The ‘Queer Generation’: Queer Community Documentary in Contemporary China

: In this article, I chart a brief history of the queer community documentary in the PRC since the 2000s by introducing its historical conditions of emergence and development. In doing so, I highlight the activist dimension of queer filmmaking and its transnational nature. I focus specifically on the aesthetics and politics, together with modes of production and circulation, of these queer community documentaries. I call the group of filmmakers working around the Beijing Queer Film Festival and the China Queer Film Festival Tour the ‘queer generation’. The ‘queer generation’ filmmakers use documentary films as a tool to engage in political and social activism. Their films and activist practices should be put in a transnational context and seen as part of the transnational cinema and international queer movements. As these filmmakers documented queer community histories, they also ‘queered’ Chinese documentaries and Chinese film industries at large. Their works represent grassroots, community-based and activist-oriented political engagements in contemporary China; these works also point to the political potential of queerness and documentary films in the world today.


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In the past two decades, there has been a surge of queer-themed documentary films in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Equipped with digital video cameras, many queeridentified individuals have self-consciously documented their own lives and the lives of people in the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) communities. Most of these films deal with issue of gender, sexuality and identity. Many are made to share with other community members and often circulated online and in community spaces. They are documentaries made by, for and about China's LGBTQ communities. They are often referred to as 'queer activist documentary' (Shaw and Zhang 2017) or 'queer community documentary'. Following Zhang Zhen (2007), who calls a group of 'sixth-generation' filmmakers who make films on urban life the 'urban generation', and inspired by the tagline of 'Generation Q' (Ku'er diedai) from the Shanghai Queer Film Festival in 2018, I call this group of filmmakers who make films on queer issues the 'queer generation'.
Like 'urban generation', the term 'queer generation' is a new coinage in Chinese film studies and queer scholarship. In real life few people would know what this means although many may immediately recognise the term's reference to the tradition of naming groups of filmmakers in terms of 'generation' in Chinese film historiography. Even the filmmakers who happen to fall into this category may not readily identify with this label. It is, however, not difficult to list some of the characteristics shared among the 'queer generation' filmmakers: most of them are LGBTQ, or queer (ku'er), identified; their films primarily document the life of gender and sexual minorities in China. Most of the filmmakers lived in Beijing in the early 2000s and most were directly or indirectly connected to China's leading queer filmmaker and activist Cui Zi'en. Most were involved in the organisation of the Beijing Queer Film Festival (since 2011) and the China Queer Film Festival Tour (2008. Around Cui Zi'en and the Beijing Queer Film Festival, the group formed a closely-knit queer film collective. Most of these filmmakers were born in the 1970s and 80s to one-child families. Many of them were 4 university educated and trained in creative arts (such as scriptwriting, painting and theatre) but very few directly in filmmaking. In other words, they are all self-taught filmmakers.
Despite all these similarities, it is these filmmakers' 'family resemblance' in terms of film aesthetics and politics, as well as their collective contributions to China's queer history, that unite them as a group of filmmakers and their works as a distinct body of works.
This article marks an effort to think of Chinese queer documentary, and in fact Chinese queer cinema, as beyond the national cinema paradigm and as a form of transnational cinema. As I will demonstrate in this article, growing up in a globalising China, the 'queer generation' filmmakers' filmmaking and activist practices are situated in a transnational context, and informed by international discourses about sexual identity and social movements. The aesthetics and politics of these films, together with their mode of production and circulation, are undeniably transnational. These films challenge an essentialised notion of 'Chineseness', which the concept of 'Huallywood' (Fu, Indelicato and Qiu 2016) also takes to task. They also open up discussions about what films are and can do. In their study of Western queer history and film history, Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs (1997) suggest that as queer documentaries document queer histories, they also 'queer' documentaries. If that is true, then Chinese queer documentaries not only challenges 'Chineseness', but also queers film history and cinematic apparatuses. In this article, by documenting key filmmakers and works that fall into the category of queer community documentary in contemporary China since the 2000s, I hope to write these filmmakers and their works into transnational queer and film histories.

