Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic art, and science fiction, Shana Ye’s Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography of the Cool Child (University of Michigan Press, 2024) unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United States. By examining the intersecting timelines of the rise of queer theory and the rise of China in the late Cold War era, Ye explores the relationship between the discourse of queer fluidity and capital’s demands for labour flexibility.* Queer Chimerica* offers insight into the governmentality of LGBTQIA+ rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, the geopolitics and biopolitics of identity, and the class-ridden appropriation of queer history and community. Thus, understanding the production of queerness unveils the uneven distribution of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduces queer precarity and agency.

Qing Shen: Readers might find the title Queer Chimerica intriguing but also puzzling, especially the term ‘Chimerica’—a neologism describing the symbiotic relationship between China and the United States. Was there a particular moment in your research or writing process when you realised that this concept perfectly captured what you wanted to express?

Shana Ye: When I was doing my doctoral work, I noticed that the emergence and mainstreaming of queer theory in the United States seemed to have unfolded alongside China’s postsocialist turn to a market economy and cultural liberation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The concept of ‘Chimerica’, coined by financial historian Niall Ferguson and economist Moritz Schularick, was useful for me to make sense of this seemingly temporal coincidence. But I wondered whether it was best to borrow such a ‘heteronormative’ concept to describe a process with dimensions far beyond its context until I read Jennifer Suchland’s *Economies of Violence: Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking *(Duke University Press, 2015). Suchland asks why global anti‑trafficking discourse frames trafficking as gendered violence against the body but not as economic violence. This question has prompted me to look beyond the rhetoric of LGBTQIA+ rights and recognition towards the political economy of queerness, particularly how the celebration of queer fluidity had been travelling alongside the flexibilisation of labour and capital under globalisation, with China newly central to both. In other words, what if China offers not LGBTQIA+ rights, but an economic, affective, and governmental structure that facilitates the fluidity of capital and labour through sexual policies and cultures? That intuition led me to ask a set of different questions and see queer China not as a result of or additive to the global queer movement, but as central to and constitutive of neoliberal queer politics.

Much of the Anglophone scholarship and media reporting on ‘queer China’ follows a familiar arc, which pits a repressive China against a liberal, rights‑granting West, and then asks whether or how Chinese queer histories, cultures, communities, and individuals render an alternative or critique. That framing does important work, especially in documenting violence and harm, but it also reproduces what Jasbir Puar calls ‘homonationalism’, obscuring how China acts as an infrastructural force that underpins the United States’ capitalisation and dominance of queer sociality worldwide. The framework of ‘queer Chimerica’ allows me to look at how the production of queerness as we know it today is predicated on the reduction and abstraction of ‘China’ to a symbolic Other that evokes both fear and excitement, as well as a material infrastructure that produces social relations, affect, and labour in the service of racialised capitalism, neoliberalism, and transnational surveillance. Consider the case of the purchase of Grindr by the Chinese tech company Kunlun Wanwei. From 2016 to 2018, the app’s valuation rose dramatically while policymakers in both the United States and China framed LGBTQIA+ life in increasingly instrumental terms, as either a market segment or a security risk. This episode exemplifies the very operation of queer Chimerica, where queerness entangles with platform capitalism, finance, and algorithmic governance in ways far beyond the simple binary of liberation versus repression, rights, and recognition.

‘Chimerica’ matters even more to queerness now precisely because both countries are drifting towards illiberal consolidation while continuing to provide intertwined logistical, financial, and technological systems that sustain the global economy. I’m thinking of Donald Trump’s recent revival of the ‘G2’ rhetoric on his social media, imagining the United States and China as the only powers capable of steering global governance. This signals how enduring this entanglement remains and how their mutual consolidation shapes the planetary conditions of life, including economic slowdowns, militarised borders, extractive infrastructure, and the normalisation of occupation and genocide. We must think about queer life under these conditions. If the pre-2000s was marked by the expansion of queer rights and visibility through market logic, today’s digital, artificial intelligence–driven economy has reorganised the very grammar of queer visibility through data extraction, recommendation systems, and predictive analytics, dominated by a ‘Chimerica’ that co-produces the very architectures of desire, intimacy, and mobility and surveillance of queer life. Queer studies needs frameworks like this that can analyse entangled formations beyond critiques of US liberalism and Chinese state projects, confronting capitalism, neoliberalism, environmental crisis, and digital coloniality without losing sight of the material, algorithmic, and geopolitical forces that now condition what queerness is becoming.

