The intersection of nationalism, Confucian familism, and queer in Katherine Hui‐ling Chou's He's My Wife, He's My Mother

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the transnational and cross‐cultural imagination in Katherine Hui‐ling Chou's 2009 play Shaonian Jinchai Nanmengmu (He's My Wife, He's My Mother), which adapts the seventeenth‐century Chinese writer Li Yu's homoerotic short story “Nanmengmu Jiaohe Sanqian” (A Male Mencius's Mother Educated His Son and Moved Three Times) while also referencing Caryl Churchill's 1979 archetypical queer play Cloud Nine. He's My Wife, He's My Mother epitomizes the layered complexities of the intersection of nationalism, Confucian familism, and Western queer epistemology. This intersection not only rearticulates Chinese transnational history and reinterprets Chinese cultural resources by absorbing the fruition of Western queer paradigm. It also seeks to transfigure the horizon of queer studies currently limited by the individualization thesis, by deploying the Confucian idea of qing as an originary human affect to emphasize the significance of connectedness and care. Chou's literary vision thus offers both a fresh angle to grasp the cultural discourses in transnational circulation and a reflective perspective to spot the limits and conceivable transformations for the theoretical formation and political praxis concerning queer and Confucianism.