Historicising Queer Films and Film Festivals
The emergence of queer community documentary and other queer themed films in the early 2000s was not a coincidence. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in the PRC in 1997 5 and removed from the third edition of the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders   Since the first Beijing Queer Film Festival, a group of young queer-identified filmmakers have been working with Cui Zi'en, professor of film theory and scriptwriting from the Beijing Film Academy, to make and screen queer-themed films. They lived in Beijing and socialised in a closely-knit community. Some were Cui's students such as Fan Popo who studied scriptwriting at the Beijing Film Academy. They mostly came from a creative art background: for example, Shi Tou trained as an artist and Wei Xiaogang was trained in stage drama. Although the term 'queer' was relatively new at the time, most of them were queer identified and supported queer politics instead of gay identity politics. They used documentary films as their major form of artistic expression and political engagement. Their 6 documentary films mostly spoke to community concerns such as 'coming out', parentchildren relationship, marriage and kinship. They worked closely with each other, often sharing ideas, expertise and resources with each other. In the process, the aesthetic styles and political stances of their films cross-fertilised each other. They shared their films at private parties and community events. They worked together to put on the Beijing Queer Film Festival and the China Queer Film Festival Tour. In this context, Cui compared the Beijing Queer Film Festival to like-minded friends getting together and having a party (Cui in Fan 2015: 256). Because of the publicness of the film festivals and other screening events, their films and the film events they put on should not be seen as merely personal and apolitical; they increasingly became an important part of China's burgeoning LGBTQ movement. It is under these historical conditions that the filmmakers worked together as a group, which I call 'the queer generation'.
Despite the decriminalisation and depathologisation of homosexuality, queer rights are far from being guaranteed in the PRC. China's media regulator, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), consistently bans queer films from being legally produced and sponsored. Therefore, most queer-themed films are made independently or semi-underground, without recourse to government support and public funding, and with no hope of being released on television or at commercial cinemas. Unauthorised events such as a queer film festival challenge the government regulation on public event, assembly, protest and mass mobilisation, and are therefore seen as politically sensitive. This has led to the Beijing Queer Film Festival being frequently raided by the police, shut down or having to change screening venues.
The single most important reason for the proliferation of queer films has been the emergence and development of queer identities and communities in urban China. Starting in the 1990s, lesbians and gay people have gathered in queer public spaces such as parks and commercial 7 venues including bars, clubs and saunas. The Internet, with mushrooming queer websites and online chatrooms, has also created a public space for sexual minorities to meet and to share information. Increasingly, community groups and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) brought sexual minorities together and a LGBTQ rights discourse started to emerge. As these identities and communities took shape, there was also an increasing demand for representation and rights (Chiang 2019). Films has become an important means for queer individual and group representation.
The need for increasing and positive queer representation has been ignored by mainstream and commercial media. Representations of queer issues on mainstream media are strictly limited and they have evolved slowly. The sense of openness created by the HIV/AIDS discourse in the 2000s has gradually been replaced by tight regulation of queer representations on mainstream media in the 2010s. Commercial and international media have offered more space and greater freedom for queer representation, but they also have to tread carefully over the red tape of China's opaque and idiosyncratic media policies. The Internet and social media have enjoyed more freedom of expression, but they are also subject to constantly changing policies of regulation and censorship. Even within the limited queer representation on media, a large majority are negative and stereotyped representations. In this context, there is an urgent need for queer people to represent their own lives. Queer film and queer film festivals represent such community efforts of self-representation.
