rofel china money boy

34
8/18/2019 Rofel China Money Boy http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/rofel-china-money-boy 1/34 Essays: Part II The Traffic in Money Boys Lisa Rofel Why do so many gay men in China speak anxiously about what they call, using the English term, “money boys”? “Money boys” is a colloquialism in China for men who sell sex to other men. What is it about money boys’ activities that lead (other) Chinese gay men to go out of their way to con- demn them and even deny that those who wish to identify as gay deserve to be called “gay”? I have had the pleasure of spending time in various gay ven- ues in Beijing, and in all of them — whether a salon discussion, film view- ing, gay bar, or private gathering in someone’s home — the issue of money boys invariably emerges. The vehemence of the condemnations is striking. Gay men I have spoken with about money boys claim they inappropriately blur the boundaries between sex and love, they exploit gay men, they are dangerous, and they are rural migrants just looking for work in the big city — implying both that they are not really gay and that they should either  positions : ./-- Copyright by Duke University Press

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Page 1: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Essays Part II

The Traffic in Money Boys

Lisa Rofel

Why do so many gay men in China speak anxiously about what they call

using the English term ldquomoney boysrdquo ldquoMoney boysrdquo is a colloquialism in

China for men who sell sex to other men What is it about money boysrsquo

activities that lead (other) Chinese gay men to go out of their way to con-

demn them and even deny that those who wish to identify as gay deserve to

be called ldquogayrdquo I have had the pleasure of spending time in various gay ven-

ues in Beijing and in all of them mdash whether a salon discussion film view-

ing gay bar or private gathering in someonersquos home mdash the issue of money

boys invariably emerges The vehemence of the condemnations is striking

Gay men I have spoken with about money boys claim they inappropriately

blur the boundaries between sex and love they exploit gay men they are

dangerous and they are rural migrants just looking for work in the big

city mdash implying both that they are not really gay and that they should either

positions 983089983096983090 983140983151983145 983089983088983089983090983089983093983089983088983094983095983097983096983092983095-983090983088983089983088-983088983088983097

Copyright 983090983088983089983088 by Duke University Press

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 426

return to their rural homes or find a ldquorealrdquo job Most importantly those who

denigrate money boys argue that they sully the reputation of Chinese gay

men Money boys it is claimed hinder the aspirations of other gay men to

make a gay sexual orientation acceptable in China In other words money

boys turn the terrain of sex and desire in China into one that is fraught with

ambiguity Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the perfectly

acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing it into

the impure world of commodification and money Is their desire mdash for sex

for money or for sex that involves money mdash really possible to cordon offfrom other kinds of desires that appear to be more normalized Finally

how do they affect the endeavors of other gay men in China to create an

identity that will be acceptable within what they view as the norms of Chi-

nese culture

In this essay I argue that money boys are a pressing issue for gay men in

China because homophobia and dilemmas about the proper ways to chal-

lenge it are framed by the tremendous transformations that have occurredin China over the last twenty-five years that prominent scholars in China

have begun to call neoliberalism1 These transformations include the pro-

motion of a market economy the steady move toward privatization the

search for profits that includes rent-seeking and corruption the increasingly

stark social inequalities evident in China the rise of consumerism and a

consumer-oriented popular culture the turn away from post-Bandung

third-world alliances toward parity with the West the vast amount of for-eign direct investment in China and conversely Chinarsquos increasing invest-

ments in non-Western countries as they search for energy resources and

finally Chinarsquos entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) with its

attendant neoliberal rules and regulations about so-called free trade

These transformations suture China more tightly into a post ndash Cold War

world in which neoliberal ideologies backed by an imperial United States

and implemented by US-dominated transnational institutions such as

the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank seem ascendant

However my approach to neoliberalism in China differs from the most

prominent theories about neoliberalism2 First in contrast to the common

assumption that neoliberalism is a fully formed phenomenon delivered

from the West to the third world I argue that neoliberalism is a histori-

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 427

cally contingent heterogeneous project whose coherence must be continu-

ally asserted through transnational articulations between unequally situated

nation-states In China as elsewhere one of the central features of struggles

to articulate transnational economic policies only some of which we might

label ldquoneoliberalrdquo profit-seeking activities which are far from uniform and

new kinds of subjects is the simultaneous mobilization of cosmopolitanism

on the one hand and Chinese civilization culture and national identity on

the other My argument in brief is that the place of lesbians and gay men

in China is intimately connected to cosmopolitanism because it is throughthe expression of desire that they as well as other Chinese citizens are able

to feel part of a universal humanity The fact that they must do so is itself a

result of the embrace of neoliberalism which changes the relation of China

to the world economy and the terms by which its people can relate to each

other3 Neoliberalism thus produces a yearning for cosmopolitanism which

then gets encoded as a difference between licit and illicit desires

The mobilization of cosmopolitanism along with Chinese cultural andnational identity occurs in several realms Official discourse about ldquosocialism

with Chinese characteristicsrdquo is but one of them and should not be lightly

dismissed as there indeed exists cultural and historical specificity to the

manner in which privatization activities occur4 Both official and popular

discourses also mobilize national identity and ldquotraditionalrdquo Chinese moral-

ity which spans invocations of Confucian virtues family values Buddhism

and the history of Chinese culture prior to the socialist revolution Thesecategories far from taken for granted are themselves continually debated as

various practices mdash gender sexual and otherwise mdash are deemed to be repre-

sentative of Chinese culture or its antithesis that requires vigorous excision

The invocation of Chinese culture morality and national identity is meant

not only to forestall the worst effects of neoliberalism (the historical ti yong

dichotomy) but indeed more assertively to define its constitution within

China and beyond it That is Chinese civilization is often seen as that which

will save neoliberalism from pure barbarism Thus the challenge for lesbi-

ans and gay men in China as well as other citizens is to prove at once their

ability to transcend nation-state boundaries and embrace neoliberal cosmo-

politanism but also to display their normativity as Chinese citizens5

My second disagreement with other theories of neoliberalism is that while

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 428

prominent theorists have made the important argument that neoliberalism

creates new subjectivities they tend to emphasize a rationalized subject who

must discipline himself or herself into neoliberal modes of being and act-

ing6 These theories have the advantage that they do not treat neoliberalism

as a purely economistic endeavor but they nonetheless accept neoliberal ide-

ologiesrsquo own ideas about rationality as that which subtends neoliberalism

Moreover they tend to draw a direct and rather deterministic line from neo-

liberal economic policies to these rational techniques of the self to neoliberal

subjectivities In contrast I locate the specific appearance of neoliberalismin China in the production of desire7 Desire is the means through which

people in China as elsewhere prove their cosmopolitan worldliness But

desire is a complicated realm As psychoanalytical theory has long argued

desire can be unpredictable and difficult to control ldquoDesirerdquo is a historically

socially and culturally produced field that articulates the new contradictions

and inequalities in China to both resolve past dilemmas and create new ones

The desiring subject mdash whether sexual affective or possessive mdash thus func-tions variously as a trope a normative ideal and a horizon of possibility mdash

or impossibility It promises new freedoms even as it seems to be the only

game in town It also creates a terrain for powerful and dehumanizing exclu-

sions While the neoliberal enticement to have desires is prevalent every-

where in China debates about how to distinguish licit and illicit desires

continue to animate public culture Lesbians and gay men must grapple

with the ambivalences contradictions and exclusions that the specificity ofneoliberalism creates in China

This essay speaks as well to a hoary debate in queer studies or perhaps I

should say to the attacks on queer studies by those who used to accuse it of

being ldquomerely culturalrdquo or idealist as opposed to materialist queer8 Those

debates were never resolved they merely faded But they left certain dichot-

omies in place those who wanted so-called materialist studies of sexuality

and desire used the term ldquomaterialistrdquo in an obfuscatory manner Those

who had been criticized responded by pointing out that attention to family

kinship intimacy and the body are as ldquomaterialrdquo as one can get But what

those who invoked materialism really meant which they did also say was

that studies of desire should be grounded in a study of capitalist relations

of production Ironically however as soon as they set out that context they

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 429

also let desire drop out of the picture because they couldnrsquot really figure out

within a certain classical Marxism how to study the myriad forms desire

takes Thus Donald Morton for example establishes a dichotomy between

need and desire and asserts that need is what we excuse the pun need to

study but desire is merely an ideological by-product of capitalism9 It was

difficult to get past such homophobia and so the debate petered out after

both sides had had their say The debate was ironic because it was based on

a basic opposition between the instrumental and the affective that which is

instrumental belongs to a study of capitalism proper mdash the rational subjectwith needs mdash while that which is affective is relegated to a realm that is not

part of capitalist relations of production proper I say it is ironic to base a

critique of queer studies on the instrumental versus the affective because as

Marshall Sahlins pointed out a long time ago this opposition was produced

out of capitalism itself10 Queer studies on the other hand has not really

figured out how to get past the homophobia implicit in so many of these

critiques and analyze the relationship between capitalism and desire Myhope is that this essay contributes to bridging that division

The desiring subject has taken center stage in China because of the his-

torically specific allegory constructed to reject Maoism This allegory revises

historical memory through the emancipatory tale that Maoism suppressed

a natural human nature and that by rejecting the socialist state people can

unshackle their gendered and sexual selves11 Given the specificity of this

history mdash and its revisionist historiography mdash the goal in China appearsto be not merely to end the suppression of so-called innate gendered and

sexual selves but the positive development of subjects with elaborate sexual

material and affective self-interests After the June 983092th crisis of legitimacy

in 983089983097983096983097 the constitution of a postsocialist humanity in China entailed the

intensification of this goal in order to create cosmopolitan citizens of a

post ndash Cold War world12

For these historical reasons homoeroticism has created a great deal of

ambivalence in China This ambivalence is evident in public culture debates

about well-known legal cases concerning homoerotic desire and gay identity

as well as in informal conversation13 Indeed homoeroticism plays a cen-

tral role in public discussions about licit and illicit or proper and improper

desires There are no laws against homosexuality in China But some con-

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 430

demn homosexuality in the name of Chinese morality while others who do

not identify as gay proclaim that although they do not understand homo-

sexuality everyone should be free to express their desires This complex situ-

ation means that lesbians and gay men provide a particularly compelling

and ambivalent challenge to postsocialist constructions of human nature

Lesbians and gay men in China could view themselves as standing at the

forefront of a universal humanity in the expression of their desires Yet they

must struggle with public debates in China about the differentiation among

those deemed appropriate subjects of desire and those cast as inappropriateThe instabilities inherent in the experimental nature of Chinarsquos neoliberal

reforms means that these ldquodesiring-actionsrdquo to borrow a term from Neferti

Tadiar were not determined in advance14 Nonetheless these debates revolved

around attempts to draw a clear boundary between normative and nonnor-

mative desires both within and outside gay communities in China

Money boys thus became a lightening rod among gay men in their efforts

to grapple with homophobia and the proper class-inflected ways to be adesiring subject in this postsocialist world As queer theory has taught us

desires normalize and in so doing constitute those who are also excluded

and marked as nonnormative15 Queer theorists of color have challenged

and expanded this canon in order to make compelling arguments about the

critical role of postcolonial histories of racism and diaspora in construct-

ing normative desires among lesbians and gay men16 Queer theorists have

also argued that normalizations require a great deal of effort to make themeffective and in that work gaps and fissures lead to unexpected outcomes

Gay men who condemn money boys marginalize them as a way to make

their own desires appear simultaneously cosmopolitan (in its contemporary

neoliberal guise) and appropriately Chinese But they sometimes have dif-

ficulty in crafting absolute distinctions between themselves and these ldquooth-

ersrdquo even as they use these others to make themselves appear to have the

more appropriate desires befitting a postsocialist China17 Thus I locate an

anxiety expressed about the ldquomoney boyrdquo as a production of the market

economy that threatens the ontological certainty of the desiring individual

The fact that the unique term ldquomoney boyrdquo is used to refer to these

men mdash rather than say ldquogigolordquo or ldquomale prostituterdquo mdash is not to be dis-

missed as incidental but bears a critical relation to commodification and the

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 431

anxieties attendant upon the loss or the blurring of the boundaries between

epistemic zones After repeatedly hearing disparaging remarks about money

boys I decided I should talk to money boys themselves I was hesitant at

first because I was not sure how one would go about asking someone ques-

tions about their engagement in an activity that is so roundly condemned I

began to ask some of my gay male friends in Beijing to introduce me to any

money boys they knew While I am sure there are men who sell sex to other

men mdash one stroll through Beijingrsquos famous Dongdan Park makes that activ-

ity obvious mdash the men I was introduced to as money boys all refused thatlabel They argued that their actions did not represent a simple equation of

sex for money18 As I describe below their rejection of the money boy label is

more than simply a matter of denial These men had a much more complex

interpretation of their activities that as with other gay men broadened out

into a consideration of the place of desire in contemporary China They led

me to understand that their activities were as much an intimate part of the

transformations that had moved China away from socialism and toward aworld of what I would call neoliberal cosmopolitanism as any other activi-

ties centered around desire Indeed their analyses of their own lives and the

debates among gay men over money boys led me to realize that the question

of desire lies at the very heart of these transformations

I offer two ldquoscenesrdquo that develop my arguments about not simply the

views of those labeled money boys but also the cultural anxieties of other gay

men about money boys That is my intent is not just to describe so-calledmoney boysrsquo attempts to decouple money and sex but other gay menrsquos fears

about their own inabilities to do so the reasons why this distinction comes

to matter at all and the politically and culturally specific context that shapes

these anxieties The first scene occurred in my room in Beijing when one of

my gay male friends introduced me to someone he labeled a money boy The

disagreements that ensued in the conversation exemplify the anxious pursuit

of neoliberal respectability among certain gay men The second scene is a

film by the well-known queer filmmaker Cui Zirsquoen Through satire and

subversion Cui Zirsquoen challenges gay men about their desires for neoliberal

normalization

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 432

Scene One

It was a spring evening in 983089983097983097983096 Ah Zhuang had agreed to introduce meto someone he said was a money boy19 I had first met Ah Zhuang through

other foreign lesbians and gay men living in Beijing Then in his early for-

ties Ah Zhuang was a radiologist Ah Zhuang considered himself to be

someone who had always known he was gay He had never married as have

so many other gay men but lived at home taking care of his mother He

also considered himself to be part of a long-lost line of aristocratic Mongo-

lians through his fatherrsquos ancestors Ah Zhuang had embraced the newlyemergent gay scene with unabashed enthusiasm Though many older men

who have sex with other men shunned that scene and given their histori-

cal experiences of harassment feared exposure Ah Zhuang in contrast

worked on the gay hotline attended all the salon discussions met with psy-

chiatrists to argue with them about the normality of homosexuality and

established himself as an ldquoelderrdquo among what were mostly young gay men

in their twenties He loved dispensing advice Ah Zhuang felt it was critical

for all people who have a homoerotic orientation to identify themselves as

gay and embrace that identity His experience of having been arrested in the

983089983097983096983088s for approaching another man for sex in the public bathrooms made

him all the more adamant that normalizing a gay identity would put an

end to the police harassment to which he had been subjected20 On the other

hand he felt equally vehement about the need to not expose onersquos family to

social condemnation and thus he felt it important to be discreet

Ah Zhuang had decided ideas about what constitutes a proper gay iden-

tity These ideas were made most apparent to me on the evening in question

That night Ah Zhuang arrived at my room with a young man named Ah

Pei Ah Zhuang introduced him as his former boyfriend I was immediately

confused I thought he had said he would introduce me to a money boy

And if this person was his former boyfriend was he telling me he had beeninvolved with a money boy As the conversation developed things turned

out to be more complex For Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang argued during the

entire evening about whether Ah Pei was indeed a money boy at all Ah

Zhuang stayed for the whole conversation in part because Ah Pei has a very

thick Beijing working-class accent and I sometimes found it hard to follow

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 433

him Ah Zhuang helpfully repeated some of Ah Peirsquos statements to make

sure I understood But Ah Zhuang also kept inserting his own views inter-

rupting Ah Pei at every turn

We began the conversation in a desultory manner with my questions

about Ah Peirsquos background He explained that his parents both had had a

hard life when they were young before the 983089983097983092983097 revolution His father was

from the Northeast and had always had to move around looking for work

But fortunately he had ended up in Beijing working in a factory under

the Central Television Bureau constructing television reception towers Hismother worked in a radio factory When his father fell ill with cancer Ah

