Leaning Toward the Wild: Queer Inhumanisms across More-than-Human Archives in the Sinophone

Abstract

This thesis investigates how queer relations in Sinophone cultural production emerge through encounters between human and nonhuman forces. While much scholarship on Chinese queer culture has focused on identity, representation, and political recognition, this project asks a different question: how do animals, objects, environments, and infrastructures participate in shaping queer intimacies, affects, and histories? The project brings together films, documentaries, and literary works across the Sinophone world and organizes them into three thematic “archives.” The first archive examines the circulation of queer intimacy and labor through independent film and documentary, focusing on Li Yu’s Fish and Elephant (2001) and Susan Chen’s Lesbian Factory (2010), where queer relations unfold alongside animals, urban environments, migrant infrastructures, and labor struggles. The second archive turns to literary experiments in language and ecology through Lin Zhao’s Chaoxitu (2021) and Zhang Guixing’s Monkey Cup (2000), analyzing how dialect, mimicry, and nonhuman narrators challenge normative conceptions of Chinese language and national belonging. The third archive traces the genealogy of camp across queer cultural production, exploring how humor, excess, and aesthetic incongruity register both the glamour and the underside of queer histories. Methodologically, the thesis combines close reading, film analysis, and theoretical engagement with queer theory, animacy studies, and affect theory, while also adopting an autotheoretical mode of writing that situates embodied experience within the analytical process. By foregrounding these more-than-human assemblages, the project reframes Sinophone queer archives as dynamic constellations of interabsorption, where queer life persists and becomes legible through its ongoing negotiations with the inhuman world.