Film and film festivals play a significant role in China's LGBTQ activism. In fact, many of the leading queer activists including Cui Zi'en and Shi Tou are filmmakers, or they turned to filmmaking as a way to engage in activism. Many queer public events involve films such as film festivals, film clubs and film screening tours. From an early stage, Chinese queer activists have found that cultural activism, represented by queer films and film festivals, is one of the most viable, sustainable and culturally sensitive ways to conduct activism in the 8 context of China where political activism represented by a pride march is politically sensitive and potentially risky. Film screening events are inclusive and less intimidating to attract new community members. People can attend a film screening event regardless of their identities and identifications; and they can participate in a film festival in a more engaged or distanced manner. In other words, everyone can participate in the film events in a way with which they feel most comfortable, and this facilitates community building. Films created by community members often address issues of identity and community; they bring people together to discuss common issues and concerns. Post-screening Q&As and discussions can often help frame some of the key issues pertaining to identities, communities and rights. As such, films are situated at the ambiguous and yet critical juncture of culture and politics, public and private, personal and political, local, national and transnational. Films and film festivals may look apolitical. However, the affective power of watching films together with like-minded people and its impact for community building and political mobilisation cannot be overlooked (Bao 2010a;Schroeder 2012).

Cui Zi'en and the 'New Queer Chinese Cinema'
Film critic Tony Rayns claimed in a film festival catalogue that Cui Zi'en's 2002 film Enter the Clowns 'inaugurates a new Queer Chinese cinema' (Leung 2012: 518). The term 'new queer Chinese cinema' has since gained popularity in film festival programming and in Chinese film studies. Helen Hok-Sze Leung (2012) identifies the term's root in the international movement of 'New Queer Cinema' and locates the 'queerness' in the following aspects: because they portray lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender characters, but more often because they unsettle the parameters of heterosexuality and its kinship structure; confound 9 expectations of coherence between gender identity, gender expression, and the sexed body; expand the possible configurations of sexual and emotional bonds; and subvert the aesthetic conventions and heterocentric presuppositions of mainstream media. (Leung 2012: 518-19) Although Leung's descriptions are apt for many Chinese queer films produced in the last two decades, the term 'new queer cinema' seems a misnomer in the PRC context. In fact, it is hard to locate an 'old' queer Chinese cinema before the advent of the 'new'. This is also complicated by the fact that 'queer cinema' in China may have appeared earlier than 'gay and lesbian cinema', in the same way that queer politics may have proceeded gay identity politics in the PRC context. Situating Chinese queer cinema in a US and Euro-centric queer film historiography can bring a sense of disjuncture and mismatch. We should treat 'new queer Cui usually makes films on a shoestring budget. He introduced in an interview that he could finish a film within a few days or weeks for only a few thousand RMB (Cui in Fan, 2015: 253). This was largely true, but such an accomplishment was only possible with many resources that Cui has recourse to, including being able to use free editing facilities at the Beijing Film Academy where he taught and rely on the generosity, good will and free labour of his friends. Cui compares the filmmaking process as friends getting together and having a party: I see myself more as an organiser than a director. Forming a film crew is almost like having a party with my friends. My role is to gather people for a big twenty-day party, like a party host. Everyone brings cheese and wine. Of course, in our party they bring a DV camera, tapes and costumes. (Cui in dGenerate Films 2010) The process of Cui's filmmaking is often spontaneous, ad hoc and collaborative: I've always thought of my creations as doing and thinking at the same time. I couldn't complete a script and go shoot it. Since I started making moving images, none of them have been made with a completed screenplay in advance. They were all made on site with a script and a rough outline, according to the resources we had available and the composition of the crew. So, for example, whether we shot in three days or five, what sort of location we used, all was ad hoc, and the dialogue was improvised. Or on a morning I would write an approximation for the daytime actors and then send them off to find their own method of dialogue and shoot it that way. No piece I've shot has relied mechanically on a script. (Cui in Fan 2015: 252) Although Cui was primarily talking about fiction filmmaking in this context, this description also largely applies to his documentaries, especially the docudramas that blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality, as in the film Night Scene. Cui practises a prefigurative politics in his filmmaking: he transforms a traditional hierarchical directorcast/crew relationship into a horizontal one, in which decisions are made collectively and everyone's individuality and creativity is respected. In doing so, he not only challenges the central role of capital in commercial cinema, but the hierarchical and exploitative production system in the film industry.