Pei had taken over his factory position At the time of course job inheri-

tance in state-run factories was seen as a privilege Then Ah Peirsquos second

brother and sister-in-law also came to work there By the time of our con-

versation Ah Pei had taken what was then the risky step of abandoning his

secure position in the factory Perhaps he had the foresight to realize that

factory workersrsquo living conditions were declining under economic reformIndeed by the time of our conversation half the factory had been let go and

were on unemployment Ah Pei had become a taxi driver He was then in

his mid-thirties

Perhaps I was moving too slowly toward the ostensible topic of the eve-

ning Or perhaps he had his own agenda In any case Ah Zhuang suddenly

interjected with a question that abruptly changed the direction of our con-

versation ldquoWhat are your feelings when you are with womenrdquo Ah Pei pro-ceeded to tell a story about his factory ldquoAll the women I have encountered

have been from our factoryrdquo He then described how at the age of 983089983097 he had

his first sexual relationship with an older married woman after another

woman he was apprenticed to introduced them to each other She too was

an apprentice According to Ah Pei she had seduced him Prior to that he

had no interest in sex with women at least not women his age They carried

on their affair for over a year The womanrsquos husband never knew he worked

in another factory The main point that Ah Pei stressed in telling this story

was that with an older person he finally felt secure Since then he added

he has always wanted to be with older people

When he first made this assertion I did not pick up on its larger implica-

tion in relation to the issue of money boys Only later when Ah Zhuang was

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 2: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 426

return to their rural homes or find a ldquorealrdquo job Most importantly those who

denigrate money boys argue that they sully the reputation of Chinese gay

men Money boys it is claimed hinder the aspirations of other gay men to

make a gay sexual orientation acceptable in China In other words money

boys turn the terrain of sex and desire in China into one that is fraught with

ambiguity Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the perfectly

acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing it into

the impure world of commodification and money Is their desire mdash for sex

for money or for sex that involves money mdash really possible to cordon offfrom other kinds of desires that appear to be more normalized Finally

how do they affect the endeavors of other gay men in China to create an

identity that will be acceptable within what they view as the norms of Chi-

nese culture

In this essay I argue that money boys are a pressing issue for gay men in

China because homophobia and dilemmas about the proper ways to chal-

lenge it are framed by the tremendous transformations that have occurredin China over the last twenty-five years that prominent scholars in China

have begun to call neoliberalism1 These transformations include the pro-

motion of a market economy the steady move toward privatization the

search for profits that includes rent-seeking and corruption the increasingly

stark social inequalities evident in China the rise of consumerism and a

consumer-oriented popular culture the turn away from post-Bandung

third-world alliances toward parity with the West the vast amount of for-eign direct investment in China and conversely Chinarsquos increasing invest-

ments in non-Western countries as they search for energy resources and

finally Chinarsquos entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) with its

attendant neoliberal rules and regulations about so-called free trade

These transformations suture China more tightly into a post ndash Cold War

world in which neoliberal ideologies backed by an imperial United States

and implemented by US-dominated transnational institutions such as

the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank seem ascendant

However my approach to neoliberalism in China differs from the most

prominent theories about neoliberalism2 First in contrast to the common

assumption that neoliberalism is a fully formed phenomenon delivered

from the West to the third world I argue that neoliberalism is a histori-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 427

cally contingent heterogeneous project whose coherence must be continu-

ally asserted through transnational articulations between unequally situated

nation-states In China as elsewhere one of the central features of struggles

to articulate transnational economic policies only some of which we might

label ldquoneoliberalrdquo profit-seeking activities which are far from uniform and

new kinds of subjects is the simultaneous mobilization of cosmopolitanism

on the one hand and Chinese civilization culture and national identity on

the other My argument in brief is that the place of lesbians and gay men

in China is intimately connected to cosmopolitanism because it is throughthe expression of desire that they as well as other Chinese citizens are able

to feel part of a universal humanity The fact that they must do so is itself a

result of the embrace of neoliberalism which changes the relation of China

to the world economy and the terms by which its people can relate to each

other3 Neoliberalism thus produces a yearning for cosmopolitanism which

then gets encoded as a difference between licit and illicit desires

The mobilization of cosmopolitanism along with Chinese cultural andnational identity occurs in several realms Official discourse about ldquosocialism

with Chinese characteristicsrdquo is but one of them and should not be lightly

dismissed as there indeed exists cultural and historical specificity to the

manner in which privatization activities occur4 Both official and popular

discourses also mobilize national identity and ldquotraditionalrdquo Chinese moral-

ity which spans invocations of Confucian virtues family values Buddhism

and the history of Chinese culture prior to the socialist revolution Thesecategories far from taken for granted are themselves continually debated as

various practices mdash gender sexual and otherwise mdash are deemed to be repre-

sentative of Chinese culture or its antithesis that requires vigorous excision

The invocation of Chinese culture morality and national identity is meant

not only to forestall the worst effects of neoliberalism (the historical ti yong

dichotomy) but indeed more assertively to define its constitution within

China and beyond it That is Chinese civilization is often seen as that which

will save neoliberalism from pure barbarism Thus the challenge for lesbi-

ans and gay men in China as well as other citizens is to prove at once their

ability to transcend nation-state boundaries and embrace neoliberal cosmo-

politanism but also to display their normativity as Chinese citizens5

My second disagreement with other theories of neoliberalism is that while

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 428

prominent theorists have made the important argument that neoliberalism

creates new subjectivities they tend to emphasize a rationalized subject who

must discipline himself or herself into neoliberal modes of being and act-

ing6 These theories have the advantage that they do not treat neoliberalism

as a purely economistic endeavor but they nonetheless accept neoliberal ide-

ologiesrsquo own ideas about rationality as that which subtends neoliberalism

Moreover they tend to draw a direct and rather deterministic line from neo-

liberal economic policies to these rational techniques of the self to neoliberal

subjectivities In contrast I locate the specific appearance of neoliberalismin China in the production of desire7 Desire is the means through which

people in China as elsewhere prove their cosmopolitan worldliness But

desire is a complicated realm As psychoanalytical theory has long argued

desire can be unpredictable and difficult to control ldquoDesirerdquo is a historically

socially and culturally produced field that articulates the new contradictions

and inequalities in China to both resolve past dilemmas and create new ones

The desiring subject mdash whether sexual affective or possessive mdash thus func-tions variously as a trope a normative ideal and a horizon of possibility mdash

or impossibility It promises new freedoms even as it seems to be the only

game in town It also creates a terrain for powerful and dehumanizing exclu-

sions While the neoliberal enticement to have desires is prevalent every-

where in China debates about how to distinguish licit and illicit desires

continue to animate public culture Lesbians and gay men must grapple

with the ambivalences contradictions and exclusions that the specificity ofneoliberalism creates in China

This essay speaks as well to a hoary debate in queer studies or perhaps I

should say to the attacks on queer studies by those who used to accuse it of

being ldquomerely culturalrdquo or idealist as opposed to materialist queer8 Those

debates were never resolved they merely faded But they left certain dichot-

omies in place those who wanted so-called materialist studies of sexuality

and desire used the term ldquomaterialistrdquo in an obfuscatory manner Those

who had been criticized responded by pointing out that attention to family

kinship intimacy and the body are as ldquomaterialrdquo as one can get But what

those who invoked materialism really meant which they did also say was

that studies of desire should be grounded in a study of capitalist relations

of production Ironically however as soon as they set out that context they

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 429

also let desire drop out of the picture because they couldnrsquot really figure out

within a certain classical Marxism how to study the myriad forms desire

takes Thus Donald Morton for example establishes a dichotomy between

need and desire and asserts that need is what we excuse the pun need to

study but desire is merely an ideological by-product of capitalism9 It was

difficult to get past such homophobia and so the debate petered out after

both sides had had their say The debate was ironic because it was based on

a basic opposition between the instrumental and the affective that which is

instrumental belongs to a study of capitalism proper mdash the rational subjectwith needs mdash while that which is affective is relegated to a realm that is not

part of capitalist relations of production proper I say it is ironic to base a

critique of queer studies on the instrumental versus the affective because as

Marshall Sahlins pointed out a long time ago this opposition was produced

out of capitalism itself10 Queer studies on the other hand has not really

figured out how to get past the homophobia implicit in so many of these

critiques and analyze the relationship between capitalism and desire Myhope is that this essay contributes to bridging that division

The desiring subject has taken center stage in China because of the his-

torically specific allegory constructed to reject Maoism This allegory revises

historical memory through the emancipatory tale that Maoism suppressed

a natural human nature and that by rejecting the socialist state people can

unshackle their gendered and sexual selves11 Given the specificity of this

history mdash and its revisionist historiography mdash the goal in China appearsto be not merely to end the suppression of so-called innate gendered and

sexual selves but the positive development of subjects with elaborate sexual

material and affective self-interests After the June 983092th crisis of legitimacy

in 983089983097983096983097 the constitution of a postsocialist humanity in China entailed the

intensification of this goal in order to create cosmopolitan citizens of a

post ndash Cold War world12

For these historical reasons homoeroticism has created a great deal of

ambivalence in China This ambivalence is evident in public culture debates

about well-known legal cases concerning homoerotic desire and gay identity

as well as in informal conversation13 Indeed homoeroticism plays a cen-

tral role in public discussions about licit and illicit or proper and improper

desires There are no laws against homosexuality in China But some con-

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 430

demn homosexuality in the name of Chinese morality while others who do

not identify as gay proclaim that although they do not understand homo-

sexuality everyone should be free to express their desires This complex situ-

ation means that lesbians and gay men provide a particularly compelling

and ambivalent challenge to postsocialist constructions of human nature

Lesbians and gay men in China could view themselves as standing at the

forefront of a universal humanity in the expression of their desires Yet they

must struggle with public debates in China about the differentiation among

those deemed appropriate subjects of desire and those cast as inappropriateThe instabilities inherent in the experimental nature of Chinarsquos neoliberal

reforms means that these ldquodesiring-actionsrdquo to borrow a term from Neferti

Tadiar were not determined in advance14 Nonetheless these debates revolved

around attempts to draw a clear boundary between normative and nonnor-

mative desires both within and outside gay communities in China

Money boys thus became a lightening rod among gay men in their efforts

to grapple with homophobia and the proper class-inflected ways to be adesiring subject in this postsocialist world As queer theory has taught us

desires normalize and in so doing constitute those who are also excluded

and marked as nonnormative15 Queer theorists of color have challenged

and expanded this canon in order to make compelling arguments about the

critical role of postcolonial histories of racism and diaspora in construct-

ing normative desires among lesbians and gay men16 Queer theorists have

also argued that normalizations require a great deal of effort to make themeffective and in that work gaps and fissures lead to unexpected outcomes

Gay men who condemn money boys marginalize them as a way to make

their own desires appear simultaneously cosmopolitan (in its contemporary

neoliberal guise) and appropriately Chinese But they sometimes have dif-

ficulty in crafting absolute distinctions between themselves and these ldquooth-

ersrdquo even as they use these others to make themselves appear to have the

more appropriate desires befitting a postsocialist China17 Thus I locate an

anxiety expressed about the ldquomoney boyrdquo as a production of the market

economy that threatens the ontological certainty of the desiring individual

The fact that the unique term ldquomoney boyrdquo is used to refer to these

men mdash rather than say ldquogigolordquo or ldquomale prostituterdquo mdash is not to be dis-

missed as incidental but bears a critical relation to commodification and the

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 431

anxieties attendant upon the loss or the blurring of the boundaries between

epistemic zones After repeatedly hearing disparaging remarks about money

boys I decided I should talk to money boys themselves I was hesitant at

first because I was not sure how one would go about asking someone ques-

tions about their engagement in an activity that is so roundly condemned I

began to ask some of my gay male friends in Beijing to introduce me to any

money boys they knew While I am sure there are men who sell sex to other

men mdash one stroll through Beijingrsquos famous Dongdan Park makes that activ-

ity obvious mdash the men I was introduced to as money boys all refused thatlabel They argued that their actions did not represent a simple equation of

sex for money18 As I describe below their rejection of the money boy label is

more than simply a matter of denial These men had a much more complex

interpretation of their activities that as with other gay men broadened out

into a consideration of the place of desire in contemporary China They led

me to understand that their activities were as much an intimate part of the

transformations that had moved China away from socialism and toward aworld of what I would call neoliberal cosmopolitanism as any other activi-

ties centered around desire Indeed their analyses of their own lives and the

debates among gay men over money boys led me to realize that the question

of desire lies at the very heart of these transformations

I offer two ldquoscenesrdquo that develop my arguments about not simply the

views of those labeled money boys but also the cultural anxieties of other gay

men about money boys That is my intent is not just to describe so-calledmoney boysrsquo attempts to decouple money and sex but other gay menrsquos fears

about their own inabilities to do so the reasons why this distinction comes

to matter at all and the politically and culturally specific context that shapes

these anxieties The first scene occurred in my room in Beijing when one of

my gay male friends introduced me to someone he labeled a money boy The

disagreements that ensued in the conversation exemplify the anxious pursuit

of neoliberal respectability among certain gay men The second scene is a

film by the well-known queer filmmaker Cui Zirsquoen Through satire and

subversion Cui Zirsquoen challenges gay men about their desires for neoliberal

normalization

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positions 182 Fall 2010 432

Scene One

It was a spring evening in 983089983097983097983096 Ah Zhuang had agreed to introduce meto someone he said was a money boy19 I had first met Ah Zhuang through

other foreign lesbians and gay men living in Beijing Then in his early for-

ties Ah Zhuang was a radiologist Ah Zhuang considered himself to be

someone who had always known he was gay He had never married as have

so many other gay men but lived at home taking care of his mother He

also considered himself to be part of a long-lost line of aristocratic Mongo-

lians through his fatherrsquos ancestors Ah Zhuang had embraced the newlyemergent gay scene with unabashed enthusiasm Though many older men

who have sex with other men shunned that scene and given their histori-

cal experiences of harassment feared exposure Ah Zhuang in contrast

worked on the gay hotline attended all the salon discussions met with psy-

chiatrists to argue with them about the normality of homosexuality and

established himself as an ldquoelderrdquo among what were mostly young gay men

in their twenties He loved dispensing advice Ah Zhuang felt it was critical

for all people who have a homoerotic orientation to identify themselves as

gay and embrace that identity His experience of having been arrested in the

983089983097983096983088s for approaching another man for sex in the public bathrooms made

him all the more adamant that normalizing a gay identity would put an

end to the police harassment to which he had been subjected20 On the other

hand he felt equally vehement about the need to not expose onersquos family to

social condemnation and thus he felt it important to be discreet

Ah Zhuang had decided ideas about what constitutes a proper gay iden-

tity These ideas were made most apparent to me on the evening in question

That night Ah Zhuang arrived at my room with a young man named Ah

Pei Ah Zhuang introduced him as his former boyfriend I was immediately

confused I thought he had said he would introduce me to a money boy

And if this person was his former boyfriend was he telling me he had beeninvolved with a money boy As the conversation developed things turned

out to be more complex For Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang argued during the

entire evening about whether Ah Pei was indeed a money boy at all Ah

Zhuang stayed for the whole conversation in part because Ah Pei has a very

thick Beijing working-class accent and I sometimes found it hard to follow

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 433

him Ah Zhuang helpfully repeated some of Ah Peirsquos statements to make

sure I understood But Ah Zhuang also kept inserting his own views inter-

rupting Ah Pei at every turn

We began the conversation in a desultory manner with my questions

about Ah Peirsquos background He explained that his parents both had had a

hard life when they were young before the 983089983097983092983097 revolution His father was

from the Northeast and had always had to move around looking for work

But fortunately he had ended up in Beijing working in a factory under

the Central Television Bureau constructing television reception towers Hismother worked in a radio factory When his father fell ill with cancer Ah

