Queering Chinese Historical Archive 中国酷儿化的历史档案

This book records, in the form of an analytical archive, selected historical materials related to queer experience in the Chinese context from the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods to March 2026.

On the one hand, although the historical materials in this book are presented along a linear timeline of historical development, history here functions as a means of exposing conditions. By revealing the conditions under which particular experiences, identities, and discourses come into being, it allows narratives of progress that appear natural or inevitable to be reconsidered and questioned.

On the other hand, this book takes the institutional and epistemological turns of homosexuality centered queer discourse in the China as the main basis for historical periodization, in order to analyze how past ethical and legal systems, as well as modern medical and identity discourse, have shaped queer experience and the formation of modern identity. In this book, queer and queer experience function as analytical concepts. By placing queer in a specific position within social structure and historical process, they are used to describe and understand those experiences and relations that, under particular historical conditions, cannot be fully contained within dominant gender order, norms of intimacy, and temporal logic.By tracing and analyzing Chinese queer experience from the premodern period to the present, this book hopes to provide readers with a foundation for understanding the complexity and heterogeneity of Chinese queer experience, and to answer the question: "Why do Chinese queer people need their own narrative?"

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