QS: Queer Chimerica** is quite ambitious in its critique of the entire ecology of queer politics and knowledge production in contemporary China. This ambition is most evident in the multiple kinds of actors with whom you engage: queer nongovernmental organisation (NGO) workers, feminist activists, scholars, members of the American Left, elderly gay men who experienced the Cultural Revolution, and disadvantaged rural gay migrants, among others. These figures appear in both speculative and ethnographic forms. Can you talk about why you chose to write Queer Chimerica in this hybrid, sci-fi–inflected mode? What does speculative fiction allow you to do that conventional academic writing does not?**

**SY: **I didn’t set out to write a book like this. I was simply trying to survive the first years of my academic career. I had just moved to Toronto to start my tenure-track job and my relationship with the United States shifted, both because of the political slide after Trump took office and because I no longer had an adviser on whom to lean when I was stuck. It was a period of anxiety mixed with nostalgia, and I had a lot of feelings of loss with which to deal. Intellectually, I was constantly wrestling with two voices in my head. One was the junior scholar eager to make a theoretical intervention in queer studies. The other was the queer feminist ethnographer in me refusing to flatten into smooth conventions of academic prose more than 100 interviews, 300 pages of Cultural Revolution confession documents, and years of fieldnotes I had gathered. So, my distractions were sci-fi and detective shows. And they magically saved me from the dreary realism of academic writing and gave me permission to imagine differently.

I was very much drawn to time travel, memory exchange, and body contamination stories. And, just for fun, I experimented with staging encounters between people who lived in different eras, spoke different languages, belonged to different classes, and never met in real life. After I adopted this mode of writing, words poured out and flooded my pages. I realised that speculation was perhaps the most faithful response to the archive and fieldwork because queer life in China was already messily speculative, full of gaps, silences, contradictions, and affective intensities. One theme I was interested in exploring was the monstrosity of memory and how it mediated queer histories through affect, fantasy, longing, resentment, unreliable accounting, and so on. Speculation let me hold this multiplicity without flattening the messiness into morally simplified positions and narratives of visibility, liberation, and recognition.

During the process of writing this book, I also took several creative writing classes. One thing I learned that fundamentally changed both my academic writing and my research was the importance of a character’s internal conflicts, and the idea that external struggles and plot tensions unfold through the interiority of the character rather than simply happening to them. It helped my academic work move away from analysis alone towards understanding shared complicity, agency, ambivalence, and interpersonal entanglement. It taught me to see the people about whom I write as occupying shifting positions of both antagonist and protagonist, hero and villain, and to attend to how they navigate power not just as oppressed subjects or heroic resisters, but also as flawed individuals with contradictory internal struggles, choices, constraints, desires, and their own route to transformation. This is more faithful to the lived reality about which I wanted to write.

**QS: One of the key theoretical contributions of Queer Chimerica is the concept of ‘homopostsocialism’. Could you elaborate on what you mean by this term, especially in relation to other ‘homo-’ formations such as ‘homonormativity’ and ‘homonationalism’? Can you share an example of what a homopostsocialist figure or subject might look like in your framework? **

SY: Early in my dissertation, I was quite invested in the concept of ‘queer socialism’ and ‘queer Marxism’ and wanted them to stand as radical alternatives to queer liberalism. But as the book took shape, I started to see the problems in proclaiming alternatives and became more curious about the violence, desire, and fantasy that accompany such claims. ‘Homopostsocialism’ was my attempt to dwell in that ambivalence because it recognises the intellectual value of Marxist analysis and socialist histories without idealising their political relevance in the present.