Pei had taken over his factory position At the time of course job inheri-

tance in state-run factories was seen as a privilege Then Ah Peirsquos second

brother and sister-in-law also came to work there By the time of our con-

versation Ah Pei had taken what was then the risky step of abandoning his

secure position in the factory Perhaps he had the foresight to realize that

factory workersrsquo living conditions were declining under economic reformIndeed by the time of our conversation half the factory had been let go and

were on unemployment Ah Pei had become a taxi driver He was then in

his mid-thirties

Perhaps I was moving too slowly toward the ostensible topic of the eve-

ning Or perhaps he had his own agenda In any case Ah Zhuang suddenly

interjected with a question that abruptly changed the direction of our con-

versation ldquoWhat are your feelings when you are with womenrdquo Ah Pei pro-ceeded to tell a story about his factory ldquoAll the women I have encountered

have been from our factoryrdquo He then described how at the age of 983089983097 he had

his first sexual relationship with an older married woman after another

woman he was apprenticed to introduced them to each other She too was

an apprentice According to Ah Pei she had seduced him Prior to that he

had no interest in sex with women at least not women his age They carried

on their affair for over a year The womanrsquos husband never knew he worked

in another factory The main point that Ah Pei stressed in telling this story

was that with an older person he finally felt secure Since then he added

he has always wanted to be with older people

When he first made this assertion I did not pick up on its larger implica-

tion in relation to the issue of money boys Only later when Ah Zhuang was

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 3: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 427

cally contingent heterogeneous project whose coherence must be continu-

ally asserted through transnational articulations between unequally situated

nation-states In China as elsewhere one of the central features of struggles

to articulate transnational economic policies only some of which we might

label ldquoneoliberalrdquo profit-seeking activities which are far from uniform and

new kinds of subjects is the simultaneous mobilization of cosmopolitanism

on the one hand and Chinese civilization culture and national identity on

the other My argument in brief is that the place of lesbians and gay men

in China is intimately connected to cosmopolitanism because it is throughthe expression of desire that they as well as other Chinese citizens are able

to feel part of a universal humanity The fact that they must do so is itself a

result of the embrace of neoliberalism which changes the relation of China

to the world economy and the terms by which its people can relate to each

other3 Neoliberalism thus produces a yearning for cosmopolitanism which

then gets encoded as a difference between licit and illicit desires

The mobilization of cosmopolitanism along with Chinese cultural andnational identity occurs in several realms Official discourse about ldquosocialism

with Chinese characteristicsrdquo is but one of them and should not be lightly

dismissed as there indeed exists cultural and historical specificity to the

manner in which privatization activities occur4 Both official and popular

discourses also mobilize national identity and ldquotraditionalrdquo Chinese moral-

ity which spans invocations of Confucian virtues family values Buddhism

and the history of Chinese culture prior to the socialist revolution Thesecategories far from taken for granted are themselves continually debated as

various practices mdash gender sexual and otherwise mdash are deemed to be repre-

sentative of Chinese culture or its antithesis that requires vigorous excision

The invocation of Chinese culture morality and national identity is meant

not only to forestall the worst effects of neoliberalism (the historical ti yong

dichotomy) but indeed more assertively to define its constitution within

China and beyond it That is Chinese civilization is often seen as that which

will save neoliberalism from pure barbarism Thus the challenge for lesbi-

ans and gay men in China as well as other citizens is to prove at once their

ability to transcend nation-state boundaries and embrace neoliberal cosmo-

politanism but also to display their normativity as Chinese citizens5

My second disagreement with other theories of neoliberalism is that while

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positions 182 Fall 2010 428

prominent theorists have made the important argument that neoliberalism

creates new subjectivities they tend to emphasize a rationalized subject who

must discipline himself or herself into neoliberal modes of being and act-

ing6 These theories have the advantage that they do not treat neoliberalism

as a purely economistic endeavor but they nonetheless accept neoliberal ide-

ologiesrsquo own ideas about rationality as that which subtends neoliberalism

Moreover they tend to draw a direct and rather deterministic line from neo-

liberal economic policies to these rational techniques of the self to neoliberal

subjectivities In contrast I locate the specific appearance of neoliberalismin China in the production of desire7 Desire is the means through which

people in China as elsewhere prove their cosmopolitan worldliness But

desire is a complicated realm As psychoanalytical theory has long argued

desire can be unpredictable and difficult to control ldquoDesirerdquo is a historically

socially and culturally produced field that articulates the new contradictions

and inequalities in China to both resolve past dilemmas and create new ones

The desiring subject mdash whether sexual affective or possessive mdash thus func-tions variously as a trope a normative ideal and a horizon of possibility mdash

or impossibility It promises new freedoms even as it seems to be the only

game in town It also creates a terrain for powerful and dehumanizing exclu-

sions While the neoliberal enticement to have desires is prevalent every-

where in China debates about how to distinguish licit and illicit desires

continue to animate public culture Lesbians and gay men must grapple

with the ambivalences contradictions and exclusions that the specificity ofneoliberalism creates in China

This essay speaks as well to a hoary debate in queer studies or perhaps I

should say to the attacks on queer studies by those who used to accuse it of

being ldquomerely culturalrdquo or idealist as opposed to materialist queer8 Those

debates were never resolved they merely faded But they left certain dichot-

omies in place those who wanted so-called materialist studies of sexuality

and desire used the term ldquomaterialistrdquo in an obfuscatory manner Those

who had been criticized responded by pointing out that attention to family

kinship intimacy and the body are as ldquomaterialrdquo as one can get But what

those who invoked materialism really meant which they did also say was

that studies of desire should be grounded in a study of capitalist relations

of production Ironically however as soon as they set out that context they

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 429

also let desire drop out of the picture because they couldnrsquot really figure out

within a certain classical Marxism how to study the myriad forms desire

takes Thus Donald Morton for example establishes a dichotomy between

need and desire and asserts that need is what we excuse the pun need to

study but desire is merely an ideological by-product of capitalism9 It was

difficult to get past such homophobia and so the debate petered out after

both sides had had their say The debate was ironic because it was based on

a basic opposition between the instrumental and the affective that which is

instrumental belongs to a study of capitalism proper mdash the rational subjectwith needs mdash while that which is affective is relegated to a realm that is not

part of capitalist relations of production proper I say it is ironic to base a

critique of queer studies on the instrumental versus the affective because as

Marshall Sahlins pointed out a long time ago this opposition was produced

out of capitalism itself10 Queer studies on the other hand has not really

figured out how to get past the homophobia implicit in so many of these

critiques and analyze the relationship between capitalism and desire Myhope is that this essay contributes to bridging that division

The desiring subject has taken center stage in China because of the his-

torically specific allegory constructed to reject Maoism This allegory revises

historical memory through the emancipatory tale that Maoism suppressed

a natural human nature and that by rejecting the socialist state people can

unshackle their gendered and sexual selves11 Given the specificity of this

history mdash and its revisionist historiography mdash the goal in China appearsto be not merely to end the suppression of so-called innate gendered and

sexual selves but the positive development of subjects with elaborate sexual

material and affective self-interests After the June 983092th crisis of legitimacy

in 983089983097983096983097 the constitution of a postsocialist humanity in China entailed the

intensification of this goal in order to create cosmopolitan citizens of a

post ndash Cold War world12

For these historical reasons homoeroticism has created a great deal of

ambivalence in China This ambivalence is evident in public culture debates

about well-known legal cases concerning homoerotic desire and gay identity

as well as in informal conversation13 Indeed homoeroticism plays a cen-

tral role in public discussions about licit and illicit or proper and improper

desires There are no laws against homosexuality in China But some con-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 430

demn homosexuality in the name of Chinese morality while others who do

not identify as gay proclaim that although they do not understand homo-

sexuality everyone should be free to express their desires This complex situ-

ation means that lesbians and gay men provide a particularly compelling

and ambivalent challenge to postsocialist constructions of human nature

Lesbians and gay men in China could view themselves as standing at the

forefront of a universal humanity in the expression of their desires Yet they

must struggle with public debates in China about the differentiation among

those deemed appropriate subjects of desire and those cast as inappropriateThe instabilities inherent in the experimental nature of Chinarsquos neoliberal

reforms means that these ldquodesiring-actionsrdquo to borrow a term from Neferti

Tadiar were not determined in advance14 Nonetheless these debates revolved

around attempts to draw a clear boundary between normative and nonnor-

mative desires both within and outside gay communities in China

Money boys thus became a lightening rod among gay men in their efforts

to grapple with homophobia and the proper class-inflected ways to be adesiring subject in this postsocialist world As queer theory has taught us

desires normalize and in so doing constitute those who are also excluded

and marked as nonnormative15 Queer theorists of color have challenged

and expanded this canon in order to make compelling arguments about the

critical role of postcolonial histories of racism and diaspora in construct-

ing normative desires among lesbians and gay men16 Queer theorists have

also argued that normalizations require a great deal of effort to make themeffective and in that work gaps and fissures lead to unexpected outcomes

Gay men who condemn money boys marginalize them as a way to make

their own desires appear simultaneously cosmopolitan (in its contemporary

neoliberal guise) and appropriately Chinese But they sometimes have dif-

ficulty in crafting absolute distinctions between themselves and these ldquooth-

ersrdquo even as they use these others to make themselves appear to have the

more appropriate desires befitting a postsocialist China17 Thus I locate an

anxiety expressed about the ldquomoney boyrdquo as a production of the market

economy that threatens the ontological certainty of the desiring individual

The fact that the unique term ldquomoney boyrdquo is used to refer to these

men mdash rather than say ldquogigolordquo or ldquomale prostituterdquo mdash is not to be dis-

missed as incidental but bears a critical relation to commodification and the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 431

anxieties attendant upon the loss or the blurring of the boundaries between

epistemic zones After repeatedly hearing disparaging remarks about money

boys I decided I should talk to money boys themselves I was hesitant at

first because I was not sure how one would go about asking someone ques-

tions about their engagement in an activity that is so roundly condemned I

began to ask some of my gay male friends in Beijing to introduce me to any

money boys they knew While I am sure there are men who sell sex to other

men mdash one stroll through Beijingrsquos famous Dongdan Park makes that activ-

ity obvious mdash the men I was introduced to as money boys all refused thatlabel They argued that their actions did not represent a simple equation of

sex for money18 As I describe below their rejection of the money boy label is

more than simply a matter of denial These men had a much more complex

interpretation of their activities that as with other gay men broadened out

into a consideration of the place of desire in contemporary China They led

me to understand that their activities were as much an intimate part of the

transformations that had moved China away from socialism and toward aworld of what I would call neoliberal cosmopolitanism as any other activi-

ties centered around desire Indeed their analyses of their own lives and the

debates among gay men over money boys led me to realize that the question

of desire lies at the very heart of these transformations

I offer two ldquoscenesrdquo that develop my arguments about not simply the

views of those labeled money boys but also the cultural anxieties of other gay

men about money boys That is my intent is not just to describe so-calledmoney boysrsquo attempts to decouple money and sex but other gay menrsquos fears

about their own inabilities to do so the reasons why this distinction comes

to matter at all and the politically and culturally specific context that shapes

these anxieties The first scene occurred in my room in Beijing when one of

my gay male friends introduced me to someone he labeled a money boy The

disagreements that ensued in the conversation exemplify the anxious pursuit

of neoliberal respectability among certain gay men The second scene is a

film by the well-known queer filmmaker Cui Zirsquoen Through satire and

subversion Cui Zirsquoen challenges gay men about their desires for neoliberal

normalization

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positions 182 Fall 2010 432

Scene One

It was a spring evening in 983089983097983097983096 Ah Zhuang had agreed to introduce meto someone he said was a money boy19 I had first met Ah Zhuang through

other foreign lesbians and gay men living in Beijing Then in his early for-

ties Ah Zhuang was a radiologist Ah Zhuang considered himself to be

someone who had always known he was gay He had never married as have

so many other gay men but lived at home taking care of his mother He

also considered himself to be part of a long-lost line of aristocratic Mongo-

lians through his fatherrsquos ancestors Ah Zhuang had embraced the newlyemergent gay scene with unabashed enthusiasm Though many older men

who have sex with other men shunned that scene and given their histori-

cal experiences of harassment feared exposure Ah Zhuang in contrast

worked on the gay hotline attended all the salon discussions met with psy-

chiatrists to argue with them about the normality of homosexuality and

established himself as an ldquoelderrdquo among what were mostly young gay men

in their twenties He loved dispensing advice Ah Zhuang felt it was critical

for all people who have a homoerotic orientation to identify themselves as

gay and embrace that identity His experience of having been arrested in the

983089983097983096983088s for approaching another man for sex in the public bathrooms made

him all the more adamant that normalizing a gay identity would put an

end to the police harassment to which he had been subjected20 On the other

hand he felt equally vehement about the need to not expose onersquos family to

social condemnation and thus he felt it important to be discreet

Ah Zhuang had decided ideas about what constitutes a proper gay iden-

tity These ideas were made most apparent to me on the evening in question

That night Ah Zhuang arrived at my room with a young man named Ah

Pei Ah Zhuang introduced him as his former boyfriend I was immediately

confused I thought he had said he would introduce me to a money boy

And if this person was his former boyfriend was he telling me he had beeninvolved with a money boy As the conversation developed things turned

out to be more complex For Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang argued during the

entire evening about whether Ah Pei was indeed a money boy at all Ah

Zhuang stayed for the whole conversation in part because Ah Pei has a very

thick Beijing working-class accent and I sometimes found it hard to follow

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 433

him Ah Zhuang helpfully repeated some of Ah Peirsquos statements to make

sure I understood But Ah Zhuang also kept inserting his own views inter-

rupting Ah Pei at every turn

We began the conversation in a desultory manner with my questions

about Ah Peirsquos background He explained that his parents both had had a

hard life when they were young before the 983089983097983092983097 revolution His father was

from the Northeast and had always had to move around looking for work

But fortunately he had ended up in Beijing working in a factory under

the Central Television Bureau constructing television reception towers Hismother worked in a radio factory When his father fell ill with cancer Ah

