Queer/Trans K’s

Economy

China’s socialist structures are a guise because the state still participates in capitalist activities – we must embrace a Marxist approach to queer IR to understand how specifically oppressions are experienced in a supposedly socialist country

Rofel 2012

(Lisa, Professor of Anthropology at The University of California, Santa Cruz, B.A., from Brown University, M.A., and Ph.D., from Stanford University, Author of “Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture.”, “Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism”, “Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State” , "Modernity's Masculine Fantasies”, "Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents," and "'Yearnings': Televisual Love and Melodramatic Politics in Contemporary China," - “Queer Positions, Queering Asian Studies” Published by Duke University Press, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/article/477200/pdf - KSA)

Positions has enabled a queering of Asian studies through this queer Marxism. For rather than insisting on separable domains of study or a universalizing approach to the study of capitalism or nonnormative desires, positions encouraged tracing the embodied entanglements between the erotic, desire, and political economic and geopolitical power in its broadest sense. Queer Marxism in this guise does not adhere to the Enlightenment dream of a common humanity, with a universal subjectivity in relation to Western capitalism and its aftermath. Queer activists in Asia and Asian studies, espe- positions 20:1 Winter 2012 188 cially those who challenge normativity in all its guises, live and think from a place of displacement, and therefore have abandoned such a dream. A queer Marxist Asian studies means transforming the relationship of power/ knowledge from this displaced positionality based in bodily pleasures that challenge normative desire and alienated labor, as they have been constructed in racialized imperial regimes. This queer Marxism obviously informs the special issue of positions, “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts,” that Petrus Liu and I coedited. It also informs my recent work. My ability to write Desiring China was a personal breakthrough in bringing together what had been treated as disparate concerns.9 In Desiring China, I was able to demonstrate how the production of desire lies at the heart of neoliberal global processes. I argued that an analysis of the relationship between neoliberalism and the formation of new subjectivities in China necessitates attention to heteronormative politics and their subversions as well as the formation of gay identities in the midst of neoliberal ambivalence about licit and illicit desires. I brought this analytical lens to bear on what otherwise would have seemed a disparate array of issues, everything from gay identity formation in China to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. Several of my new projects continue in this vein. Broadly speaking, I am both participating in and analyzing transnational relations of desire and production. My participation has entailed political discussions with queer activists in China and currently a translation project of Cui Zi’en’s writings.10 Cui Zi’en, a professor at the Beijing Film Institute, is a well-known queer experimental lmmaker and novelist. He is one of the most visible, out gay activists and intellectuals in China. In addition to his lms and novels, Cui Zi’en is one of the main organizers of Beijing’s bi-annual Queer Film and Culture Festival. This activism has hurt his career in China, though he has not landed in jail. In his essay in “Beyond the Strai(gh)ts,” Cui playfully argues that the underground activities of lesbian and gay organizations in China formed “the rst Communist International.”11 And just as with previous communist organizing, the fear of homosexuality in China has to do, according to Cui, with the fact that homosexuality has a globalized presence. “To me,” he wrote, “the concept of the ‘nation’ has been dissolved by queerness.”12 The politics of translation has been widely discussed in academia.13 One pragmatic aspect that often goes unremarked is that translation from a Rofel ❘ Queer positions, Queering Asian Studies 189 country not yet dominated by English and of authors marginalized in their own countries is a political project of establishing a transnational politics, in this case, of queer activism. This translation work has shaped one of my new projects, on nomadic activism in China. I am beginning to write about political activism in China across a range of politics: queer, environmental, land rights, animal rights, and labor. Rather than reinforce the dichotomies that lead people to write on only one of these issues, I plan to write across their seemingly disparate concerns to address how their activism overlaps as well as diverges, how it draws from transnational as well as nationalist concerns, and, most importantly, how it draws on memories of socialist notions of justice as well as creates novel ideas about human and nonhuman survivability. In my essay on queer activism in China, for example, I chart its hybrid sources of inspiration, including neoliberalism, the Marxism that infused life in China for over forty years, and the history of socialism in China that continues to be required reading in school.14 Queer activism in China is shaped not only by the utopian goals of social equality and social justice inspired by Chinese Marxism but also by some of the specic strategies used by Communist Party organizers prior to the revolution. But queer activism in China is also shaped by the contemporary contours of neoliberal power in which and through which LGBT activists try to imagine and enact livable lives. Queer activists in China today thus grapple with the conjunctural articulations of utopian dreams that Marxist-inspired national liberation struggles unleashed and that have not been laid to rest, the sedimented forms of power the socialist state has put into place that always have gaps, and neoliberalism’s commodied hopes and dreams that provide grounds for pushing against boundaries marking licit from illicit desires. Moreover, the fact that Chinese socialism continues to be the formal rhetoric of the state means that citizens protesting various social injustices have repeatedly called upon the state to live up to its socialist rhetoric in the face of the capitalism the state has encouraged and helped to create.15 I further argue that in the current moment in China, there is no way for activists to demand rights from the state. China currently has the formal rule of law, but only those involved with property, commerce, and consumption can claim something called “rights.” While rights associated with positions 20:1 Winter 2012 190 consumerism, commercial progress, and intellectual property seem to be developing rapidly, other kinds of rights are marginalized. Rights associated with sexual minorities are a good example. In this context, I argue, the difculty of doing politics on the terrain of “rights” opens up a space that enables a different kind of political creativity. The fact that rights are not currently viable means that lesbians and gay men have the opportunity not to capitulate to heteronormative social life. That is, the ability to press for a nonassimilationist, nonnormative life is enabled by this context.16

