Polylocality in Queer Sinophone Cinema

Abstract

<p>My essay maps Yingjin Zhang’s impact on film studies by tracing selective examples of polylocality in queer Sinophone cinema. In his original framework of polylocality, the concept refers to “the production of scale and translocality” in cinematic representations of space in globalization. This essay explores several modes of queer urbanism and polylocality across the Sinophone cities of Hong Kong, Taipei, and Kuala Lumpur. In Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 queer classic Happy Together, the local spaces of cruising, drifting, and boredom in Buenos Aires are linked to the postcolonial anxiety of Hong Kong mediated by Taipei as an alternative geopolitical entity. In Yau Ching’s 2002 film Let’s Love Hong Kong, the status of Hong Kong’s newly postcolonial regionalism is linked to its cosmopolitan mediation by various lesbian subjects from Mainland China, the local, and cyberspace. Finally, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2006 ecological and postmodern illumination on queer desire and migrant workers in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone offers a cinematic representation of queer polylocality in Kuala Lumpur. The film details scenes of interracial intimacies, vulnerability, and survival amid ecological destruction and pollution. Overall, my essay thinks with Zhang’s contribution to cinema studies and urban studies by queering the concept of polylocality through Sinophone articulations.</p>