Pei had taken over his factory position At the time of course job inheri-

tance in state-run factories was seen as a privilege Then Ah Peirsquos second

brother and sister-in-law also came to work there By the time of our con-

versation Ah Pei had taken what was then the risky step of abandoning his

secure position in the factory Perhaps he had the foresight to realize that

factory workersrsquo living conditions were declining under economic reformIndeed by the time of our conversation half the factory had been let go and

were on unemployment Ah Pei had become a taxi driver He was then in

his mid-thirties

Perhaps I was moving too slowly toward the ostensible topic of the eve-

ning Or perhaps he had his own agenda In any case Ah Zhuang suddenly

interjected with a question that abruptly changed the direction of our con-

versation ldquoWhat are your feelings when you are with womenrdquo Ah Pei pro-ceeded to tell a story about his factory ldquoAll the women I have encountered

have been from our factoryrdquo He then described how at the age of 983089983097 he had

his first sexual relationship with an older married woman after another

woman he was apprenticed to introduced them to each other She too was

an apprentice According to Ah Pei she had seduced him Prior to that he

had no interest in sex with women at least not women his age They carried

on their affair for over a year The womanrsquos husband never knew he worked

in another factory The main point that Ah Pei stressed in telling this story

was that with an older person he finally felt secure Since then he added

he has always wanted to be with older people

When he first made this assertion I did not pick up on its larger implica-

tion in relation to the issue of money boys Only later when Ah Zhuang was

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 4: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 428

prominent theorists have made the important argument that neoliberalism

creates new subjectivities they tend to emphasize a rationalized subject who

must discipline himself or herself into neoliberal modes of being and act-

ing6 These theories have the advantage that they do not treat neoliberalism

as a purely economistic endeavor but they nonetheless accept neoliberal ide-

ologiesrsquo own ideas about rationality as that which subtends neoliberalism

Moreover they tend to draw a direct and rather deterministic line from neo-

liberal economic policies to these rational techniques of the self to neoliberal

subjectivities In contrast I locate the specific appearance of neoliberalismin China in the production of desire7 Desire is the means through which

people in China as elsewhere prove their cosmopolitan worldliness But

desire is a complicated realm As psychoanalytical theory has long argued

desire can be unpredictable and difficult to control ldquoDesirerdquo is a historically

socially and culturally produced field that articulates the new contradictions

and inequalities in China to both resolve past dilemmas and create new ones

The desiring subject mdash whether sexual affective or possessive mdash thus func-tions variously as a trope a normative ideal and a horizon of possibility mdash

or impossibility It promises new freedoms even as it seems to be the only

game in town It also creates a terrain for powerful and dehumanizing exclu-

sions While the neoliberal enticement to have desires is prevalent every-

where in China debates about how to distinguish licit and illicit desires

continue to animate public culture Lesbians and gay men must grapple

with the ambivalences contradictions and exclusions that the specificity ofneoliberalism creates in China

This essay speaks as well to a hoary debate in queer studies or perhaps I

should say to the attacks on queer studies by those who used to accuse it of

being ldquomerely culturalrdquo or idealist as opposed to materialist queer8 Those

debates were never resolved they merely faded But they left certain dichot-

omies in place those who wanted so-called materialist studies of sexuality

and desire used the term ldquomaterialistrdquo in an obfuscatory manner Those

who had been criticized responded by pointing out that attention to family

kinship intimacy and the body are as ldquomaterialrdquo as one can get But what

those who invoked materialism really meant which they did also say was

that studies of desire should be grounded in a study of capitalist relations

of production Ironically however as soon as they set out that context they

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 429

also let desire drop out of the picture because they couldnrsquot really figure out

within a certain classical Marxism how to study the myriad forms desire

takes Thus Donald Morton for example establishes a dichotomy between

need and desire and asserts that need is what we excuse the pun need to

study but desire is merely an ideological by-product of capitalism9 It was

difficult to get past such homophobia and so the debate petered out after

both sides had had their say The debate was ironic because it was based on

a basic opposition between the instrumental and the affective that which is

instrumental belongs to a study of capitalism proper mdash the rational subjectwith needs mdash while that which is affective is relegated to a realm that is not

part of capitalist relations of production proper I say it is ironic to base a

critique of queer studies on the instrumental versus the affective because as

Marshall Sahlins pointed out a long time ago this opposition was produced

out of capitalism itself10 Queer studies on the other hand has not really

figured out how to get past the homophobia implicit in so many of these

critiques and analyze the relationship between capitalism and desire Myhope is that this essay contributes to bridging that division

The desiring subject has taken center stage in China because of the his-

torically specific allegory constructed to reject Maoism This allegory revises

historical memory through the emancipatory tale that Maoism suppressed

a natural human nature and that by rejecting the socialist state people can

unshackle their gendered and sexual selves11 Given the specificity of this

history mdash and its revisionist historiography mdash the goal in China appearsto be not merely to end the suppression of so-called innate gendered and

sexual selves but the positive development of subjects with elaborate sexual

material and affective self-interests After the June 983092th crisis of legitimacy

in 983089983097983096983097 the constitution of a postsocialist humanity in China entailed the

intensification of this goal in order to create cosmopolitan citizens of a

post ndash Cold War world12

For these historical reasons homoeroticism has created a great deal of

ambivalence in China This ambivalence is evident in public culture debates

about well-known legal cases concerning homoerotic desire and gay identity

as well as in informal conversation13 Indeed homoeroticism plays a cen-

tral role in public discussions about licit and illicit or proper and improper

desires There are no laws against homosexuality in China But some con-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 430

demn homosexuality in the name of Chinese morality while others who do

not identify as gay proclaim that although they do not understand homo-

sexuality everyone should be free to express their desires This complex situ-

ation means that lesbians and gay men provide a particularly compelling

and ambivalent challenge to postsocialist constructions of human nature

Lesbians and gay men in China could view themselves as standing at the

forefront of a universal humanity in the expression of their desires Yet they

must struggle with public debates in China about the differentiation among

those deemed appropriate subjects of desire and those cast as inappropriateThe instabilities inherent in the experimental nature of Chinarsquos neoliberal

reforms means that these ldquodesiring-actionsrdquo to borrow a term from Neferti

Tadiar were not determined in advance14 Nonetheless these debates revolved

around attempts to draw a clear boundary between normative and nonnor-

mative desires both within and outside gay communities in China

Money boys thus became a lightening rod among gay men in their efforts

to grapple with homophobia and the proper class-inflected ways to be adesiring subject in this postsocialist world As queer theory has taught us

desires normalize and in so doing constitute those who are also excluded

and marked as nonnormative15 Queer theorists of color have challenged

and expanded this canon in order to make compelling arguments about the

critical role of postcolonial histories of racism and diaspora in construct-

ing normative desires among lesbians and gay men16 Queer theorists have

also argued that normalizations require a great deal of effort to make themeffective and in that work gaps and fissures lead to unexpected outcomes

Gay men who condemn money boys marginalize them as a way to make

their own desires appear simultaneously cosmopolitan (in its contemporary

neoliberal guise) and appropriately Chinese But they sometimes have dif-

ficulty in crafting absolute distinctions between themselves and these ldquooth-

ersrdquo even as they use these others to make themselves appear to have the

more appropriate desires befitting a postsocialist China17 Thus I locate an

anxiety expressed about the ldquomoney boyrdquo as a production of the market

economy that threatens the ontological certainty of the desiring individual

The fact that the unique term ldquomoney boyrdquo is used to refer to these

men mdash rather than say ldquogigolordquo or ldquomale prostituterdquo mdash is not to be dis-

missed as incidental but bears a critical relation to commodification and the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 431

anxieties attendant upon the loss or the blurring of the boundaries between

epistemic zones After repeatedly hearing disparaging remarks about money

boys I decided I should talk to money boys themselves I was hesitant at

first because I was not sure how one would go about asking someone ques-

tions about their engagement in an activity that is so roundly condemned I

began to ask some of my gay male friends in Beijing to introduce me to any

money boys they knew While I am sure there are men who sell sex to other

men mdash one stroll through Beijingrsquos famous Dongdan Park makes that activ-

ity obvious mdash the men I was introduced to as money boys all refused thatlabel They argued that their actions did not represent a simple equation of

sex for money18 As I describe below their rejection of the money boy label is

more than simply a matter of denial These men had a much more complex

interpretation of their activities that as with other gay men broadened out

into a consideration of the place of desire in contemporary China They led

me to understand that their activities were as much an intimate part of the

transformations that had moved China away from socialism and toward aworld of what I would call neoliberal cosmopolitanism as any other activi-

ties centered around desire Indeed their analyses of their own lives and the

debates among gay men over money boys led me to realize that the question

of desire lies at the very heart of these transformations

I offer two ldquoscenesrdquo that develop my arguments about not simply the

views of those labeled money boys but also the cultural anxieties of other gay

men about money boys That is my intent is not just to describe so-calledmoney boysrsquo attempts to decouple money and sex but other gay menrsquos fears

about their own inabilities to do so the reasons why this distinction comes

to matter at all and the politically and culturally specific context that shapes

these anxieties The first scene occurred in my room in Beijing when one of

my gay male friends introduced me to someone he labeled a money boy The

disagreements that ensued in the conversation exemplify the anxious pursuit

of neoliberal respectability among certain gay men The second scene is a

film by the well-known queer filmmaker Cui Zirsquoen Through satire and

subversion Cui Zirsquoen challenges gay men about their desires for neoliberal

normalization

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 432

Scene One

It was a spring evening in 983089983097983097983096 Ah Zhuang had agreed to introduce meto someone he said was a money boy19 I had first met Ah Zhuang through

other foreign lesbians and gay men living in Beijing Then in his early for-

ties Ah Zhuang was a radiologist Ah Zhuang considered himself to be

someone who had always known he was gay He had never married as have

so many other gay men but lived at home taking care of his mother He

also considered himself to be part of a long-lost line of aristocratic Mongo-

lians through his fatherrsquos ancestors Ah Zhuang had embraced the newlyemergent gay scene with unabashed enthusiasm Though many older men

who have sex with other men shunned that scene and given their histori-

cal experiences of harassment feared exposure Ah Zhuang in contrast

worked on the gay hotline attended all the salon discussions met with psy-

chiatrists to argue with them about the normality of homosexuality and

established himself as an ldquoelderrdquo among what were mostly young gay men

in their twenties He loved dispensing advice Ah Zhuang felt it was critical

for all people who have a homoerotic orientation to identify themselves as

gay and embrace that identity His experience of having been arrested in the

983089983097983096983088s for approaching another man for sex in the public bathrooms made

him all the more adamant that normalizing a gay identity would put an

end to the police harassment to which he had been subjected20 On the other

hand he felt equally vehement about the need to not expose onersquos family to

social condemnation and thus he felt it important to be discreet

Ah Zhuang had decided ideas about what constitutes a proper gay iden-

tity These ideas were made most apparent to me on the evening in question

That night Ah Zhuang arrived at my room with a young man named Ah

Pei Ah Zhuang introduced him as his former boyfriend I was immediately

confused I thought he had said he would introduce me to a money boy

And if this person was his former boyfriend was he telling me he had beeninvolved with a money boy As the conversation developed things turned

out to be more complex For Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang argued during the

entire evening about whether Ah Pei was indeed a money boy at all Ah

Zhuang stayed for the whole conversation in part because Ah Pei has a very

thick Beijing working-class accent and I sometimes found it hard to follow

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 433

him Ah Zhuang helpfully repeated some of Ah Peirsquos statements to make

sure I understood But Ah Zhuang also kept inserting his own views inter-

rupting Ah Pei at every turn

We began the conversation in a desultory manner with my questions

about Ah Peirsquos background He explained that his parents both had had a

hard life when they were young before the 983089983097983092983097 revolution His father was

from the Northeast and had always had to move around looking for work

But fortunately he had ended up in Beijing working in a factory under

the Central Television Bureau constructing television reception towers Hismother worked in a radio factory When his father fell ill with cancer Ah

Pei had taken over his factory position At the time of course job inheri-

tance in state-run factories was seen as a privilege Then Ah Peirsquos second

brother and sister-in-law also came to work there By the time of our con-

versation Ah Pei had taken what was then the risky step of abandoning his

secure position in the factory Perhaps he had the foresight to realize that

factory workersrsquo living conditions were declining under economic reformIndeed by the time of our conversation half the factory had been let go and

were on unemployment Ah Pei had become a taxi driver He was then in

his mid-thirties

Perhaps I was moving too slowly toward the ostensible topic of the eve-

ning Or perhaps he had his own agenda In any case Ah Zhuang suddenly

interjected with a question that abruptly changed the direction of our con-

versation ldquoWhat are your feelings when you are with womenrdquo Ah Pei pro-ceeded to tell a story about his factory ldquoAll the women I have encountered

have been from our factoryrdquo He then described how at the age of 983089983097 he had

his first sexual relationship with an older married woman after another

woman he was apprenticed to introduced them to each other She too was

an apprentice According to Ah Pei she had seduced him Prior to that he

had no interest in sex with women at least not women his age They carried

on their affair for over a year The womanrsquos husband never knew he worked

in another factory The main point that Ah Pei stressed in telling this story

was that with an older person he finally felt secure Since then he added

he has always wanted to be with older people

When he first made this assertion I did not pick up on its larger implica-

tion in relation to the issue of money boys Only later when Ah Zhuang was

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 5: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 429

also let desire drop out of the picture because they couldnrsquot really figure out

within a certain classical Marxism how to study the myriad forms desire

takes Thus Donald Morton for example establishes a dichotomy between

need and desire and asserts that need is what we excuse the pun need to

study but desire is merely an ideological by-product of capitalism9 It was

difficult to get past such homophobia and so the debate petered out after

both sides had had their say The debate was ironic because it was based on

a basic opposition between the instrumental and the affective that which is

instrumental belongs to a study of capitalism proper mdash the rational subjectwith needs mdash while that which is affective is relegated to a realm that is not

part of capitalist relations of production proper I say it is ironic to base a

critique of queer studies on the instrumental versus the affective because as

Marshall Sahlins pointed out a long time ago this opposition was produced

out of capitalism itself10 Queer studies on the other hand has not really

figured out how to get past the homophobia implicit in so many of these

critiques and analyze the relationship between capitalism and desire Myhope is that this essay contributes to bridging that division

The desiring subject has taken center stage in China because of the his-

torically specific allegory constructed to reject Maoism This allegory revises

historical memory through the emancipatory tale that Maoism suppressed

a natural human nature and that by rejecting the socialist state people can

unshackle their gendered and sexual selves11 Given the specificity of this

history mdash and its revisionist historiography mdash the goal in China appearsto be not merely to end the suppression of so-called innate gendered and

sexual selves but the positive development of subjects with elaborate sexual

material and affective self-interests After the June 983092th crisis of legitimacy

in 983089983097983096983097 the constitution of a postsocialist humanity in China entailed the

intensification of this goal in order to create cosmopolitan citizens of a

post ndash Cold War world12

For these historical reasons homoeroticism has created a great deal of

ambivalence in China This ambivalence is evident in public culture debates

about well-known legal cases concerning homoerotic desire and gay identity

as well as in informal conversation13 Indeed homoeroticism plays a cen-

tral role in public discussions about licit and illicit or proper and improper

desires There are no laws against homosexuality in China But some con-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 430

demn homosexuality in the name of Chinese morality while others who do

not identify as gay proclaim that although they do not understand homo-

sexuality everyone should be free to express their desires This complex situ-

ation means that lesbians and gay men provide a particularly compelling

and ambivalent challenge to postsocialist constructions of human nature

Lesbians and gay men in China could view themselves as standing at the

forefront of a universal humanity in the expression of their desires Yet they

must struggle with public debates in China about the differentiation among

those deemed appropriate subjects of desire and those cast as inappropriateThe instabilities inherent in the experimental nature of Chinarsquos neoliberal

reforms means that these ldquodesiring-actionsrdquo to borrow a term from Neferti

