich Asians movie, this concentration on Hollywood is detrimental to a severe degree.
At least I got to get some information on movies and the whole topic of degeneration and becoming female as shown in the novel that later became the movie Swordsman 2 reminds me about those Chinese evolutionary theories that claim that women are basically less evolved males. And in such a mindset a degenerating man (here a castrated on) would "naturally" become a woman.
And I did wonder whether she would interpret the popularity of Bowie, Mercury and Boy George in the "West" as equally a sign of a "long-held cultural fascination with cross-gender performances" as she does in Hong Kong.
In the end I had only a few more pages to go and I was thinking about quitting, because the current chapter was pretty dull and how much could she improve in only 6 pages?
And at that point I was not even three quarters through the book. It was filled with that many bibliographies and all.
This was mostly a pointless book.

[Yvette]

Very useful and insightful read into queer reading strategies in a specific context of Hong Kong as a postcolonial city. I enjoyed the way she wrote and drew critical links between concepts such as space to queer bodies in movies for instance.