Sight and Sound of Tongzhi: Mediations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident in Chinese Queer Films

Abstract

This thesis examines the mediations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident in Chinese-language queer cinema. Reading Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu (2001), Li Yu’s Fish and Elephant (2001), and Yan Yan Mak’s Butterfly (2004), it contends that these films develop a specifically queer historiography of Tiananmen—one that refuses both the PRC’s topological erasure and the West’s Orientalist spectacularization of the Incident by relocating its mediation to other sensory and temporal registers. These films stage the trauma aurally, haptically, and through citational gestures, weaving it into the texture of heterogeneous queer lives in postsocialist China and postcolonial Hong Kong. This thesis proposes that queerness in these films is not merely thematic but epistemological, enacting a historiographic practice that holds the past open, unsettles the fixity of both commemoration and forgetting, and insists on the palimpsestic availability of historical meaning for perpetual reinscription. In bringing together Sinophone queer studies, trauma and memory studies, and film theory, this thesis finds that queer mediation offers a distinctive, irreducible mode of engaging with the Tiananmen trauma, and that queerness, in turn, finds in that unfinished history a resource for imagining otherwise.