Cui's experimental style of filmmaking has much to do with his Left political stance: his innovations in cinematic style serve to deconstruct some established traditions in filmmaking.
Cui uses phrases such as 'demolishing the temple' and 'changing blood' to subvert the film's close relationship with the capital (Cui in Fan 2015: 248-9). For Cui, making films and holding queer film festivals are like social gatherings, or shared community activities based on the spirit of friendship, camaraderie, and mutual help, an idea close to 'utopianism, or communism' (p. 253). He often chooses 'the situation of poverty, or bare, stark nudity' to present his understanding of the world (p. 254). The main characters of his films are often portrayed as lumpenproletariat. Cui compares the exchange of ideas through unofficial and underground channels (such as watching bootleg film DVDs and attending international film festivals) to the 'communist international of queer films' (Cui and Liu 2010: 422). As a queer auteur and activist with coherent and innovative political ideas, Cui is a unique voice in the polyphony of the queer film culture both domestically and internationally. Audrey Yue (2012) sees Cui's works as a fine exemplar of 'queer Sinophone films' and Petrus Liu (2015) uses Cui to develop his theory of 'queer Marxism'. As China's leading queer filmmaker and activist, Cui's aesthetics and politics have had a strong impact on other members of the 'queer generation'.

'Queer Generation' Filmmakers and Their Films
The 1985-born Fan Popo was inspired by Cui Zi'en while he was studying at the Beijing Film Academy. He has been an active queer filmmaker and activist ever since. His works feature different aspects of the community life: New Beijing, New Marriage (Xin qianmen dajie, dir. Despite the differences in terms of topics and styles, these young filmmakers all share an identification with and a commitment to queer identities and communities. Many of their films can be seen as 'participatory documentaries' (Nichols 1992), in which filmmaking actively participates in, and consciously shapes, the filmed event. The filmmakers no longer assume a distanced stance from the filmed subjects. Rather, they identify and interact with the filmed subjects. Furthermore, their filmmaking activities and the circulation of these films constitute a 'mediating environment' that involves 'an interactive and intersubjective sociopolitical and critical discourse' around the films (Fan 2016); they can also be seen as 'public culture' that contributes to an emerging queer public space in China ( For films made under these circumstances, commercial success is often not a major concern and even impossible to think about. A filmmakers' job is to make films for the communities they come from and document the community history that they have experienced. Their values as 'testimony' and 'historical archive' are more important, and this is why many documentaries rely heavily on 'talking heads' to document oral histories narrated by interviewees. These filmmakers, however, do have to think about the community audience when they make films, as most of these films are shown in community screenings and at queer film festivals. For example, after shooting Mama Rainbow, Fan Popo shot Papa Rainbow, in response to the audience question of 'where have all the dads gone?'. In this way, these queer filmmakers and the communities they come from are mutually supportive.
As queer communities offer these filmmakers research materials, and support and even reward them with honours and opportunities, the 'queer generation' filmmakers repay the communities with their hard, creative and affective labour. While filmmakers do not necessarily have to represent communities in any rigid or dogmatic manner, they do identify strongly and work closely with queer communities to make their works socially relevant and meaningful.

The Politics and Aesthetics of Queer Documentary
Most of these filmmakers self-identify as 'queer', or ku'er, a transliteration of the English word 'queer' in Chinese. Fan Popo, male by birth, often uses the person pronoun 'she/her' and self-identify as lala (lesbian) on social media to combat patriarchy in gay communities.
