Pre-registration via email required. Contact Jessica Cañas-Castañeda, jcanas@uci.edu.

What's the relationship between "Global China" and the emergence of Chinese LGBT and queer culture? Queer theorization is often thought of as being originated from French poststructuralist critique of gender and sexual identities and US-based LGBT social movement. This talk traces a third genealogy of "queer" by examining the ways in which the production of queerness is inseparable of Cold War racial capitalism, exemplified by the post-Cold War interdependence of China and United States. Treating "queer" as a set of material relations of capital and labor mediated by geopolitics and affect, this talk argues that the maintenance of a Cold War divide is crucial to sustain the transnational LGBT right industry and to conceal inequality enabled by the alliance of democratic and authoritarian neoliberalism.