Focus on maintaining healthy economies is reaffirms rigid gender hierarchies

Cohen and Lee 13

Mordecai Cohen (M.C.) Ettinger has been engaged in social justice struggles for the last 12 years on multiple fronts ranging from queer/transgender/intersex liberation, to Palestine liberation solidarity. He worked with TransAction since its inception and co-founded Jews for a Free Palestine.Alexander Lee is a transgender person on the FTM spectrum of Chinese and Taiwanese descent. He is a second-generation immigrant, originally from Orange County, CA. He is also the founding director of the TGI Justice Project, a nonprofit organization that works to end human rights abuses against transgender, gender variant and intersex people in prisons and jails.Lessons for the Left from the Radical Transgender Movement

November 10, 2013 http://bodyeclectic.net/lessons-for-the-left-from-the-radical-transgender-movement/

Despite (or because of) being pushed out of the leadership of the new LGB movement that emerged in the decades following the uprisings at Stonewall and Compton’s, the rampant discrimination and grinding poverty experienced by many transgender people has changed very little. The transgender community continues to experience extreme levels of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. Transgender women of color in particular are most vulnerable because of the multiple layers of oppression they experience as women, as women of color, and as transgender women of color. Not surprisingly, transgender women are vastly overrepresented in US criminal justice systems, and at the same time are over-represented as the victims of individual and state-sponsored hate crimes.¶ Even a transgender person with race, class, or educational privilege is likely to face downward class mobility as a consequence of transphobia. Leslie Feinberg, well known multi-issue radical and transgender activist, has proposed in hir book Transgender Warriors that colonization and industrialization have intensified rigid gender hierarchies for the benefit of the perpetuation of capitalism. Thus passing unambiguously as a woman or man, or fitting into the “gender binary” is necessary to avoid stigma and marginalization from the gender-rigid free market economy. The pressure to pass has only intensified as globalization creates a huge low-wage service sector, which demands an intelligible gender expression from its workers. For those whose gender expressions or identities do not or cannot pass, the only option left is to find work in the criminalized economies of drugs or sex work. Participation in this underground economy of course leads to police profiling and disproportionate representation in the prison industrial complex.¶ Transgender and gender variant people also experience transphobia within the field of health care. Psychiatric professionals currently act as gatekeepers for people who may opt for hormone therapy or surgery as part of their gender transitions. More dangerous still is the rampant mistreatment of transgender people within the medical industrial complex, which systematically denies humane treatment of a broad range of health issues from life threatening to the mundane. There are well documented cases of transgender women being left to die during life saving emergency procedures when medical personnel discovered their transgender status and either refused or were “too shocked” to resume treatment.