Claustrophobic Sexuality: Mapping Gay Male Urban Subjects and Postmodernity in the Films of Cui Zi’en

Abstract

<p>This chapter reconsiders the role of sexuality in postmodern theory and enquires into the reasons that a postmodernist urban mapping of gay male subjects in many transnational Chinese films appears often through the distinctive trope of claustrophobia. The chapter argues that while many queer Chinese films narrate unlivable and spatially compressed queer lives, they also help us imagine a queer kind of cognitive mapping, a perverse remapping that hints at the possibility of pleasures, rebellion and queer existence despite the forces of postsocialist market expansion in China. Theoretically, the chapter extends both David Harvey and Fredric Jameson's theories of postmodern space by examining how such spatial conspiracy is most powerfully represented through individual claustrophobic relation to the urban totality. It argues that the films of Cui Zi’en (PRC), namely The Old Testament (2002) and Feeding Boys, Ayaya (2003), both confirm the logics of queer claustrophobia while self-reflexively provide alternative perverse mappings.</p>