The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus

In the preface to her 1993 book Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler notes that the text was offered “in part as a rethinking of some parts” of her seminal 1990 book Gender Trouble.1 Meanwhile, in 2023, precisely thirty years later, Petrus Liu similarly observes that his new work, The Specter of Materialism, “was written as a sequel to [his] 2015 book, Queer Marxism in Two Chinas,” and he offers his thanks to “those who have prompted me to rethink and rewrite its arguments” (x).Although it is not unusual for an author to open one monograph by specifying that it builds on arguments developed in an earlier work, other parallels between The Specter of Materialism and Bodies That Matter are also worth noting. Liu observes that 1990 was the year not only when the term queer theory was first coined but also that saw the publication of several foundational texts in the field, including David M. Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's Epistemology of the Closet, and Butler's own Gender Trouble. However, whereas Butler devotes Bodies That Matter to an examination of “the way in which the ‘materiality’ of sex is forcibly produced,”2 Liu in The Specter of Materialism instead seeks to recuperate a concept of materiality as it pertains to queer theory while at the same time using queer theory to expand and complicate a Marxist analysis of a set of modern Chinese cultural and political-economic policies and phenomena.In his theorization of the status of materiality within queer theory, Liu draws on three intersecting conceptual frameworks, understanding materiality not only in corporeal terms, but also in an economic and an empirical (as opposed to linguistically or socially constructed) sense. To this end, Liu brings recent work in queer theory into dialogue with corresponding discussions in Marxism to further develop the paradigm of queer Marxism that was the theoretical lynchpin of his second book. More specifically, in The Specter of Materialism Liu notes that the birth of queer theory in 1990 coincided with a corresponding watershed moment in global Marxism, as the protests that began in 1989 in Eastern Europe led to the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the contemporaneous 1989 June Fourth protests in China similarly marked an important inflection point in post-Mao Chinese socialism.Coincidentally, it was also in 1989 that the term Washington Consensus was coined to describe a set of neoliberal developmental policies deployed by Washington-based financial institutions such as the World Bank, particularly as they applied to Latin America. Liu, meanwhile, describes how in the early 1990s Deng Xiaoping “adopted a new model of economic development designed to accelerate the accumulation of capital through the privatization of state-owned enterprises” (2), which in turn helped lay the groundwork for an alternative developmental model that came to be known as the Beijing Consensus, reflected most clearly in the policies subsequently implemented under the global infrastructure project now known as the Belt and Road Initiative, which China adopted in 2013.Liu contends that the post-1990 emergence of queer theory was itself a symptom of, and not a solution to, the contradictions of global capitalism that underlay both the Washington Consensus and the nascent Beijing Consensus. However, he contends that it is precisely queer theory's “inability to devise effective responses to these global crises [that] returns as the specter of materialism.” He proposes, moreover, that an analytical focus on this specter of materialism—this symptom of queer theory's inability to fully address the contradictions of global capitalism from which it emerged in the first place—that offers the possibility of “a new framework for understanding the nexus between queerness and material life” (5).In the latter half of his study, Liu examines three different Chinese case studies, drawing on the Marxist concepts of formal and real subsumption—the former referring to the process by which precapitalist labor relations are partially incorporated into a capitalist structure, and the latter referring to the process by which capital creates entirely new modes of labor and social relations. In particular, Liu uses formal subsumption as a model for understanding a process whereby a sociocultural formation is partially incorporated into, and subsumed by, an emerging capitalist structure.In the first case study, Liu considers Lu Xun, known as the father of modern Chinese literature. Although Lu Xun is closely associated with left-wing politics and Marxism (though he never joined the Chinese Communist Party), Liu argues that an equally important dimension of Lu Xun's fiction is its focus on socially marginal figures, particularly women. Through a close reading of several of Lu Xun's better known works, Liu contends that qualities traditionally read as examples of Lu Xun's Marxist realism can be more productively understood as examples of “a forgotten and subsumed queer modernism [that] sheds light on the historical function of an analytic of gender and sexuality in capitalism's global transformations” (83).In the second case study, Liu turns to the 1992 Hong Kong film Swordsman II: Asia the Invincible, based on Jin Yong's novel The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, serialized in the mid-1960s. The original novel features an antagonist, Asia the Invincible, who changes from a man to a woman. Liu notes that whereas the novel treats this character as a monstrosity to offer a misogynist and transphobic critique of Mao Zedong, in the film the character is instead presented as a charismatic queer figure. In fact, Liu observes that Jin Yong was apparently displeased with the decision to cast the Asian star Bridgette Lin for the part of Asia the Invincible, because he was concerned that Lin's reputation and stature would grant the character too much legitimacy. Through attention to the queer themes of this iconic film, meanwhile, Liu seeks to recuperate the film's reflection of the Cold War “as a multilayered and sometimes contradictory ideological formation” (130).In the third case study Liu turns to UN Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. The first such conference to be held in what might be called the age of queer theory, the Beijing conference occasioned sharp debates over the purview of the field of women's studies, as well as the precise meaning of the concepts of sex and gender. Liu concludes the chapter by offering a detailed analysis of a speech that President Xi Jinping gave at the UN Global Leaders’ Meeting on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in 2015, on the twentieth anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Liu notes that Xi specified that China was committed to promoting only “women's rights” and not “gender equality.” In fact, Liu observes that Xi's speech uses the Chinese term for “gender” (xingbie) only once (in reference to what Liu calls a “UN agenda”), and although the official English translation of the speech makes repeated reference to the phrase gender equality, in the original Chinese text Xi used the more conservative Maoist phrase nannü pingdeng, which literally means “equality of men and women.” Through this analysis, Liu illustrates capitalism's “capacity to subsume sexuality” while at the same time suggesting the possibility of “an alternative politics that can nourish the possibilities of gendered life” (160).The cover image of The Specter of Materialism features a reproduction of a panel titled “Original Sky,” from the 2012 multimedia work Family Tree by the Kenya-born and US-based artist Wangechi Mutu. Each of the work's thirteen panels features a figure made from a collage consisting of an assemblage of animate and inanimate elements, and the work's exhibition notes describe how “Original Sky” is “at once primitive and futuristic, a combination of human, animal, alien and mechanical parts.”3 Most telling, the Family Tree collages feature an assortment of medical journal images, which are reassembled to create new human-like figures. Although it is not discussed in the main body of Liu's monography, Mutu's cover image nicely captures one of the central concerns of Liu's project, offering a compelling visual metaphor for the process of formal subsumption, wherein labor processes are incorporated into new capitalist structures. More generally, to paraphrase Judith Butler's description of her own Bodies That Matter, Liu's study offers a rethinking of how some parts of existing bodies, labor processes, social formations, or cultural phenomena may be partially subsumed into new ones while at the same time leaving behind spectral vestiges of their earlier formations. Liu's project is interested in tracing that process of partial subsumption while at the same time examining its limits.