China’s foreign student programs, many initiated under the banner of the unity of socialist countries and Afro-Asian solidarity, were originally designed to project international recognition of the newly established People’s Republic of China. Yet, these initiatives unfolded within an environment where government agencies closely monitored public expression and everyday life. For foreign students, daily life was mediated by state-managed hospitality, limited mobility, and surveillance. On the Chinese side, distrust of foreigners was pervasive at that time and actively cultivated by the authorities. All this caused foreign students to experience a feeling akin to what today is known as political depression.

In How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) and Land of Milk and Honey (2023), C. Pam Zhang explores Chinese diasporic subjectivities across shifting temporal and geographic terrains. Adopting a queer counter-perspective, she unsettles racist, classist, and heteronormative narratives of ‘Chineseness’, ‘manhood’, and ‘womanhood’ in nineteenth-century and contemporary Euro-American contexts. Using these two novels as examples, this essay traces the dialectic of self-representation and interpellation, the afterlives of transgenerational trauma, and the imbrication of aspiration with pleasure. It further elucidates how Zhang entwines debates on universal human rights amid anthropogenic catastrophe with an analysis of individual responsibility under transnational capitalism.

Since the 2010s, the debate about anti-gender politics has centred on the rise of right-wing forces and ideologies that are trans-exclusionary, queerphobic, and anti-feminist—particularly hostile to queer and intersectional feminisms (Butler 2024). These movements often weaponise victimhood to uphold existing structures of power: cisgender women are portrayed as victims of transgender rights under cis-sexism; men […]

It has become something of a truism, in both academic discourse and everyday conversation, that invisibility is a central form of queer oppression. In a culture in which queer lives are erased—whether through passive ignorance, deliberate exclusion, or reductive portrayals as tragic, broken figures—the urgency of authentic representation cannot be overstated. But when it comes […]