Tadiar were not determined in advance14 Nonetheless these debates revolved

around attempts to draw a clear boundary between normative and nonnor-

mative desires both within and outside gay communities in China

Money boys thus became a lightening rod among gay men in their efforts

to grapple with homophobia and the proper class-inflected ways to be adesiring subject in this postsocialist world As queer theory has taught us

desires normalize and in so doing constitute those who are also excluded

and marked as nonnormative15 Queer theorists of color have challenged

and expanded this canon in order to make compelling arguments about the

critical role of postcolonial histories of racism and diaspora in construct-

ing normative desires among lesbians and gay men16 Queer theorists have

also argued that normalizations require a great deal of effort to make themeffective and in that work gaps and fissures lead to unexpected outcomes

Gay men who condemn money boys marginalize them as a way to make

their own desires appear simultaneously cosmopolitan (in its contemporary

neoliberal guise) and appropriately Chinese But they sometimes have dif-

ficulty in crafting absolute distinctions between themselves and these ldquooth-

ersrdquo even as they use these others to make themselves appear to have the

more appropriate desires befitting a postsocialist China17 Thus I locate an

anxiety expressed about the ldquomoney boyrdquo as a production of the market

economy that threatens the ontological certainty of the desiring individual

The fact that the unique term ldquomoney boyrdquo is used to refer to these

men mdash rather than say ldquogigolordquo or ldquomale prostituterdquo mdash is not to be dis-

missed as incidental but bears a critical relation to commodification and the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 431

anxieties attendant upon the loss or the blurring of the boundaries between

epistemic zones After repeatedly hearing disparaging remarks about money

boys I decided I should talk to money boys themselves I was hesitant at

first because I was not sure how one would go about asking someone ques-

tions about their engagement in an activity that is so roundly condemned I

began to ask some of my gay male friends in Beijing to introduce me to any

money boys they knew While I am sure there are men who sell sex to other

men mdash one stroll through Beijingrsquos famous Dongdan Park makes that activ-

ity obvious mdash the men I was introduced to as money boys all refused thatlabel They argued that their actions did not represent a simple equation of

sex for money18 As I describe below their rejection of the money boy label is

more than simply a matter of denial These men had a much more complex

interpretation of their activities that as with other gay men broadened out

into a consideration of the place of desire in contemporary China They led

me to understand that their activities were as much an intimate part of the

transformations that had moved China away from socialism and toward aworld of what I would call neoliberal cosmopolitanism as any other activi-

ties centered around desire Indeed their analyses of their own lives and the

debates among gay men over money boys led me to realize that the question

of desire lies at the very heart of these transformations

I offer two ldquoscenesrdquo that develop my arguments about not simply the

views of those labeled money boys but also the cultural anxieties of other gay

men about money boys That is my intent is not just to describe so-calledmoney boysrsquo attempts to decouple money and sex but other gay menrsquos fears

about their own inabilities to do so the reasons why this distinction comes

to matter at all and the politically and culturally specific context that shapes

these anxieties The first scene occurred in my room in Beijing when one of

my gay male friends introduced me to someone he labeled a money boy The

disagreements that ensued in the conversation exemplify the anxious pursuit

of neoliberal respectability among certain gay men The second scene is a

film by the well-known queer filmmaker Cui Zirsquoen Through satire and

subversion Cui Zirsquoen challenges gay men about their desires for neoliberal

normalization

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positions 182 Fall 2010 432

Scene One

It was a spring evening in 983089983097983097983096 Ah Zhuang had agreed to introduce meto someone he said was a money boy19 I had first met Ah Zhuang through

other foreign lesbians and gay men living in Beijing Then in his early for-

ties Ah Zhuang was a radiologist Ah Zhuang considered himself to be

someone who had always known he was gay He had never married as have

so many other gay men but lived at home taking care of his mother He

also considered himself to be part of a long-lost line of aristocratic Mongo-

lians through his fatherrsquos ancestors Ah Zhuang had embraced the newlyemergent gay scene with unabashed enthusiasm Though many older men

who have sex with other men shunned that scene and given their histori-

cal experiences of harassment feared exposure Ah Zhuang in contrast

worked on the gay hotline attended all the salon discussions met with psy-

chiatrists to argue with them about the normality of homosexuality and

established himself as an ldquoelderrdquo among what were mostly young gay men

in their twenties He loved dispensing advice Ah Zhuang felt it was critical

for all people who have a homoerotic orientation to identify themselves as

gay and embrace that identity His experience of having been arrested in the

983089983097983096983088s for approaching another man for sex in the public bathrooms made

him all the more adamant that normalizing a gay identity would put an

end to the police harassment to which he had been subjected20 On the other

hand he felt equally vehement about the need to not expose onersquos family to

social condemnation and thus he felt it important to be discreet

Ah Zhuang had decided ideas about what constitutes a proper gay iden-

tity These ideas were made most apparent to me on the evening in question

That night Ah Zhuang arrived at my room with a young man named Ah

Pei Ah Zhuang introduced him as his former boyfriend I was immediately

confused I thought he had said he would introduce me to a money boy

And if this person was his former boyfriend was he telling me he had beeninvolved with a money boy As the conversation developed things turned

out to be more complex For Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang argued during the

entire evening about whether Ah Pei was indeed a money boy at all Ah

Zhuang stayed for the whole conversation in part because Ah Pei has a very

thick Beijing working-class accent and I sometimes found it hard to follow

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 433

him Ah Zhuang helpfully repeated some of Ah Peirsquos statements to make

sure I understood But Ah Zhuang also kept inserting his own views inter-

rupting Ah Pei at every turn

We began the conversation in a desultory manner with my questions

about Ah Peirsquos background He explained that his parents both had had a

hard life when they were young before the 983089983097983092983097 revolution His father was

from the Northeast and had always had to move around looking for work

But fortunately he had ended up in Beijing working in a factory under

the Central Television Bureau constructing television reception towers Hismother worked in a radio factory When his father fell ill with cancer Ah

Pei had taken over his factory position At the time of course job inheri-

tance in state-run factories was seen as a privilege Then Ah Peirsquos second

brother and sister-in-law also came to work there By the time of our con-

versation Ah Pei had taken what was then the risky step of abandoning his

secure position in the factory Perhaps he had the foresight to realize that

factory workersrsquo living conditions were declining under economic reformIndeed by the time of our conversation half the factory had been let go and

were on unemployment Ah Pei had become a taxi driver He was then in

his mid-thirties

Perhaps I was moving too slowly toward the ostensible topic of the eve-

ning Or perhaps he had his own agenda In any case Ah Zhuang suddenly

interjected with a question that abruptly changed the direction of our con-

versation ldquoWhat are your feelings when you are with womenrdquo Ah Pei pro-ceeded to tell a story about his factory ldquoAll the women I have encountered

have been from our factoryrdquo He then described how at the age of 983089983097 he had

his first sexual relationship with an older married woman after another

woman he was apprenticed to introduced them to each other She too was

an apprentice According to Ah Pei she had seduced him Prior to that he

had no interest in sex with women at least not women his age They carried

on their affair for over a year The womanrsquos husband never knew he worked

in another factory The main point that Ah Pei stressed in telling this story

was that with an older person he finally felt secure Since then he added

he has always wanted to be with older people

When he first made this assertion I did not pick up on its larger implica-

tion in relation to the issue of money boys Only later when Ah Zhuang was

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 6: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 430

demn homosexuality in the name of Chinese morality while others who do

not identify as gay proclaim that although they do not understand homo-

sexuality everyone should be free to express their desires This complex situ-

ation means that lesbians and gay men provide a particularly compelling

and ambivalent challenge to postsocialist constructions of human nature

Lesbians and gay men in China could view themselves as standing at the

forefront of a universal humanity in the expression of their desires Yet they

must struggle with public debates in China about the differentiation among

those deemed appropriate subjects of desire and those cast as inappropriateThe instabilities inherent in the experimental nature of Chinarsquos neoliberal

reforms means that these ldquodesiring-actionsrdquo to borrow a term from Neferti

Tadiar were not determined in advance14 Nonetheless these debates revolved

around attempts to draw a clear boundary between normative and nonnor-

mative desires both within and outside gay communities in China

Money boys thus became a lightening rod among gay men in their efforts

to grapple with homophobia and the proper class-inflected ways to be adesiring subject in this postsocialist world As queer theory has taught us

desires normalize and in so doing constitute those who are also excluded

and marked as nonnormative15 Queer theorists of color have challenged

and expanded this canon in order to make compelling arguments about the

critical role of postcolonial histories of racism and diaspora in construct-

ing normative desires among lesbians and gay men16 Queer theorists have

also argued that normalizations require a great deal of effort to make themeffective and in that work gaps and fissures lead to unexpected outcomes

Gay men who condemn money boys marginalize them as a way to make

their own desires appear simultaneously cosmopolitan (in its contemporary

neoliberal guise) and appropriately Chinese But they sometimes have dif-

ficulty in crafting absolute distinctions between themselves and these ldquooth-

ersrdquo even as they use these others to make themselves appear to have the

more appropriate desires befitting a postsocialist China17 Thus I locate an

anxiety expressed about the ldquomoney boyrdquo as a production of the market

economy that threatens the ontological certainty of the desiring individual

The fact that the unique term ldquomoney boyrdquo is used to refer to these

men mdash rather than say ldquogigolordquo or ldquomale prostituterdquo mdash is not to be dis-

missed as incidental but bears a critical relation to commodification and the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 431

anxieties attendant upon the loss or the blurring of the boundaries between

epistemic zones After repeatedly hearing disparaging remarks about money

boys I decided I should talk to money boys themselves I was hesitant at

first because I was not sure how one would go about asking someone ques-

tions about their engagement in an activity that is so roundly condemned I

began to ask some of my gay male friends in Beijing to introduce me to any

money boys they knew While I am sure there are men who sell sex to other

men mdash one stroll through Beijingrsquos famous Dongdan Park makes that activ-

ity obvious mdash the men I was introduced to as money boys all refused thatlabel They argued that their actions did not represent a simple equation of

sex for money18 As I describe below their rejection of the money boy label is

more than simply a matter of denial These men had a much more complex

interpretation of their activities that as with other gay men broadened out

into a consideration of the place of desire in contemporary China They led

me to understand that their activities were as much an intimate part of the

transformations that had moved China away from socialism and toward aworld of what I would call neoliberal cosmopolitanism as any other activi-

ties centered around desire Indeed their analyses of their own lives and the

debates among gay men over money boys led me to realize that the question

of desire lies at the very heart of these transformations

I offer two ldquoscenesrdquo that develop my arguments about not simply the

views of those labeled money boys but also the cultural anxieties of other gay

men about money boys That is my intent is not just to describe so-calledmoney boysrsquo attempts to decouple money and sex but other gay menrsquos fears

about their own inabilities to do so the reasons why this distinction comes

to matter at all and the politically and culturally specific context that shapes

these anxieties The first scene occurred in my room in Beijing when one of

my gay male friends introduced me to someone he labeled a money boy The

disagreements that ensued in the conversation exemplify the anxious pursuit

of neoliberal respectability among certain gay men The second scene is a

film by the well-known queer filmmaker Cui Zirsquoen Through satire and

subversion Cui Zirsquoen challenges gay men about their desires for neoliberal

normalization

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positions 182 Fall 2010 432

Scene One

It was a spring evening in 983089983097983097983096 Ah Zhuang had agreed to introduce meto someone he said was a money boy19 I had first met Ah Zhuang through

other foreign lesbians and gay men living in Beijing Then in his early for-

ties Ah Zhuang was a radiologist Ah Zhuang considered himself to be

someone who had always known he was gay He had never married as have

so many other gay men but lived at home taking care of his mother He

also considered himself to be part of a long-lost line of aristocratic Mongo-

lians through his fatherrsquos ancestors Ah Zhuang had embraced the newlyemergent gay scene with unabashed enthusiasm Though many older men

who have sex with other men shunned that scene and given their histori-

cal experiences of harassment feared exposure Ah Zhuang in contrast

worked on the gay hotline attended all the salon discussions met with psy-

chiatrists to argue with them about the normality of homosexuality and

established himself as an ldquoelderrdquo among what were mostly young gay men

in their twenties He loved dispensing advice Ah Zhuang felt it was critical

for all people who have a homoerotic orientation to identify themselves as

gay and embrace that identity His experience of having been arrested in the

983089983097983096983088s for approaching another man for sex in the public bathrooms made

him all the more adamant that normalizing a gay identity would put an

end to the police harassment to which he had been subjected20 On the other

hand he felt equally vehement about the need to not expose onersquos family to

social condemnation and thus he felt it important to be discreet

Ah Zhuang had decided ideas about what constitutes a proper gay iden-

tity These ideas were made most apparent to me on the evening in question

That night Ah Zhuang arrived at my room with a young man named Ah

Pei Ah Zhuang introduced him as his former boyfriend I was immediately

confused I thought he had said he would introduce me to a money boy

And if this person was his former boyfriend was he telling me he had beeninvolved with a money boy As the conversation developed things turned

out to be more complex For Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang argued during the

entire evening about whether Ah Pei was indeed a money boy at all Ah

Zhuang stayed for the whole conversation in part because Ah Pei has a very

thick Beijing working-class accent and I sometimes found it hard to follow

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 433

him Ah Zhuang helpfully repeated some of Ah Peirsquos statements to make

sure I understood But Ah Zhuang also kept inserting his own views inter-

rupting Ah Pei at every turn

We began the conversation in a desultory manner with my questions

about Ah Peirsquos background He explained that his parents both had had a

hard life when they were young before the 983089983097983092983097 revolution His father was

from the Northeast and had always had to move around looking for work

But fortunately he had ended up in Beijing working in a factory under

the Central Television Bureau constructing television reception towers Hismother worked in a radio factory When his father fell ill with cancer Ah

