Queer As Subalterns Yün Peng (bio) QUEER MARXISM IN TWO CHINAS BY PETRUS LIU Duke University Press, 2015 In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Petrus Liu makes three related claims. First, Chinese queer Marxism is a critique of and an alternative to the "familiar intellectual paradigm" of queer theory in the United States (7). In particular, a queer Marxist critique of the latter's tendency toward neoliberal pluralism and "dematerializing" subjectivism promises to restore to queerness its radical potential (10). Second, queer Marxism presents a new definition of queerness that is both theoretically significant and practically consequential. Rather than a preexisting identity category, queerness is redefined through Marx's labor theory of value as a product of the distribution of social resources, as social norm is understood in terms of the capitalist social reproduction. Third, if bringing Marxism to bear on queerness offers a needed way out of the neoliberal impasse, this is conceivable only if we confront the Cold War thinking that automatically attributes queer rights to the liberal state as both originating in the West and developmentally more advanced. The book's theoretical framework is laid out in the first two of the five chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction and a map. The queer Marxist analysis is further developed in chapter 2, where it is fleshed out through two examples: the PRC filmmaker Cui Zi'en's queer cinema practice and the theory and practice of Taiwan's antistatist feminist and queer movements. Chapter 3 reads Chen Ruoxi's 1986 novel Paper Marriage as "an exemplary work of queer Marxism in the two Chinas" and makes a counterargument against the Foucauldian [End Page 201] histories of sexuality that attribute Chinese queer identity to the influence of "translations of Western knowledge" (88, 86–87). Chapter 4 takes on "the liberal myth of the self-fashioned bourgeoisie" and argues, through the example of Song of Dreams, a novel by the popular Taiwanese writer Xiao Sa, that "queer culture is not a product of liberal-ism's promotion of human diversity; rather, it comes into being as a social critique of the liberal fable of self-invention" (115). Chapter 5 engages the human rights discourse and proposes a queer Marxist recuperation of the human as "neither the agent of social transformation nor the subject of universal rights" but rather "ek-stasis" and grounded in Marx's understanding of the "constitutive sociality of the self" and "the moral equality of human time" in his labor theory of value (142–43, 165, 150–51). The heart of the book's argument is an analysis of queerness through Marx's labor theory of value. The first key point in this connection is that value is determined by "abstract labor, the aggregate production of commodities in society as a whole"—in other words, by the reproduction of society as a whole, which includes both economic and noneconomic factors (80). The second, related point is that capitalist reproduction necessarily depends on the reproduction of "the moral and intellectual conditions" that lie "outside the capitalist reproduction scheme" narrowly defined (81). This is the Althusserian formula that "the reproduction of capital is both the reproduction of the material forces and the reproduction of 'the social conditions of production' that include … what he calls the ideological state apparatuses" (81; original emphasis). Within this framework, queerness is understood in terms of capitalist reproduction of society "along asymmetrical lines" (82). Drawing on Marx, Liu argues that abstract labor, which reproduces society, "at once homogenizes individuals and places them into discrete identity groups and ineluctable classes" (80). Such structurally determined asymmetry explains why pluralism doesn't work: the production of a universal equivalent of value simultaneously creates distinctions and assigns stigmas. One way to look at it is that queerness is a matter of the social production of value, an instance of what Gayatri Spivak describes as the "irreducibly complicitous" relationship between "the Value-form in the general sense and in the narrow" or, in other words, between "cultural" and economic forms of value (Spivak 82; original emphasis).1 [End Page 202] Value, then, serves as a sort of index pointing to the social totality. While liberal pluralism "has...
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