Wei Xiaogang's Queer Comrades documentaries explore different sexualities and lifestyles including kink. Cui Zi'en and He Xiaopei's queer stances are most pronounced: Cui refuses to accept any norm in gender, sexuality and filmmaking; he often remarks that he is against the concept of sex and 'every single person might have a sexuality or his or her own' (Cui and Wang 2004: 184). In Queer China, Comrade China, through interviews, Cui speaks against gay identity politics and homonormativity in the LGBTQ movement. For example, when it comes to the topic of same-sex marriage, as he shows the community support for 18 same-sex marriage campaigns, he also interviews queer scholars and activists including Guo Xiaofei, Lisa Rofel and Li Yinhe, all of whom challenge the heteronormative institution of marriage. From these interviews, it is clear that he is not an advocate for same-sex marriages.
He Xiaopei celebrates sexual pleasure in her AIDS documentary The Lucky One; her autobiography film (Duoxinglian jiating, 2010) explores polyamory and human relationships.
He also argues against the PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) type of gay identity politics in Our Marriages as she celebrates alternative families and queer kinship formed by lesbians and gay men through 'cooperative marriages' (xingshi hunyin). Recently He has casted her attention on intersectional issues with gender, sexuality, class, disability and race, through her film Evo and Chrissy (Ruci shenghuo, 2017), Love You Too (2017) and The Playmates (Wanban, 2018).
The 'queer generation' films also manifest distinct aesthetics, which distinguish themselves from other types of independent documentary in China. Chinese film studies scholars have observed the popular obsession with the 'direct cinema' aesthetics among China's independent documentarians (Berry, Lü and Rofel 2010;Robinson 2013). Heavily influenced by American director Frederick Wiseman and Japanese director Ogawa Shinsuke, most Chinese independent documentarians adopt a 'fly-on-the-wall' approach to document the social realities as they observe 'objectively', meanwhile trying their best to erase the filmmakers' subjectivity in front of the camera. Most documentarians in the 'queer generation', in contrast, do not shy away from the camera; some even intentionally embed their voices or bodies in the film and in the social realities of which they play a part. Shi Tou and Ming Ming's films explicitly foreground the filmmaker's subjectivity. In Women 50 Minutes, for example, the two filmmakers not only make their social commentaries in the form of film subtitles, but physically appear in the film, making their own lives an integral part of the women's experiences they document (Bao 2010b). Observing Shi Tou's participatory approach in Dyke March, Chao Shi-Yan (2010: 93) comments: 'Shi Tou's presence in front of the camera is especially meaningful, for her participatory performance exerts a strong impact on the audience that is informed by a shared sense of wish-fulfilment and queer performativity'. Indeed, the 'queer generation' documentaries are performative not simply because they involve gendered performances; but more importantly, they bring gendered and sexual subjectivities into existence through the production, circulation and conception of films.

Transnational Circulation of Queer Documentary
Queer documentaries are usually circulated through home DVDs and public screening events such as queer film festivals, although filmmakers sometimes make these films available online for free to reach more audiences. For example, the Queer Comrades website hosts many community documentaries. To reach out to the public, filmmakers have also uploaded some of their films to mainstream video streaming websites. Fan Popo uploaded his film Mama Rainbow to several Chinese video streaming websites including Youku, Tudou, and 56.com until these videos were taken down by the censorship authorities. This triggered Fan's lawsuit against China's media censor, the SARFT, in 2015.
Film festivals at different levelslocal, national, regional and global -play an important role in disseminating queer documentaries. Although primarily made for people in Chinese queer communities, some of these films also target international queer film festivals. That is why many of these films have English subtitles from the outset. Chinese queer filmmakers are often invited by universities and film festivals overseas to give talks and screen their films.
Cui describes this as the 'communist international of queer films' (Cui and Liu 2010) queer cultures in China have been constantly shaped by an entanglement of global, regional, national and local discourses: as these discourses shape queer cultures, queer cultures also redefine these geographic and cultural categories.

Queer Online Documentary, and What Next?