Pei had taken over his factory position At the time of course job inheri-

tance in state-run factories was seen as a privilege Then Ah Peirsquos second

brother and sister-in-law also came to work there By the time of our con-

versation Ah Pei had taken what was then the risky step of abandoning his

secure position in the factory Perhaps he had the foresight to realize that

factory workersrsquo living conditions were declining under economic reformIndeed by the time of our conversation half the factory had been let go and

were on unemployment Ah Pei had become a taxi driver He was then in

his mid-thirties

Perhaps I was moving too slowly toward the ostensible topic of the eve-

ning Or perhaps he had his own agenda In any case Ah Zhuang suddenly

interjected with a question that abruptly changed the direction of our con-

versation ldquoWhat are your feelings when you are with womenrdquo Ah Pei pro-ceeded to tell a story about his factory ldquoAll the women I have encountered

have been from our factoryrdquo He then described how at the age of 983089983097 he had

his first sexual relationship with an older married woman after another

woman he was apprenticed to introduced them to each other She too was

an apprentice According to Ah Pei she had seduced him Prior to that he

had no interest in sex with women at least not women his age They carried

on their affair for over a year The womanrsquos husband never knew he worked

in another factory The main point that Ah Pei stressed in telling this story

was that with an older person he finally felt secure Since then he added

he has always wanted to be with older people

When he first made this assertion I did not pick up on its larger implica-

tion in relation to the issue of money boys Only later when Ah Zhuang was

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 7: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 431

anxieties attendant upon the loss or the blurring of the boundaries between

epistemic zones After repeatedly hearing disparaging remarks about money

boys I decided I should talk to money boys themselves I was hesitant at

first because I was not sure how one would go about asking someone ques-

tions about their engagement in an activity that is so roundly condemned I

began to ask some of my gay male friends in Beijing to introduce me to any

money boys they knew While I am sure there are men who sell sex to other

men mdash one stroll through Beijingrsquos famous Dongdan Park makes that activ-

ity obvious mdash the men I was introduced to as money boys all refused thatlabel They argued that their actions did not represent a simple equation of

sex for money18 As I describe below their rejection of the money boy label is

more than simply a matter of denial These men had a much more complex

interpretation of their activities that as with other gay men broadened out

into a consideration of the place of desire in contemporary China They led

me to understand that their activities were as much an intimate part of the

transformations that had moved China away from socialism and toward aworld of what I would call neoliberal cosmopolitanism as any other activi-

ties centered around desire Indeed their analyses of their own lives and the

debates among gay men over money boys led me to realize that the question

of desire lies at the very heart of these transformations

I offer two ldquoscenesrdquo that develop my arguments about not simply the

views of those labeled money boys but also the cultural anxieties of other gay

men about money boys That is my intent is not just to describe so-calledmoney boysrsquo attempts to decouple money and sex but other gay menrsquos fears

about their own inabilities to do so the reasons why this distinction comes

to matter at all and the politically and culturally specific context that shapes

these anxieties The first scene occurred in my room in Beijing when one of

my gay male friends introduced me to someone he labeled a money boy The

disagreements that ensued in the conversation exemplify the anxious pursuit

of neoliberal respectability among certain gay men The second scene is a

film by the well-known queer filmmaker Cui Zirsquoen Through satire and

subversion Cui Zirsquoen challenges gay men about their desires for neoliberal

normalization

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positions 182 Fall 2010 432

Scene One

It was a spring evening in 983089983097983097983096 Ah Zhuang had agreed to introduce meto someone he said was a money boy19 I had first met Ah Zhuang through

other foreign lesbians and gay men living in Beijing Then in his early for-

ties Ah Zhuang was a radiologist Ah Zhuang considered himself to be

someone who had always known he was gay He had never married as have

so many other gay men but lived at home taking care of his mother He

also considered himself to be part of a long-lost line of aristocratic Mongo-

lians through his fatherrsquos ancestors Ah Zhuang had embraced the newlyemergent gay scene with unabashed enthusiasm Though many older men

who have sex with other men shunned that scene and given their histori-

cal experiences of harassment feared exposure Ah Zhuang in contrast

worked on the gay hotline attended all the salon discussions met with psy-

chiatrists to argue with them about the normality of homosexuality and

established himself as an ldquoelderrdquo among what were mostly young gay men

in their twenties He loved dispensing advice Ah Zhuang felt it was critical

for all people who have a homoerotic orientation to identify themselves as

gay and embrace that identity His experience of having been arrested in the

983089983097983096983088s for approaching another man for sex in the public bathrooms made

him all the more adamant that normalizing a gay identity would put an

end to the police harassment to which he had been subjected20 On the other

hand he felt equally vehement about the need to not expose onersquos family to

social condemnation and thus he felt it important to be discreet

Ah Zhuang had decided ideas about what constitutes a proper gay iden-

tity These ideas were made most apparent to me on the evening in question

That night Ah Zhuang arrived at my room with a young man named Ah

Pei Ah Zhuang introduced him as his former boyfriend I was immediately

confused I thought he had said he would introduce me to a money boy

And if this person was his former boyfriend was he telling me he had beeninvolved with a money boy As the conversation developed things turned

out to be more complex For Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang argued during the

entire evening about whether Ah Pei was indeed a money boy at all Ah

Zhuang stayed for the whole conversation in part because Ah Pei has a very

thick Beijing working-class accent and I sometimes found it hard to follow

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 433

him Ah Zhuang helpfully repeated some of Ah Peirsquos statements to make

sure I understood But Ah Zhuang also kept inserting his own views inter-

rupting Ah Pei at every turn

We began the conversation in a desultory manner with my questions

about Ah Peirsquos background He explained that his parents both had had a

hard life when they were young before the 983089983097983092983097 revolution His father was

from the Northeast and had always had to move around looking for work

But fortunately he had ended up in Beijing working in a factory under

the Central Television Bureau constructing television reception towers Hismother worked in a radio factory When his father fell ill with cancer Ah

Pei had taken over his factory position At the time of course job inheri-

tance in state-run factories was seen as a privilege Then Ah Peirsquos second

brother and sister-in-law also came to work there By the time of our con-

versation Ah Pei had taken what was then the risky step of abandoning his

secure position in the factory Perhaps he had the foresight to realize that

factory workersrsquo living conditions were declining under economic reformIndeed by the time of our conversation half the factory had been let go and

were on unemployment Ah Pei had become a taxi driver He was then in

his mid-thirties

Perhaps I was moving too slowly toward the ostensible topic of the eve-

ning Or perhaps he had his own agenda In any case Ah Zhuang suddenly

interjected with a question that abruptly changed the direction of our con-

versation ldquoWhat are your feelings when you are with womenrdquo Ah Pei pro-ceeded to tell a story about his factory ldquoAll the women I have encountered

have been from our factoryrdquo He then described how at the age of 983089983097 he had

his first sexual relationship with an older married woman after another

woman he was apprenticed to introduced them to each other She too was

an apprentice According to Ah Pei she had seduced him Prior to that he

had no interest in sex with women at least not women his age They carried

on their affair for over a year The womanrsquos husband never knew he worked

in another factory The main point that Ah Pei stressed in telling this story

was that with an older person he finally felt secure Since then he added

he has always wanted to be with older people

When he first made this assertion I did not pick up on its larger implica-

tion in relation to the issue of money boys Only later when Ah Zhuang was

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 8: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 432

Scene One

It was a spring evening in 983089983097983097983096 Ah Zhuang had agreed to introduce meto someone he said was a money boy19 I had first met Ah Zhuang through

other foreign lesbians and gay men living in Beijing Then in his early for-

ties Ah Zhuang was a radiologist Ah Zhuang considered himself to be

someone who had always known he was gay He had never married as have

so many other gay men but lived at home taking care of his mother He

also considered himself to be part of a long-lost line of aristocratic Mongo-

lians through his fatherrsquos ancestors Ah Zhuang had embraced the newlyemergent gay scene with unabashed enthusiasm Though many older men

who have sex with other men shunned that scene and given their histori-

cal experiences of harassment feared exposure Ah Zhuang in contrast

worked on the gay hotline attended all the salon discussions met with psy-

chiatrists to argue with them about the normality of homosexuality and

established himself as an ldquoelderrdquo among what were mostly young gay men

in their twenties He loved dispensing advice Ah Zhuang felt it was critical

for all people who have a homoerotic orientation to identify themselves as

gay and embrace that identity His experience of having been arrested in the

983089983097983096983088s for approaching another man for sex in the public bathrooms made

him all the more adamant that normalizing a gay identity would put an

end to the police harassment to which he had been subjected20 On the other

hand he felt equally vehement about the need to not expose onersquos family to

social condemnation and thus he felt it important to be discreet

Ah Zhuang had decided ideas about what constitutes a proper gay iden-

tity These ideas were made most apparent to me on the evening in question

That night Ah Zhuang arrived at my room with a young man named Ah

Pei Ah Zhuang introduced him as his former boyfriend I was immediately

confused I thought he had said he would introduce me to a money boy

And if this person was his former boyfriend was he telling me he had beeninvolved with a money boy As the conversation developed things turned

out to be more complex For Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang argued during the

entire evening about whether Ah Pei was indeed a money boy at all Ah

Zhuang stayed for the whole conversation in part because Ah Pei has a very

thick Beijing working-class accent and I sometimes found it hard to follow

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 433

him Ah Zhuang helpfully repeated some of Ah Peirsquos statements to make

sure I understood But Ah Zhuang also kept inserting his own views inter-

rupting Ah Pei at every turn

We began the conversation in a desultory manner with my questions

about Ah Peirsquos background He explained that his parents both had had a

hard life when they were young before the 983089983097983092983097 revolution His father was

from the Northeast and had always had to move around looking for work

But fortunately he had ended up in Beijing working in a factory under

the Central Television Bureau constructing television reception towers Hismother worked in a radio factory When his father fell ill with cancer Ah

Pei had taken over his factory position At the time of course job inheri-

tance in state-run factories was seen as a privilege Then Ah Peirsquos second

brother and sister-in-law also came to work there By the time of our con-

versation Ah Pei had taken what was then the risky step of abandoning his

secure position in the factory Perhaps he had the foresight to realize that

factory workersrsquo living conditions were declining under economic reformIndeed by the time of our conversation half the factory had been let go and

were on unemployment Ah Pei had become a taxi driver He was then in

his mid-thirties

Perhaps I was moving too slowly toward the ostensible topic of the eve-

ning Or perhaps he had his own agenda In any case Ah Zhuang suddenly

interjected with a question that abruptly changed the direction of our con-

versation ldquoWhat are your feelings when you are with womenrdquo Ah Pei pro-ceeded to tell a story about his factory ldquoAll the women I have encountered

have been from our factoryrdquo He then described how at the age of 983089983097 he had

his first sexual relationship with an older married woman after another

woman he was apprenticed to introduced them to each other She too was

an apprentice According to Ah Pei she had seduced him Prior to that he

had no interest in sex with women at least not women his age They carried

on their affair for over a year The womanrsquos husband never knew he worked

in another factory The main point that Ah Pei stressed in telling this story

was that with an older person he finally felt secure Since then he added

he has always wanted to be with older people

When he first made this assertion I did not pick up on its larger implica-

tion in relation to the issue of money boys Only later when Ah Zhuang was

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 9: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 433

him Ah Zhuang helpfully repeated some of Ah Peirsquos statements to make

sure I understood But Ah Zhuang also kept inserting his own views inter-

rupting Ah Pei at every turn

We began the conversation in a desultory manner with my questions

about Ah Peirsquos background He explained that his parents both had had a

hard life when they were young before the 983089983097983092983097 revolution His father was

from the Northeast and had always had to move around looking for work

But fortunately he had ended up in Beijing working in a factory under

the Central Television Bureau constructing television reception towers Hismother worked in a radio factory When his father fell ill with cancer Ah

Pei had taken over his factory position At the time of course job inheri-

tance in state-run factories was seen as a privilege Then Ah Peirsquos second

brother and sister-in-law also came to work there By the time of our con-

versation Ah Pei had taken what was then the risky step of abandoning his

secure position in the factory Perhaps he had the foresight to realize that

factory workersrsquo living conditions were declining under economic reformIndeed by the time of our conversation half the factory had been let go and

were on unemployment Ah Pei had become a taxi driver He was then in

his mid-thirties

Perhaps I was moving too slowly toward the ostensible topic of the eve-

ning Or perhaps he had his own agenda In any case Ah Zhuang suddenly

interjected with a question that abruptly changed the direction of our con-

versation ldquoWhat are your feelings when you are with womenrdquo Ah Pei pro-ceeded to tell a story about his factory ldquoAll the women I have encountered

have been from our factoryrdquo He then described how at the age of 983089983097 he had

his first sexual relationship with an older married woman after another

woman he was apprenticed to introduced them to each other She too was

an apprentice According to Ah Pei she had seduced him Prior to that he

had no interest in sex with women at least not women his age They carried

on their affair for over a year The womanrsquos husband never knew he worked

in another factory The main point that Ah Pei stressed in telling this story

was that with an older person he finally felt secure Since then he added

he has always wanted to be with older people

When he first made this assertion I did not pick up on its larger implica-

tion in relation to the issue of money boys Only later when Ah Zhuang was

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 10: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 434

arguing with him did I realize that since that first affair with a woman

Ah Pei had been mainly with older men who took care of him mdash including

Ah Zhuang In talking about his first affair Ah Pei thus traced his inter-

est in older men to an emotional and sexual history of feeling comfortable

with older people Ah Zhuang as we will see reduced Ah Peirsquos story to

one of opportunism For at this point Ah Zhuang sarcastically interjected

a counterpoint to Ah Peirsquos insistence that this older woman had taken the

initiative ldquoMaybe the first time but then what about the second and third

ones Because yoursquove told me that there were quite a few including the topleader of the factory And even the managerrsquos wife Didnrsquot you take some

of the initiative in these later encounters I would really like to know what

exactly is your psychological attitude when you are with older peoplerdquo Ah

Pei ignored the first part of Ah Zhuangrsquos question answering that with

older people he feels particularly able to relax and let go

Here we find the first point of contention between Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang

over whether Ah Pei fits into the category of money boy Ah Pei tried to tellme a story of his psychological and emotional history He feels that older

people take the initiative with him which puts him at ease Ah Zhuang on

the other hand tried to turn Ah Peirsquos actions into self-seeking advantage Ah

Zhuang was not objecting so much to a seeming bisexuality that might make

a gay identity more ambiguous as to what in his view was naked opportun-

ism that did not distinguish between genders Ah Zhuang elaborated on his

view when I asked Ah Pei how he felt starting an affair with this womanAh Pei responded about the sex saying that looking back on it he could

see that he didnrsquot feel entirely comfortable because she did everything he

didnrsquot have to budge She helped him with everything Ah Zhuang then

interjected ldquoChina has a way of saying this this woman served ( cihou) him

Thatrsquos a clearer way to put it Chinarsquos traditional view is that the man should

take care of ( cihou) the woman and make her feel comfortable In his case

he made the woman do it so that he could feel comfortablerdquo This situation

in Ah Zhuangrsquos view was evidently one clear marker of a money boy Other-

wise why would a man not act like the man that he should be Why would

a man let himself be treated like a woman Ah Zhuangrsquos decided views on

appropriate gender attributes reproduce the dominant mode of delineating

the boundary between normative and nonnormative desire through gen-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 11: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 435

der His interpretation is testimony to a contradictory antinomy between a

fluidity of desire which is supposed to change continuously in line with a

free trade cosmopolitan market economy and a renaturalization of a binary

gender in its ldquorecoveryrdquo from Maoist suppression

Ah Zhuangrsquos views also echo a longer history of gender and sexuality

in China in which as Keith MacMahon has argued one of the main signs

of male privilege is the polygamous ability to have and manage multiple

sexual partners21 Ah Zhuang as a medical doctor is undoubtedly famil-

iar with traditional medical prescriptions for male potency and the needto retain male energy Moreover as Judith Farquhar has argued these tra-

ditional medical texts have been recovered and popularized in post-Mao

China through a discourse on excess and deficiency that is simultaneously

an allegory about Chinarsquos past and future22 Ah Zhuangrsquos critique of Ah Pei

reflects an understanding that to ldquotake care ofrdquo a woman sexually means

that the male is in charge of managing pleasure because he needs to control

the depletion of his own energies Clearly in Ah Zhuangrsquos view Ah Pei hasnot followed the proper prescriptions and therefore is not contributing to the

proper development of social life in China

Ah Pei then proceeded to tell a story of the factory as a site of sexual excess

Rather than paint a conventional portrait of a large state-run factory as a

place of hard work alternating with boredom Ah Pei offered a tale in which

it seemed a matter of course for people to develop their sexual proclivities in

such an oppressive situation Ah Pei explained for example how he startedsleeping with one woman Her husband had been arrested and thrown into

prison for sleeping around with the younger women in the factory His wife

the woman Ah Pei had an affair with brought the women home for him The

husband was arrested however not owing to the moral probity of other fac-

tory leaders but according to Ah Pei because another factory leader wanted

to have sex with one of the young women and was jealous of this man and

so reported him to the public security bureau When this manrsquos wife invitedhim over to her home he figured he wouldnrsquot get into any trouble having an

affair with her By implication Ah Pei was explaining how he had come to

have such a free and easy approach to sex But Ah Zhuang used this story to

conclude that Ah Pei had a profound lack of ethical sense when establishing

relationships with people particularly men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 12: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 436

