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Queer Media Loci: Hong Kong

In the third installment of Queer Media Loci, “An Unruly Death: Queer Media in Hong Kong,” author Denise TseShang Tang performs a delicate intervention. Her essay is both a rebuke and an autopsy of the persistent rumors that Hong Kong is dead or dying — only a pale, vampiric presence of its former glory. If this were the case, to closely look at and write about queer media production, exhibition, and consumption in contemporary Hong Kong would be akin to a wake, a funeral, a raising of the dead, or a hunt for the undead. But Tang does nothing so ghastly in response to rumors of queer Hong Kong’s demise. Instead, she performs a nonchalant evocation of four case studies in contemporary queer media. At first glance, Tang’s choice of case studies — an online video series about the bullying of LGBT students in high schools, the mediated efforts to fight against fundamentalist Christian propaganda by grassroots queer activists, genderambiguous performances by pop divas and an electronica duo, and gossip magazine reports on celebrities in sensationalized lesbian relationships — may seem a far cry from the lively activity of Hong Kong queer cinema’s glory days. Not so long ago, Bridgette Lin gave an epic portrayal of the transgender superhero, Asia the Invincible, in The Legend of The Swordsman (1992) and Swordsman III: The East Is Red (1993), and Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung played gay lovers adrift in Buenos Aires in auteur Wong KarWai’s critically acclaimed Happy Together (1997). Yet Tang’s less glamorous examples perfectly embody her notion of a “localized queer nonchalance” among Hong Kong’s lesbian, gay, and transgender communities. Her case studies are quiet utterances of Hong Kong’s transnational queer media scene: paradoxical, ephemeral, and difficult to render in sharp and living focus. Retro and forwardlooking, radical and conservative, found in both likely and unlikely locales for queer media, these queer experiences haunt