Qiunong Liu

About Qiunong’s Research:

Current studies on Chinese queer performance emphasise films and TV dramas and seldom study theatre under censorship. My project will investigate contemporary Chinese theatre-makers’ artistic and commercial strategies in representing queer lives and experiences under conditions of censorship. Drawing on theories of queer affect and temporality, it focuses on the key sites of theatre production in Beijing and Shanghai. I select relatively popular theatre productions because they are more easily exposed to censorship, and I want to see how queerness as an expression of marginalised experience can be woven into the shows that try to attract the general public. Through interviews with theatre-makers and analysis of key performances and their reception, the project explores how contemporary work stages utopian possibilities in a scene of complex constraints. Moreover, I consider the notions of affect and temporality in the shows not only as strategies, but also as a result of the Chinese historical context, challenging the Eurocentric situatedness of queer theory.
This project asks the following questions:
1.What are the forms of censorship on theatre performance in contemporary China, and how do they influence the artistic and commercial strategies of queer theatre-makers?
2.Under these conditions, how are queer experiences represented, explicitly or implicitly, in urban Chinese theatre practice across plays and musicals?
3.How do theatre-makers mobilise queer notions of affect and temporality as strategies of implicit representation and as a means of evading censorship?
4.How do these strategies vary in the case of works translated into Chinese from other cultural contexts?