PEER REVIEWED
https://doi.org/10.51897/interalia/ESTA1579
Haunting as Being/Loving: Apparitionalism and Chinese Femme Lesbianism
Wen Wen
Abstract
This study advances analytical insights into apparitional lesbianism through three pieces of Chinese contemporary literature in the 1990s. The valuable view of hauntology is deployed to address femmes’ lesbianism by looking into the repertoire of images and narratives of these texts. Using narrative analysis, I argue that, like a ghost, femmes are living through a great oxymoron as the disavowed validity, vaporizing while becoming. Apart from the social imagination in the development of the phantom-like lesbian culture, this work tries to articulate a significant onto-epistemological interpretation of lesbians’ s existence as spectral being. In subsequent discussions, the spectrality of their lesbianism is considered in the poetic implicitly, the affect with regards to the diasporic nature of queerness and the hauntological time they embodied at the utopian margins. Such comprehensions are not only about the portray of these characters and their homoerotic love affairs showing how femme images coalesce into an apparitional life, but also concerned with the interpretative agency on behalf of female homosexuality and femininity.
Keywords: apparitional lesbianism, femme, hauntology, affect, Chinese lesbians
