Who are <i>Shunzhi</i> ? Subaltern politics and the making of ‘the other’ in Chinese queer activism

This article presents the results of a year-long ethnographic engagement with queer activism on Weibo. The findings reveal that a populist antagonism between a collective queer entity as ‘the people’ vis-à-vis shunzhi (顺直, cisgender heterosexuals) as ‘the other’ has been affectively constructed. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s conceptualization of counterpublicity and Ernesto Laclau’s poststructuralist populist logic, I argue that queer activism in contemporary China exudes a defensive populist form of anti-cisheteropatriarchal force. This is achieved by self-organized activists, jitong (激同, radical homosexuals) in this case, of different times and spaces who converge in queer counterpublics to build the ‘chain of equivalences’ which, together with the accumulation of affective value, sets out to de-totalize the monolithic structure of official discourses on rationality . While this approach can be understood as jitong ’s call for the ‘return of the political’, it in actuality risks obscuring the complexities of multi-positional struggles faced by ‘the subaltern’ as a whole. This research pushes further to examine the undercurrents of affective resistance of jitong and suggests that a feminist reworking to achieve grassroots solidarity should be engaged. In so doing, this research expands populism scholarship by redirecting the Euro-American focus from majoritarian mobilization to subaltern counterpublic formations in the Sino-mediasphere.