The framework of ‘postsocialism’ has often been limited in the North American academy to studies of the former Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, or existing socialist states. Yet, postsocialist decolonial scholars have challenged this narrow view. For example, Neda Atanasoski in her book Humanitarian Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), has argued that the United States is in fact a postsocialist empire, because the Cold War enabled it to relegate colonialism to the past while recasting itself as the guardian of freedom and the harbinger of a neoliberal future. Thinking with this broader understanding of postsocialism as a global mode of governance allowed me to move beyond the analytic of the nation-state and towards relationality. If homonormativity and homonationalism help us understand how US liberalism and empire normalise queer subjects through rights, recognition, and militarisation, homopostsocialism reveals the logics through which rival formations such as ‘Chimerica’ work together to produce hegemonic queer expressions, cultures, and subjectivities, therefore renewing colonial legacies and forming new alliances. We see how spectacles of ideological opposition often serve to displace attention from shared geo-economic projects, such as accelerating capital and labour extraction, reorganising social reproduction, and circulating affective fantasies of catching up.

Homopostsocialism as a structure of global governance relies on a framework of feeling and temporality of becoming. It depends on the continual production of an Other imagined as ‘not yet liberated’. In this temporality, the history and imagination of socialism never fully disappear; their spectres of violence and oppression are repeatedly conjured so that fantasies of neoliberal rescue can be fulfilled. Like zombies or vampires, homopostsocialism sustains an undead future of ‘transition’, ‘becoming modern’, and ‘integration into global norms’ that never quite arrives. This is precisely how it governs bodies and aspirations in the present. My book unpacks how the promise of becoming but never being is reproduced and disrupted by queer subjects who must navigate the everyday architectures and metrics that structure survival. In the long aftermath of socialism, when ‘class’ as a political language has faded, this revolving-door temporality reorganises class formation around one’s capacity to uphold the fantasy of a better future while sanctioning the neglect of emerging material inequalities. In other words, postsocialist incorporation of difference performs an abject assimilation oriented towards a future that is simultaneously promised and withheld—a fluid dynamic of ‘you will become the same’, coupled with the persistent stickiness of ‘you will also never be’.** **

QS: One of the most compelling figures in Queer Chimerica is Guang Hui, a tongzhi (‘gay’) NGO volunteer and a kind of minjian (‘folk’) queer historian. He embodies what you describe as an ‘improper queer’: someone who sits uneasily within the hegemonic narratives of Chinese queer history, marginalised in activism, and whose queer historiography can hardly be recognised within American-led academic frameworks. As you write: ‘He is not at the forefront of the most radical queer movement nor queer Sinophone studies’ (p. 193). Can you introduce this fascinating character to our readers and say a bit about what analytical or affective work you hope this figure performs in your book?

**SY: **I met Guang Hui very early in my fieldwork, and he immediately struck me as someone who didn’t quite fit the dominant images of the polished urban gay man or the professionalised LGBTQIA+ activist. He smoked too much and talked too much about the social construction theory that no-one really cared about. At first, I was drawn to him partly because I was interested in studying gay life in the 1980s and 1990s and he was a living archive. After our second conversation, he sent me a trove of materials he had collected over decades, as though he had already done most of the archival digging for me. Then I became fascinated with his unusual life trajectory. He doesn’t sit comfortably in any of the simplified subject positions that often dominate queer studies and activist storytelling. He is neither a revolutionary hero who embodies radical transformation nor a victim of state repression or structural abandonment.

