Queer Sinophone Literature in Hong Kong: The Politics of Worldliness

Abstract

Sinophone studies examines the dissemination of Sinitic-language communities and their lived histories and cultural expressions. In Visuality and Identity, Shu-mei Shih defines the Sinophone as “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several centuries.” This chapter queers the concept of the Sinophone by examining literary texts written by one of the most prolific writers in Hong Kong, Wong Bik-wan. In particular, I address the following questions: How does Hong Kong as an intermediary city of global capitalism and a postcolonial region within China exemplify the politics of worldliness? In turn, how does Hong Kong literature in the case of Wong Bik-wan queer the received historicism of capitalist modernity and neoliberalism? Drawing on Shih’s concept of the Sinophone, Edward Said’s theory of worldliness as textual affiliation, and Pheng Cheah’s theory of worlding as a temporal rupture of capitalism, my chapter delineates the queer and worlding potentials of Wong Bik-wan’s 1999 feminist classic Portraits of Martyred Women and her 2012 novel Children of Darkness. Both novels exemplify the queer worldliness of Hong Kong by representing the politics of feminist toughness, gender solidarity, and materialist critique. Connecting the two thematic threads on toughness and gendered solidarity is Wong’s literary encounter with the sedimentation, burden, and force of History itself. While Wong’s texts may not be constellational and Benjaminian in the sense of capturing historical violence in a moment of shock and emergency, her mode of historical materialism is much subtler and traffics in the realms of the minor, the quotidian, and the queer. Overall, Wong’s novels capture other modes of “being in the world” not predetermined by the materialist force of global capital in and beyond Hong Kong.