Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong
by Helen Leung Hok-sze
Reviewed by Nigel Collett
http://www.upiasia.com/Bookshelf/934/Helen Leung's book is the first volume of the new series from Hong Kong University Press, "Queer Asia", a pioneering undertaking which links the Press with a group of academics from universities as far apart as Hong Kong, London, Australia and Canada, and which aims to focus "on non-normative sexuality and gender cultures, identities and practices in Asia." The series seeks to provide an Asian balance to "queer theory", hitherto perhaps a very heavily western-oriented body of work. Leung is an Assistant Professor in women's studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, but in this book her interest is in Hong Kong, and in particular in the examination of what its cinema has to say about its own "queer" culture.
Readers unfamiliar with this burgeoning academic genre may wish to note here that "queer theory" had its roots in earlier studies into homosexual politics, writing and history, and has sought to reclaim the previously pejorative term for homosexual, "queer", a word now used by some to encompass the still growing number of groups of the sexually diverse, groups otherwise subsumed under the acronym LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) or, locally in Hong Kong, in the Chinese term tongzhi, or "comrade". However, "queer theory" has long outgrown its roots to emerge as the study of almost anything that can be described as marginal in society, though more usually of the sexual. The cynical might also note here that this is a field largely dominated by erstwhile teachers of literature, and one of the most telling criticisms that may be made of the body of work that it has produced is that it is all too frequently couched in the detached, esoteric, whimsical and not terribly useful jargon of literary criticism.