Value and world making: Notes on the materiality and impossibility of global subjectivities

When the lovely Japanese are out, you know it [the movement] has made it global!¹

In a 20-s long clip from Shibuya in Tokyo, we see a rally turning right on a traffic light holding a long banner and numerous placards with demands for a ceasefire. In an orderly fashion, three columns of people walk in a long serpentine rally screaming the slogan ‘Boycott Israel’. The clip is captioned – ‘The movement has reached Japan. Chants of boycott Israel resonated throughout the streets of Shibuya in Tokyo’. Under the clip, one can notice several comments proclaiming that Japanese people have been in the movement for the past 7 months. Two responses caught my attention to a comment that said: ‘Finally they are out!’ One said, ‘We have been protesting for 7 months. It just did not reach; Japan is not on a different planet! Another said, ‘They have been protesting here since October. The algorithm finally caught you!’ While both confirm and affirm that Japan has been actively demanding a ceasefire and boycott since the beginning of the genocidal war, they simultaneously register the invisibilisation of the conscience and agency of a vast region that fails to find space in the mental map and media consumption of a large majority of people located in the West/US. Even if one can forsake this instance of invisibilisation, two things become pertinent to note here: the (cultural) characterisation of Japanese as lovely people who are orderly even in dissent; and their participation in the movement as a marker of the globality of the demand for boycott rooted in the BDS movement. The clip, in its proclamation of the globality of the demand (for boycott), considers Japan as an active participant in the larger discourse of war and violence unlike the comments that follow. While there are multiple stories that define this particular moment in the construction of Japanese civility and dissent, the undertones of essentialism and peripheralisation of a region called the ‘far east’ Asia seems to be an interesting endeavour to undertake.

In Petrus Liu's The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of Beijing Consensus, one finds this larger narrative of peripheralisation of regions and cultures that are far, geographically, from the US/West (scholarly) interests and become visible only as empirical notations. Divided into two parts, Theory and History, Liu invites his readers to a process of refraction² where forms and processes of capital are visible in the cultural, social, and literary histories and become significant to understand the invisibilisation and obliteration of cultures and histories that are distant from the US/West.

For a scholar interested in gendered labour and labour activist networks, with negligible training in textual analysis, this book comes as a reassurance that engaging with materiality as the central question in the global south is a worthwhile project. This book proposes that materiality must be understood as something that is not limited to the economic position one assumes but one that makes world making possible in the current neoliberal capitalist moment that seems to present a homogeneous view of the world irrespective of the specificities based on spatial and temporal contexts.

Drawing from Marx, Petrus Liu conceptualises capitalism as a totality describing it not as a mere economic process but ‘a kind of haunting, a structure of social relations that is legible only through its traces’ (9). These traces, as he proceeds to demonstrate, can be located in the processes of subsumption – a key operative term in the book – whereby capital reorganises social and cultural relations and creates a differential and hierarchical distribution of life chances. Capitalism, then, is legible in the discursive practices that renders a human subject racialised, gendered, and disposable. Divided into two parts, ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of Beijing Consensus is a methodological intervention that presents a material reading of literary narratives and their discursive possibilities to understand the political economy of sexuality in the context of postsocialist China.

Petrus Liu begins by locating his project in the materialist turn in new queer studies drawing distinction from the preoccupation of the queer theory in the 1990s United States with experiential accounts. He argues that the materialist turn of investigating the predicaments of global precariat and its relations with the neoliberal state has made queer theory take a decisive turn from theories of representation and performativity towards the questions of dispossession and precarity. The new queer theory presupposes the optic of intersectionality that is concerned with anti-heteronormativity and the material distribution and stratification of life chances. In this context, Liu seeks to explore the political economy of sexuality in postsocialist China that has replaced the US as the centre of global capitalism with its low cost, high quality labour, vast consumer market, and expanding relations with the neighbouring countries as a donor or development partner. Locating the distinctiveness of the term ‘queer’ in a spatial context as that of China, Liu contradicts the assumption of the West as the inventor of queer subjectivities to argue that queer bodies, in China, are not only present and unrecognised but are also labouring bodies engaged in the global economic processes that produce both use and exchange values on an everyday basis. Queer, Liu contends, is an anti-identitarian category that functions ‘as a placeholder for a collective historical subject-in-process [highlighting] the problems of cultural comparison, linguistic translation, and political community’ (27).

