Originating from the Black and brown LGBTQ communities in 1970s New York City, ballroom culture has gained global traction and yet its transnational circulation remains undertheorized. China’s ballroom scene has emerged and grown rapidly since 2016, even as NGOs and other civil society actors have been increasingly shut down. This article examines how Chinese trans and queer people interpret, practice, and negotiate vogue femme in varied and at times contradictory ways. I foreground Vogue Femme’s polyvariant potentials as both gestures of racialized trans survival and a mode of creative appropriation, which I argue enable its vibrant and messy rearticulations in contemporary China. I propose queer minor transnationalism as an analytic for understanding China’s ballroom scene, which decenters Western whiteness as the compulsory point of reference and untethers the epistemic approach to queer China from the formations of area studies and ethnic studies. Queer minor transnationalism contributes to transnational queer studies by gesturing toward the coalitional possibilities between the interconnected yet incommensurable fields of queer/trans of color critique and queer Asian studies.
Jiacheng Liu (they/them/tā) is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric/Media at the University of Memphis. Dr. Liu’s research centers on global queer Asias, trans and queer of color critique, digital media and culture, and China and Asian diasporas. Their current project analyzes the emergence of ballroom culture in China and its implication for queer minor transnationalism and Afro-Asian intimacies.
Their work on the intersections of queer cultures, digital platforms, and social movements has appeared in International Journal of Cultural Studies, Sexualities, Feminist Media Studies, and Information, Communication & Society. They received their dual-title PhD in Mass Communications and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Pennsylvania State University.