Ah Zhuang then goaded Ah Pei into explaining his theory about lack of

father love Ah Pei told me about his violent father who drank too much and

hit his children Then one day when Ah Pei was a teenager he stood up to

his father But he always felt the keen loss of having a fatherrsquos love Thatrsquos

why he thinks he feels particularly comfortable with older men Ah Zhuang

promptly disagreed ldquoI donrsquot agree with this that a gay is someone who lacks

father love so they go in search of father love or someone older23 If his

view is correct then I am suspicious of whether he is really a gayrdquo Ah Pei

responded indirectly by saying that he knows for sure he will never get mar-

ried that even though no one living near him knows he is gay and thinks he

goes around with women he feels most comfortable with men Ah Zhuang

has a decided view of the correct way to be gay one that contains a normal-

izing pressure to present only positive or ldquonaturalrdquo reasons why one would

turn out to be gay This naturalization of gay identity parallels the natu-

ralization of the ability to be a desiring subject in post-Mao China Both

naturalizations create hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that articulatewith the neoliberal naturalization of social inequality In contrast Ah Pei

implied that there are varied ways of having homoerotic encounters and

involvements His story highlights contingency history and experience The

inequalities in his story are class- and gender-based

Ah Pei then launched into a story of how he started to get involved with

men He had come into Tiananmen Square one evening and met some-

one there Ah Zhuang interrupted and said that Ah Pei had still been withwomen after that But Ah Pei responded that though he had been with

women after his first man he nonetheless preferred men He continued his

story ldquoI walked by Zhongshan Park and went to the [public] toilet I saw a

lot of men who went in but didnrsquot come out I just stood there didnrsquot dare

to go in and piss What were they doing in there Curiosity got the better of

me I went in and found two men playing around After that I went there

every day Thatrsquos how I met a guy Thatrsquos how I started I was just a littleover twenty years oldrdquo He began to meet a lot of men through that public

toilet finally meeting his first real lover Lao Chen (Old Chen) With Lao

Chen ldquoI finally started a new life I had a homerdquo

Ah Pei explained about the suffering that he had endured in order to be

with men One evening he was nabbed by the police He lied and said he

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 13: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 437

didnrsquot understand what the other man wanted from him The police officer

made him do hard labor for a couple of hours but let him go after he saw

Ah Pei crying The police thought he looked very young Here Ah Zhuang

interjected that he too had thought Ah Pei looked much younger than his

years when he first met him ldquoWhen he meets up with other peoplerdquo Ah

Zhuang concluded ldquohe uses his brains Hersquos good at performingrdquo In other

words Ah Zhuang implied that At Pei had perfected the art of deception

When Ah Pei described his relationship with his first long-term male

lover Lao Chen he and Ah Zhuang began to argue in earnest Ah Zhuangset out the terms by stating that Lao Chen basically ldquokeptrdquo ( yang) Ah Pei

that he took care of him in every way24 He asserted his privileged access to

the truth of the situation by telling me that Lao Chen was a dear friend of

his and it was actually through Lao Chen that he had met Ah Pei He also

set up Lao Chenrsquos class background from a wealthy family in Shanghai Lao

Chen was privileged to lead the life of a playboy However according to Ah

Zhuang Lao Chen was also a deep thinker he had graduated from FuDanUniversity (the most prestigious university in Shanghai) and Ah Zhuang

had spent many pleasurable evenings talking to him about politics Thus

before Ah Pei had a chance to get very far into his version Ah Zhuang had

already established a clear class division between himself and Lao Chen on

the one side and Ah Pei on the other This division Ah Zhuang implied

should also reflect whose version of this social and biographical history was

reliableAgainst this weighty class backdrop Ah Pei struggled to put forth his

perspective Lao Chen had raised him true but he had given Lao Chen

great sexual satisfaction taking the initiative to do so He had also paid his

price by doing a lot of things for him such as taking care of Lao Chenrsquos

wife and other friends when they visited from Shanghai ldquoThat was money

I spent out of my own pocket I feel I treated his family well Hersquos older

than me and has a lot of money I admit thatrdquo In Ah Peirsquos view Lao Chenand he had a fair exchange Lao Chen had the money to buy things for Ah

Pei who in turn gave Lao Chen a satisfying sexual and emotional life In

Ah Peirsquos view it was through Lao Chenrsquos lavish expenditures on him that he

began to have true feelings of love for Lao Chen This issue of true feelings

was critical in Ah Peirsquos view in distinguishing himself from a money boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 14: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 438

Ah Pei further asserted that unlike money boys he never stuck out his hand

and asked for money People have always offered to buy things for him he

said but he never asked for anything ldquoI have always relied on myselfrdquo

Ah Zhuang quickly jumped in at this point ldquoIf I consider him to be a

money boy itrsquos because hersquos extremely intelligent in this regard Thatrsquos why

I think todayrsquos conversation is especially interesting We could talk about it

for a long time Lao Chen shed a lot of tears over him So he is a little dif-

ferent than the money boys at Half and Half [the gay bar] Do they have

these kind of money boys in the United States Sometimes he really did payfor things himself and their relationship was real I see it this way Hersquos a

little different than those others He still has a little feeling involvedrdquo David

Eng (this volume) astutely evaluates the difficulties in neoliberal modernity

of distinguishing between what he calls tokens of affection and tokens of

exchange

After Ah Zhuangrsquos explication Ah Pei did not directly address the com-

parison of himself with money boys Instead he inarticulately reasserted hisview that he had never stuck out his hand asking for money and had always

relied on himself Given Ah Zhuangrsquos blunt assertion I wanted Ah Pei to

respond I asked whether he saw himself as like those men in any way He

was direct ldquoI am absolutely not like themrdquo Ah Zhuang laughed furiously

ldquoI never stuck out my hand with Ah Zhuang eitherrdquo he replied to the laugh

ldquoLet Ah Zhuang tell you himself Do you admit it Ah Zhuang liked me so

he bought me things My old man [his current lover] is like this too Irsquom notvery smart Irsquom actually stupid my level is low but Lao Chen told him I was

clever Where am I cleverrdquo

I then bluntly asked him if he only sought out lovers who had money ldquoAh

Zhuang is a clear examplerdquo he replied ldquoAh Zhuang has nowhere near the

money of these other men but I still tell him I learned a lot from him I

used to have a foul mouth I still thank him for these past four years Thatrsquos

why I still keep a relationship with him no matter with gay friends or notI always introduce himrdquo

Ah Zhuang directed Ah Pei to explain how his relationship with Lao

Chen ended Ah Pei told a story of how Lao Chen began to see someone

else and did not want Ah Pei to come home anymore Ah Pei was furious

and refused to let him go He did all sorts of things to stop the relationship

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 15: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 439

from ending including threatening to expose Lao Chen at work Lao Chen

would certainly have lost his job not only because of homophobia but as

Ah Pei explained because he was already in hot water with the Party due

to his outspoken criticisms Ah Zhuang jumped in to point out how Ah

Peirsquos behavior with Lao Chen provided yet one more set of money boy sig-

nifiers ldquoIrsquoll explainrdquo insisted Ah Zhuang after Ah Pei had presented his

perspective ldquoFrom his point of view he wanted to occupy a position This

position was incredibly important to him Only with this position could he

have money Now it was very possible that this position could be taken overby someone else So thatrsquos why he wanted to take revenge Lao Chen came

looking for me to ask me what he should do lsquoServes you rightrsquo I said He

asked lsquoMaybe if I give him some money then he would be willing to leave

me alonersquo He asked me how much I said lsquoI donrsquot knowrsquo How could I

know how much money he should give him At the time I told him lsquoYou

can end things but you have to think of a way to do itrsquo rdquo Ah Pei diffidently

responded that he hadnrsquot wanted to let go of Lao Chen because yes he leda comfortable life with him and also he had feelings for him For Ah Pei

the fact that his life was comfortable with Lao Chen was quite distinct from

a money boyrsquos desire to be paid for sex But Ah Zhuang saw them as one

and the same Finally Lao Chen left for Canada promising to bring Ah Pei

with him after he had arrived there ldquoI was naiverdquo Ah Pei said because he

had believed him

Surprisingly Ah Pei and Ah Zhuang never explained to me much oftheir own relationship Perhaps in the end they sought to preserve some of

the fragments of their friendship They ended their conversation with me by

briefly mentioning Ah Peirsquos latest relationship with an older man someone

from France whom he had met in a bar one evening Ah Pei doesnrsquot speak

any French and this man doesnrsquot speak any Chinese Ah Zhuang translated

for them when necessary This man who worked for the French airlines

was planning to bring Ah Pei to France with him They had already appliedfor his visa In subsequent conversations Ah Zhuang derided Ah Peirsquos plans

How would Ah Pei make a living in France What could he do He would

have a hard time learning the language et cetera It was as if to say Ah Pei

did not deserve the special privilege of living in a Western country

One could dismiss this whole conversation as the obvious denouement of

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 16: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 440

a relationship that had ended bitterly Indeed Ah Zhuang had thrown Ah

Pei out of his house But Ah Zhuangrsquos insistence that Ah Pei was a money

boy reflected more than mere bitterness By rejecting Ah Peirsquos claims that

he too could place himself in the category of ldquogay manrdquo Ah Zhuang was

attempting to establish a hegemonic definition of respectable gayness For

Ah Zhuang this respectability adhered in appropriate gender sensibilities

class embodiment the proper balance between dependency and equality

a strict separation of money and love and a worldliness that only those of

a certain class stature should aspire to display Ah Zhuang was trying to

establish what Lisa Duggan has called the ldquonew homonormativityrdquo Dug-

gan argues that this new homonormativity is the equivalent of neoliberal

politics in the sexual realm25 These sexual politics uphold rather than con-

test dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions and promise

a depoliticized gay culture While Duggan concerns herself only with the

United States and does not consider transnational queer politics we can still

consider how her argument illuminates the sexual politics of someone likeAh Zhuang Ah Zhuang hopes to make gay identity respectable within

the terms of postsocialist neoliberalism The fact that neoliberalism has

made desire the central realm for producing proper citizen-subjects made

Ah Zhuangrsquos discourse all the more fraught with anxiety Ah Peirsquos own

intimacy with a well-to-do foreign gay man further goaded Ah Zhuang to

condemn Ah Peirsquos actions as inappropriate in terms of sexual gendered and

culturalnational identity For Ah Pei was going abroad to live in a Westerncountry long before Ah Zhuang would have the opportunity to do so

While Ah Peirsquos views do not simply reverse this moral equation nor do

they exemplify resistance to homonormativity in any straightforward sense

they provide an incipient means of gaining insight into the techniques of neo-

liberal normalizations as well as their instabilities Ah Zhuangrsquos condemna-

tion of Ah Peirsquos plans to move to France with his lover reveals the extent to

which the transnationalism that made Ah Peirsquos current relationship possiblechanges how ldquoinappropriaterdquo desires manifest themselves in the postsocialist

era It was after all only after the transformations in the last few decades

that a person from France would come to live and work again in China and

that an ldquoinappropriaterdquo desire could now also be a transnational desire The

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 17: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 441

fact that they do not speak each otherrsquos language exemplifies how neoliberal-

ism has allowed for new possibilities in the manner in which people desire

each other not just which kinds of desires are legitimate but which kinds of

desires are sustainable through which kinds of technological aids and socio-

economic conditions and across which kinds of borders Yet in Ah Zhuangrsquos

view someone of Ah Peirsquos class background could only succeed in such an

achievement by entangling the desires for money sex and love rather than

keeping them separate However the separations between entrepreneurialism

and intimacy that Ah Zhuang wants to establish for respectable gayness are

difficult to maintain26 Neoliberal cosmopolitanism appears to be all about

entrepreneurial savvy Yet there is more than one way to be an entrepreneur

And there is more than one way to be a nonnormalized or even antinormal-

ized gay subject27

Scene 2

Two young men are squatting at the edge of a bridge passing the time by

blowing up condoms ldquoThis way it looks like a dick It changes into breasts

when it gets bigger The breast changes into a dick and the dick into a

breastrdquo one of them says and laughs As they continue to play with their

condom-balloons the other one asks ldquoDo you like the feeling of being pen-

etrated or the feeling when you stick it inrdquo ldquoBothrdquo comes the answer

This scene opens Feeding Boys Ayaya ( Aiyaya Qu Buru) a queer filmabout male hustlers or money boys by the well-known experimental film-

maker Cui Zirsquoen28 This first scene immediately cuts to a contrasting scene

Two men are in a small closed room filled with computer and filmmaking

equipment The older one is in the background sitting in front of his com-

puter The other much younger is in the forefront of the screen The per-

son manipulating the computer equipment says ldquoZaizai [characterrsquos name]

this theme is for you It might not completely match your character in thefilm The distance makes it more precise Do you have any objectionsrdquo The

young man standing in the forefront of the screen has a somber look on his

face He refuses to speak The camera angle is an extreme close-up enlarg-

ing his face to fill the screen and nearly blocking out a view of the film-

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 18: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 442

maker The effect is of a split screen We hear the filmmaker from behind

urging him several times ldquoSay somethingrdquo But the other refuses to speak

The quick juxtaposition of these two scenes and their contrasting mise-

en-scene prefigure the major motifs in Feeding Boys Ayaya The opposition

is established visually in the lighting camera angles locations and position-

ing of the characters The first scene presents characters who we will later

come to realize are money boys though at this point their identities are

unclear The scene mixes irony and pathos freedom and marginalization

The ironic and lighthearted humor of the dialogue contrasts with the curi-

ous positioning of the two young men They are at the edge of a deserted

bridge in the very early morning sunlight The camera places both of them

in the center of the screen in a medium close-up thus highlighting rela-

tionality but also distance or alienation The bantering friendship of the

two young men is visually contrasted with their distance from the rest of

the population and from the normative workday Yet this alienation is also

a liberation from the very same mdash the freedom to play at any hour the lackof confinement in space This scene represents what Judith Halberstam has

called ldquoqueer time and spacerdquo Halberstam argues that queer time and space

are ldquowillfully eccentric modes of beingrdquo that challenge heteronormativity by

providing alternative relations to time and space29

The very next scene reminds us that what we have just seen and what we

will view in the rest of the film is a set of representations The question of

how to represent money boys and who can and should speak in their nameis highlighted in this film The filmmaker character in the second scene

is choosing the theme music not the young man The dark closed room

and the split screen raise the question of whether and how the young man

can escape the framing of his life by the other The silence of the young

man mdash another money boy mdash recalls Gayatri Spivakrsquos famous dictum that

the subaltern cannot speak by which she meant that only traces of their

own interpretations of their lives remains in the texts written about them bycolonial elites30