As demonstrated in this article, the 'queer generation' is not a social movement with a set of coherent political agendas and activist strategies, although many 'queer generation' filmmakers have been actively involved in the PRC's queer movements; they also contribute to China's 'new documentary movement' and the continuous shaping of China's film industries. Similarly, the documentaries produced by the 'queer generation' do not represent a homogeneous body of works; each filmmaker and each work carries its own distinct features.
However, they do manifest some shared aesthetics and politics. This is because these works cross-fertilise each other as the filmmakers work closely with each other in a closely-knit community. Seen in this light, it is still possible to talk about the emergence, development and even decline of the group.
If the emergence of the group was marked by the first Beijing Queer Film Festival in 2001, the group was most active in the first decade of the 2000s, from the first to fourth editions of the Beijing Queer Film Festival. The decline of the group was associated with strengthening political control in the PRC in the early 2010s, when the Beijing Queer Film Festival had to go underground and adopt 'guerrilla' tactics with the government which tried very hard to close down the festival (Bao 2017). In 2011, the festival venue, the Dongjen Book Club, was closed down three days before the festival opening. The festival organisers had to make emergency plans by contacting other venues at the last minute. Although the festival organiser eventually held the festival with low-key publicity and under contingent plans, it became obvious that the city of Beijing was not a welcoming place for the festival. The festival organisers managed to hold another two iterations of the festival in 2013 and 2014 before the festival eventually went underground. Since 2015, the festival has been rebranded as the Beijing Love Queer Cinema Week and has taken refuge in the Institut Français Beijing, a cultural centre supported by the French government, thus successfully circumventing 23 intervention from the Chinese government. The Institut Français has adopted a different approach to film festival organisation and audience participation. The Beijing Love Queer Cinema Week has since become more international and arthouse film oriented, as it primarily targets an international expatriate community and foreign language speaking Chinese living in Beijing, thus gradually distancing itself from the local queer communities. As watching queer films becomes safer in this context, the Beijing Love Queer Cinema Week seems to have lost its radical political edge and community spirit. However, this is not the end of queer community documentary in China. As long as there are queer people and communities, there will be a need for queer community documentary.
Today, an increasing number of queer individuals have used their video cameras and smart phones to make films about their own lives. They then upload these videos to video streaming websites or share them on smart phone apps (Shaw and Zhang 2017). There has indeed been a proliferation of queer online shorts (ku'er wangluo wei dianying). As these young, queeridentified individuals explore identities and lifestyles, they sometimes also articulate communitarian and political concerns. Perhaps what we see is not the disappearance of a 'queer generation', but a changing or expanding definition of the 'queer generations' who are less obsessed with traditional forms of filmmaking and modes of exhibition and instead are more flexible with video-making technologies and digital forms of dissemination. Whether their online videos can effectively articulate community concerns about rights and justice, and how much these online videos can contribute to queer identity and community building in China, only time can tell.

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In this article, I have charted a brief history of queer community documentary in the PRC since the 2000s by introducing its historical conditions of emergence, development and decline. In doing so, I have highlighted the transnational nature of queer filmmaking in China. In particular, I have focused on the aesthetics and politics, together with modes of production and circulation, of these queer community documentaries. I call the group of filmmakers working around the Beijing Queer Film Festival and the China Queer Film Festival Tour the 'queer generation'. The 'queer generation' filmmakers turned to production and circulation of queer documentary films to engage in political and social activism. Their films and activist practices should be put in a transnational context and seen as part of the transnational cinema and international queer movements. As these filmmakers have documented queer community histories, they have also 'queered' Chinese documentaries and Chinese film industries at large. Their works represent grassroots, community-based and activist-oriented political articulations in contemporary Chinese society; they also point to the political potential of queerness and documentary films in the world today.

Funding details:
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Disclosure statement:
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgments:
I would like to thank the two guest editors of the journal, Dr Maria Elena Indelicato and Dr