The book thus adds to a long-standing debate in and around queer theory about the relationship of queerness to Marxism. These are the kinds of questions that Petrus Liu asks us to ponder in The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (2023), a meditation on the imbrications of Marxism and queer theory through the lens of contemporary China (the so-called “Beijing Consensus” referenced in the book’s subtitle). Were these changes, which helped lead to a brief flourishing of queer life on the mainland, a product of the country’s socialist governance or of burgeoning neoliberal reforms? Were the kinds of queer life that arose there in the 1990s and early 2000s imports from the West or the distinctive phenomena of a postsocialist order? And what does it say about capitalism and socialism that, under President Xi Jinping, LGBTQ Chinese people have had to contend with growing discrimination, harassment, and persecution? Four years later, the government removed homosexuality from its catalog of mental disorders. IN 1997, the People’s Republic of China decriminalized homosexuality-decades after other socialist countries and only six years ahead of the United States.
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