In the second part, Liu expands on the concept of ‘subsumption’ in literature, politics of the Cold War, and the projects of gender mainstreaming. He contends that the socialist vision of the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong was anchored in a cultural revolution that saw reconstruction of literature as central to the materialist basis of the new society. It is here that the queer literature and communities found visibility. He narrates the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) evocation of Lu Xun as an official Maoist icon – as a literary icon whose writings subsume ideological transformation from class struggle in the 1950s to economic reconstruction in the post-Cultural Revolution era. Lu Xun's use of spoken Chinese, bestowing agency to capital's subject, and distinguishing the particular and localised identity of the Chinese in comparison to the universalisation of the Chinese identity into a global subject distinguished him as a literary icon who has consistently been subsumed into the CCP’s narrative of the new Chinese subject. The attempt at subsuming the class analysis in Lu Xun's writing, Liu argues, remains essential to understand the interactions and deliberations that the Chinese state initiates to establish control, pride, and legitimacy of its vision and rule. The expansion of China in the regions of Africa through infrastructural projects to demonstrate the intentions of postsocialist China to alter the geopolitical order through south–south cooperation between nations of the global South and provide an alternative model of state-sponsored economic development or what we presently understand as the Beijing Consensus. This economic development as a result of the land tenure reforms in agrarian regions led to the capitalisation of agrarian land and the creation of a floating migrant labour population giving rise to the two labouring bodies that this book looks at – female migrant workers or the dagongmei and rural to urban sex workers or the money boys – as gender categories in formation that embody contradictions of capitalism as agential subjects.³

Contrary to the harmonious growth narrative of the east Asian nations due to their relations with China, he draws our attention to the social antagonisms based on nationalism that led to the anti-systemic Umbrella and Sunflower movements in 2014 and the 2019–20 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Liu here interjects that Cold War be understood as a method rather than a mere temporal break due to its imprints on Asian subjectivities. Presenting a close reading of the 1992 Hong Kong film Swordsman II: Asia the Invincible directed by Ching Siu-tung where the first transgender character was introduced in Chinese cinema. Asia, the villainous character, becomes an iconographic figure of queer excess with parallels drawn with Mao Zedong in a context of Cold War where anti-imperialist movements against Chinese dominance over Taiwan and Hong Kong were present. Here, the figuration of Asia vis-a-vis Cold War politics arrives as a methodological intervention. This brings us to the last chapter where Liu expands on the subsumption of sexuality in the Beijing Conference on Women. The incompleteness of the term ‘gender’ in accommodating the multiple identities in the gender mainstreaming projects became apparent in the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women. Seen as one of the landmark moments in the history of women's activism, Beijing Conference arrived at a cultural juncture where the CCP believed and propagated that women were equal to men but at the same time presented a ‘desexualised image of women as productive workers’ (132). From equating sex to gender, gender to women, and women to development, developmentalist discourse fixes gender identities instead of recognising the cultural differences and specificities present in the Chinese language that has separate terms for sex one is born in and sex chosen for self (Shengli xingbie and Shehui xingbie, respectively), where gender remains an uncategorised concept and holds several meanings. Referring to Luce Irigaray's definition of ‘women as sex that cannot be thought’ (29) and Lu Xun's use of recurring phrases in moments of dispossession (99), Liu here reminds us of the failure of language that corresponds with the understanding of queer as a subject-in-progress where material conditions of dispossession, precarity, and disposability becomes relevant. It resides along with the difficulties of constructing a global queer identity that aligns with the Western notions of sexuality which denies the presence of gender variance present in the non-Western cultures.

Petrus Liu presents us with an interconnection between literature, Cold War and gender mainstreaming to argue that the accumulation of capital is followed by dispossession and precarity. The relations of intimacy and alienation between the global North and global South become prominent in the interactions and distances, global North is positioned as the producer of categories and knowledge with an interest in universalising their conjectures, while global South strives to hold a place of non-conformity to these universalising definitions of modern individualised subjectivities. The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of Beijing Consensus, in an unsettling tone, tells us that what counts as ‘value’ or valuable in a capitalistic system is governed by its cultural specificities. The point of convergence between the cultural specificities and totalising tendencies of the capitalist system becomes the site of competing truths which are possible to explore through a focus on the materiality of bodies – in both their constructions and decays.