Guang Hui entered the *tongzhi *and HIV/AIDS intervention world in the 1980s and, briefly, was a successful community leader. He travelled a lot, was recognised by many NGOs, and had a foreign boyfriend who offered him an immigration opportunity. Yet, three decades later, he was a construction worker living with HIV, disconnected from the very institutions that once rewarded him, and relying on his labour for income. Analytically speaking, Guang Hui in the book helps disrupt what counts as queer history and who gets to represent it. He points to a queer China organised not around rights or visibility but around survival, sociality, and quiet forms of care. He shows the limits of categories such as ‘activist’, ‘victim’, ‘radical’, or ‘backward’, and instead invites us to consider the complex, improvisational ways people inhabit and negotiate power.

But deep down, what really matters to me is seeing Guang Hui living a contented, good life as defined by himself. In him, I see a person who healed his own trauma and is now living at peace and ease. Watching him craft a life that neither disavowed his pain nor centred it taught me that healing and care are not a destination but a daily practice. Through him, I learned that we have a responsibility to attend to our own wounds so that our scholarship and activism do not reproduce them onto others. The last time I talked to him was during the Covid years. I learned that he had returned to his hometown and still smoked too much and talked too much about theories about which no-one cared. He sent me photos of dusty roads, his neighbours, small gatherings, and his new rural migrant lovers. I did a couple of sketches based on the images he sent me but never shared them with anyone else. I now think about how my life has been transformed by him. It was the most precious gift I received from my fieldwork, for his life showed me a kind of dignity that I want to embrace and embody.

**QS: How do you situate your work in relation to recent works such as Petrus Liu’s *The Specter of Materialism *(Duke University Press, 2022), which engages with the ‘Beijing Consensus’, and the growing body of queer Sinophone studies? We seem to be witnessing an increasing attention to geopolitics. Do you see these projects as part of a broader geopolitical turn in queer theorising about China? **

SY: There has been a geopolitical turn in queer theorising about China, and its momentum can be traced to the early 2000s, when scholars began arguing that China is not just an empirical case of global queer culture, but a site that reframes what queer theory can ask. I’m thinking of the 2010 special issue ‘Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics’ in positions: asia critique, guest edited by Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel, in which Petrus boldly asked: ‘Why Does Queer Theory Need China?’ I’m deeply indebted to that inaugural move. Later, queer Sinophone studies pushed this turn much further by decentring the nation‑state, tracing local circuits of language, media, and politics across the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and the diaspora. Scholars such as Howard Chiang, Ari Larissa Heinrich, Alvin K. Wong, Hongwei Bao, Charlie Yi Zhang, and Wen Liu, among others, have shown how thinking from geopolitics and cultural production can provincialise Anglophone frameworks while keeping the power of empire, colonialism, and authoritarian regimes in check. Queer Chimerica is very much in conversation with these projects.

At the same time, I want to point out a risk when geopolitics becomes the primary horizon of analysis. In much scholarship, especially that produced in North American circles and tailored for a Western readership, China is often overrepresented as an object of geopolitical narration, yet underexamined as a structuring force in the political economy of queer life (I’m recalling the Kunlun Wanwei and Grindr example again). Geopolitics tells us a great deal about ideology and discourse, but far less about the actual funding architectures, philanthropic conditions, supply chains, real estate and housing regimes, and so on. This is where my project diverges a bit in emphasis. I share Petrus’s commitment to materialist critique, but Queer Chimerica turns deliberately to the meso‑scale and micro‑scale of the everyday, so we can track how queerness is shaped by movements of labour, capital, and context. I have noticed an emerging body of exciting new scholarship that explores the entanglement of sexuality, infrastructure, and materiality in queer Sinophone studies. For example, work that examines how land and property policies choreograph intimacy, cohabitation, and kinship (Zhangzhu Wan), how platform and content moderation produce recognisability while directing stigma and surveillance (Lin Song), and how transpacific, transregional pharmaceutical markets and logistics chains shape access to HIV and transgender medications and hormones (Thelma Wang).

In short, I see my book as affirming the importance of geopolitics while insisting that we also attend to the geo-economic and infrastructural conditions that organise queer worlds. In this sense, China matters to queer theory not only as a geopolitical problem but also as a method of thinking across ideology and infrastructure, discourse and materiality, fantasy and logistics.