“A New Species”

Abstract

Taking as its starting point Michel Foucault's use of the biological species metaphor in his claim that, in nineteenth-century Europe, “the homosexual was now a new species,” this article considers the sudden explosion of homoerotic activities and cultural representations in Greater China beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The article focuses in particular on four literary works dating from around 1994 that examine queer individuals in relation modern institutional structures associated with disciplines of biology/science, reportage/media, medicine/activism, and policing/psychiatry. At the same time, however, through attention to the role played by these institutional structures in shaping new queer subjectivities, each of these four works emphasizes the subject's ability to intervene in the discursive formations within which those same subjectivities are positioned and thereby to narrativize the subject's own identity.