A review by melirod0699
Queer Marxism in Two Chinas by Petrus Liu

4.0

Works best as a marxist text, not so much as a queer one. Echoing Howard Chiang’s review of this book, there’s definitely some questionable practice in terms of decentering the west as the book sets out to do. If de-centering the west means conceptualizing China as the potential solution to the western ‘tension between Marxism and Queer Theory’ then maybe the west remains too much in the picture. Theorizing the Nonliberal alternative to neoliberalism still considers liberalism as a global and flat concept that it cannot be if we’re considering it a transnational and global problem. Thinking on this I find myself reiterating Spivak’s question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ No, not to us. And not through our language and positionality within the very western and very colonial space of the academy.