Queer Minor Transnationalism Digital Video Activism and Queer Worldmaking with Prof. Hongwei Bao
Over the past two decades, despite the continuing political repression of LGBTQ+ people and the constant media censorship of queer issues inside China, Chinese queer activists have been actively making transnational connections and forging international solidarities with queer communities worldwide. Such transnational activism often uses digital videos and films for self-representation, community building, and political activism. It frequently goes beyond the spheres of Europe and North America, and extends to other parts of Asia, Latin America, and the African continent. Such activism is exemplified by the Queer University Africa project (2017–2019), “How Can We See (Each Other)” film program (2020), and the Imagining Queer Bandung project (2021).
In these projects that involve digital video-making workshops and film festivals, queer filmmakers and activists from different parts of the world meet each other and share their creative and activist work. In the process, they articulate a transnational and decolonial queer politics based on the cultural imagination of a “queer Global South” and a “queer Bandung.” Such a politics disrupts a Euro- and US-centric version of queer globalization; it also challenges the heteronormativity, homonormativity, and homonationalism that have been shaped by nationalist and capitalist reifications of sexuality, identity, and desire. It epitomizes a form of queer minor transnationalism working at the grassroots level and offers an alternative mapping of the queer world out of its imagined centre in the Global North.