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Date: Wed, September 25, 2024
Time: 14:10–17:00 
Venue: College of Liberal Arts 711
 
Lecture: The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus  
Respondent: Eno Pei Jean Chen, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University 
Chair: Zhou Hau Liew, NCHU International PhD Program in Taiwan and Transcultural Studies presents
 
Abstract:
In recent years, queer theory appears to have made a materialist turn away from questions of representation and performativity to those of dispossession, precarity, and the differential distribution of life chances. Despite this shift, queer theory finds itself constantly reabsorbed into the liberal project of diversity management. This theoretical and political weakness, Petrus Liu argues, stems from an incomplete understanding of capitalism’s contemporary transformations, of which China has been at the center. In The Specter of Materialism Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus—global capitalism’s latest mutation—to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality. Liu explores how relations of gender and sexuality get reconfigured to meet the needs of capital in new regimes of accumulation and dispossession, demonstrating that evolving US-Asian economic relations shape the emergence of new queer identities and academic theories. In so doing, he offers a new history of collective struggles that provides a transnational framework for understanding the nexus between queerness and material life.
 
Speaker Bio:
Petrus Liu is Professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. His research interests lie at the intersection of queer theory and Marxist cultural criticism, which he explores through publications and courses on modern Chinese and comparative literature, digital media, capitalism and the novel, and new social movements in the global South. In addition to The Specter of Materialism (Duke UP, 2023), his books include Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (Cornell, 2011); Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke UP, 2015); and (as coeditor) Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet: Ten Queer Stories (Duke UP, 2024).