Feeding Boys is a continual juxtaposition of these two types of images mdash

one of money boys displaying a queer sociality and the other of someone mdash

whether the filmmaker character a Christian missionary out to save money

boys his girlfriend who takes over his work or the parents of an aspir-

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 19: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 443

ing money boy mdash speaking for or about them Although the film does not

romanticize their lives the money boy characters not only exceed but also

challenge these representations of them both their content and their mode

of representation They continually frustrate attempts to represent capture

or change them Zaizai for example later demands to choose his own theme

music an insistence that frustrates the filmmaker who claims it will ruin

his film Their queerness emerges in these challenges

With Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen enters the larger debates that have central-

ized the question of desire in postsocialist China Cui Zirsquoen uses experimen-

tal visual logics that blur documentary and fiction and that refuse narrative

linearity or closure to challenge not only the specific judgments about money

boys among gay men but the entire apparatus of normalization in China

that tries to delimit desire Cui Zirsquoen addresses the specificity of neoliberal-

ism in China by challenging the hegemonic articulations between Chinese

culture and proper desire on the one hand and labor money and desire on

the other The film has a carnivalesque quality reinforced by the hand-heldcamera techniques which is at once somber and playful It subverts bour-

geois heterosexuality as that which subtends Chinese culture by robbing it of

its glory The film represents money boys as people with an integral human-

ity who take the full measure of their lives while the people who judge

them in the name of neoliberal desires Chinese morality or Christianity

appear damaged filled with contradictory desires themselves or just plain

boring The film thus further subverts postsocialist normalizing desires bydirecting our gaze away from what many think is perverse or rather by

making the normal perverse and the perverse normal The people to be

pitied in this film are the heterosexuals who condemn the hustlersrsquo profes-

sion They are the ones who wither and die Hustlers in contrast have time

to play and enjoy life Yet Cui Zirsquoen does not indulge in a simple decon-

structive reversal Hustlers suffer too but mainly from the condemnation

and exploitation they experience as a result of the hypocritical desires of theheteronormative world

Although Feeding Boys seems to establish a debate between heterosexu-

als and gay male hustlers the themes raised in the film rehearse anxieties

similar to those I presented in my first scene that occur among gay men

Are hustlers respectable or do they sully the good name of other gay men

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 20: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 444

Do they deserve sympathy or condemnation Are they gay or just exploit-

ing vulnerable gay men Are their desires to be celebrated or condemned

Are they appropriate for Chinarsquos postsocialist neoliberal future or do they

represent the degradation of that future Feeding Boys refuses these dichoto-

mous terms Rather than simply reverse their valence the film addresses

other queer questions that displace these normalizing ones How should

we engage our desires How can this engagement lead to nonnormative

lives How does class inflect desire How can nonnormative desires chal-

lenge class-based temporalities What is the relationship between money

and sex Finally what is the role of religion

Feeding Boys loosely revolves around the elusive search of a Christian het-

erosexual brother Dabin for his younger brother Xiao Bao who has dis-

appeared into the money boy life During his search he discovers that one

of his younger ldquoChristian brothersrdquo Xiao Jian has also decided to become

a money boy to practice Christian love Juxtaposing money boysrsquo serious

banter with the normalizing judgments of others Feeding Boys weaves inand out of several recurrent image-themes the everyday life of hustlers

Xiao Jianrsquos exploration of how to become a hustler the missionizing zeal of

Dabin to dissuade hustlers from continuing in their profession and finally

the desire to represent and normalize the lives of hustlers Throughout

Feeding Boys jumps between these image-themes thus putting them in

dialogue with one another The experimental filmrsquos refusal to present a

linear narrative mirrors the refusal by the money boy characters to accedeto the normalizing judgments of others Thus the form to echo Hayden

White is also the content31 Cui Zirsquoenrsquos filmmaking techniques warn us

that endeavors to normalize create severe dislocations and damage And

not merely to money boys

Image-Theme 1 The Mundanity of Money Boy Life

Feeding Boys strikingly refuses to display any images of money boys actually

engaged in sex or hustling for customers This lack of sex scenes contrasts

with Cui Zirsquoenrsquos other films which generally go out of their way to show sex

between men The only way we even know that these young men are money

boys is through the dialogue More specifically we hear the arguments that

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 21: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 445

straight people who disapprove of them engender Indeed the film is quite

chaste The one scene in which we see two people showing erotic affection

is between the older heterosexual brother of one of the money boys (XiaoBao) whose missionary goal is to convert hustlers and his girlfriend Feed-

ing Boys thus refuses to indulge viewersrsquo scopophilic desires Cui Zirsquoen teases

the viewer from the first scene Watching two men blowing up condoms

and briefly chatting about sex hints at more erotic scenes to come But they

never materialize A condom-balloon is all we ever get By thus tapping into

a gaze desirous for the perverse and then frustrating that desire Cui Zirsquoen

confronts the viewer with the need to think about representation and the

role of representation in normalizing desire mdash both in public discourse and

in his film

In place of the erotic the viewer is offered the stuff of everyday life One

recurrent image as in the first scene is of money boys on a bridge early in

the morning In one scene they playfully engage in ballet-like dance ges-

tures In another one of them displays his acrobatic skills doing severalback flips Later we see these same young men practicing taiji quan (a mar-

tial arts exercise) again early in the morning on the bridge These images

immediately bring to mind the ldquonormalrdquo populace in Chinarsquos cities who go

out each morning to do precisely these group exercises This idea is rein-

forced by the camera angle in these scenes which is a medium wide-angle

shot taking in both the bridge and the surrounding metropolis But the

bridge is also symptomatic of a moment of suspension between directionsin life or between worlds A bridge represents a gap as well as an attempt to

overcome a fissure in the landscape In one telling scene near the end of the

film a money boy begs for money on the bridge pleading with passersby

that he has given up his dissolute life and reformed himself Yet immediately

after we see him with another friend arguing with the Christian mission-

aryrsquos girlfriend stating unequivocally that even though they treated begging

as a ldquorealrdquo job no one wanted to give them money and that in todayrsquos worldpeople respect a prostitute more than a poor person The bridge thus repre-

sents two intertwined passages mdash from a socialist world of time and space

in which citizens had the leisure to do morning exercises and their lives

were not measured by money to a neoliberal world in which wealth is the

only measure of human dignity and no one mdash except those on the outside

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 22: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 446

of bourgeois respectability mdash has time to spend exercising on a bridge This

passage is intertwined then with a passage from heteronormative relations

of time and space to queer time and space mdash the refusal of the relationshipbetween time work money and desire that neoliberalism has established

Another recurrent scene is of several young men playing in the park

They walk through the park in a desultory manner enjoying the day One

of them has his dog on a leash The dog is obviously well groomed and

well fed Only recently have Beijing residents been allowed to keep pets in

the city Dogs quickly became a key signifier of bourgeois cosmopolitan

accomplishment Why shouldnrsquot money boys be allowed to have them too

In the film the pet belies the idea that money boys lead an unstable dirty

and unreliable life as many believe Moreover it forces open the cluster of

oppositions between respectable and degraded desires in which bourgeois

heterosexual family life goes together with accoutrements like pets while

prostitution is supposed to represent nothing but lack

Other scenes reinforce the sense that money boys are like everyone else inthe way they go about the stuff of everyday life We see them singing in a

karaoke bar playing with a young boy on a playground and having a meal

with their families These young men are portrayed as neither angels nor

demons They are neither ecstatic nor suicidal But the film makes clear that

they live on the margins and have only one another for support

In only a few scenes do these money boys talk about their work But even

here their conversations resemble those of anyone who has ever grumbledabout his or her workplace At one point in the bar for example one of

the money boys tells the other Xiao Bao that his brother (the missionary)

has been looking for him Xiao Bao shakes his head and complains that a

customer has just ripped him off by refusing to pay In another scene in the

park during the daytime one of the money boys complains to the other that

he canrsquot seem to save any money because he always has to buy expensive

clothes to look nice for his customers The other responds that he should besmarter and get the customers to buy the clothes for him He proudly reveals

that he has saved quite a bit of money with which he plans to buy a house

for his mother

The film also playfully satirizes normalized work lives In one scene one

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 23: Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 447

of the money boys says ldquoWe need structure We have to become profes-

sionalsrdquo Pointing to a gay bar behind him he says ldquoThis is our interna-

tional head officerdquo Another money boy repeats virtually the same wordsbut this time points to a twenty-story high rise building The film shifts to

an eerie scene of colorful masks then quickly to what looks to be a confer-

ence meeting in a bar Someone presumably their boss is taking roll call

They all stand to attention some of them wearing name tags as if at an aca-

demic meeting In this manner Cui Zirsquoen calls into question the relationship

between sex work and desire in China He highlights the instabilities in

how neoliberalism in China has produced social inequalities through trans-

national structures of differentially valued labors But he further demon-

strates the inextricability of sexuality bodies desire and labor To labor for

wealth is supposed to be the foremost desire in a neoliberal world Thus

normalization techniques reduce and embed desire in a structured world

of intensive labor extraction one that produces a capitalist-inflected heter-

onormativity (even as it has a nondeterministic relationship to that heter-onormativity) In other words Cui Zirsquoen deconstructs how the whole person

becomes a commodity in a neoliberal world and how that world while it

fosters desires also robs people of their desires for a full humanity Through

this humorous filmic meditation on desire Cui Zirsquoen thus provides biting

queer commentary on the reduction and devaluation of necessary labor in

postsocialist China

This commentary is most explicit in a scene near the end of the filmwhen the missionaryrsquos girlfriend pleadingly asks several money boys why

they do this work One of them responds with ten reasons ldquoOne you donrsquot

have to be president Two you donrsquot have to be a soldier Three you donrsquot

have to be a farmer and work the land Four you donrsquot have to wash dishes

Five you donrsquot have to marry and have kids Six you donrsquot have to become a

movie star Seven you donrsquot have to be a movie director Eight you donrsquot get

fat Nine you are exploited by others but donrsquot exploit others And ten youdonrsquot die because we use our bodies to satisfy both good and bad peoplersquos

desiresrdquo Through arguments with and about money boys the film thus

creates commentary on how neoliberalism in China appropriates not just

labor-power but the laborer as a desiring subject32 The queer commentary

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

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positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 24: Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 448

of Feeding Boys demonstrates how nonnormative alternatives lie outside of

those temporal and spatial markers of respectable Chinese experience mdash

namely marriage reproduction kinship and death The film thus chal-lenges the oppositions of respectability and shame

Image-Theme 2 How to Become a Money Boy

The thread of this image-theme most explicitly mocks normalizing judg-

ments about desire work class and sex Through this image-theme the

film represents gay male hustling as a profession as honorable as becom-

ing a lawyer or computer scientist In perhaps the most iconic scene in this

regard Feeding Boys stages an argument between Xiao Jian and his parents

that crafts a mimicry of family gatherings to decide the childrenrsquos future33

His parents appear to be respectable middle-class intellectuals The mise-

en-scene is a plushly decorated apartment in which the family lives together

The family is all seated there The father states unequivocally that this kindof work leads nowhere They bemoan the fact that they raised their son for

so many years and gave him the opportunity to do many things with his life

They insist they just want the best for him The parents are oddly calm and

though disgusted do not throw him out of the house Indeed in the next

scene he arrives early in the morning to the apartment stating boldly to his

parents that they arrived home from work earlier than him His mother

asks if he isnrsquot supposed to work the night shift and he responds that he willwork any shift The mother turns to the father and makes the pithy com-

ment ldquoSo we failed to discourage him from this line of workrdquo

In another scene in which Xiao Jian defends to Dabin his reasons for

wanting to become a money boy Cui Zirsquoen crafts a doubled-edged mock-

ery of socialist ideals as well by invoking the old socialist honor of learn-

ing from and serving the masses His satire in this regard cuts in multiple

directions It recalls not just the marginalization but the condemnationand punishment under socialism of those with inappropriate desires But

it also uses those socialist ideals to critique the neoliberal normalization of

the appropriate relationship between labor and desire Xiao Jian initiates an

argument with Dabin when he announces that he too wants to become

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 2934

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3034

positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3134

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 25: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 449

a money boy Xiao Jian is insistent ldquoI want to sell my body like Xiao Bao

[Dabinrsquos brother]rdquo He then explains that when Xiao Bao disappeared he

went to check out the male prostitution business ldquoMost of these youngstersare from villages and from very poor family backgrounds I was born into

a happy family I want to join the hustlers and change their social statusrdquo

Dabin retorts ldquoCan you make those people happy Itrsquos all about making

millionaires officials and rich guys happyrdquo ldquoYou told me that we have to

serve the humble Now I want to become one of themrdquo replies Xiao Jian

ldquoI want to become the lowest of the low together with robbers hooligans

petty thieves ex-convicts homosexuals and hustlers I want to stay at the

bottomrdquo Dabin then launches into classical Chinese metaphors ldquoWater

flows downward but man soars heavenwardrdquo Xiao Jian has an answer to

that as well insisting that man is also part of nature and is also capable of

running downhill ldquoItrsquos only natural and makes things more equalrdquo

The visual logics of this scene provide the ironic counter-commentary

During the entire scene Xiao Jian is fully dressed while we watch Dabin halfnaked as he dresses after a shower The viewer becomes engaged in the erot-

ics of watching Dabin slowly lather lotion over his entire body then pull on

tight-fitting underwear The camera lingers on his well built body By the end

of the scene Dabin is still half naked The erotics of the scene are heightened

by the effect of a mirror that stages Xiao Jian in reverse That is Xiao Jian is

seated to the left of Dabin but we only view him through the mirror where

he appears on Dabinrsquos right while Dabin occupies center stage as the half- naked figure of erotic righteousness The mirror clues us in to a split between

the dialogue and the visual logics This split reflects back to the spectator the

hypocritical contradictions in postsocialist enticements of desire

Image-Theme 3 The Trials and Tribulations of Missionary Work

Early in the film we see someone driving through Beijing in a nice carHe is a good looking serious young man It turns out to be Dabin search-

ing for Xiao Bao his younger brother Dabin walks into a bar looking for

him without success He proceeds to follow one of the money boys into the

bathroom and argues with him saying that he doesnrsquot understand why his

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3134

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 26: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 2634

positions 182 Fall 2010 450

job is so attractive ldquoHow could it attract you How can you enjoy it without

getting tiredrdquo The money boy calmly responds ldquoThe job has three advan-

tages First you earn money Second freedom Third you can fool aroundwith different peoplerdquo When Dabin aggressively asks if there are any dis-

advantages the money boy responds ldquoFirst you get sick easily Second itrsquos

a waste of condoms and KY jelly Third you donrsquot get enough sleeprdquo Dabin

cries ldquoIf you keep doing this you will get AIDSrdquo Thus opens the third

image-theme the heterosexual Christian evangelist who attempts to convert

money boys

Dabinrsquos idea of conversion conflates normative sexual desire and Chris-

tianity Thus in the next major scene in which he appears he argues with

two money boys telling them that birds in the sky donrsquot sell their bodies

but they have food to eat that lotus flowers donrsquot sell their bodies but they

are beautiful that dogs and earthworms donrsquot sell their bodies but they live

vigorous lives so why should they sell their bodies He then offers to give

them the Bible Cui Zirsquoen was raised as a Catholic in the northeast city of

Dalian In his previous films he took a Derek Jarman approach and made

symbolic Jesus figures suffer the slings and arrows of heterosexual rage He

tried to reconcile homoerotic desire with what he viewed as the true essence

of Catholicism In Feeding Boys Cui Zirsquoen has taken a distinctive approach

Here he asserts that those who use Christianity to suppress nonnormative

desires have a hopeless case on their hands Moreover the true essence of

Christianity is ambiguous Perhaps it really is a source of oppression ratherthan as in his previous films a potential guide for love

This ambiguity is underscored in the next major scene in which Dabin

attempts to win converts among money boys He is reading the Bible together

with his younger ldquoChristian brotherrdquo Xiao Jian who has also chosen to be a

money boy Xiao Jian appears earnest He asks ldquoDo you think Jesus would

like that I mean would he like the fact that men and women and men and

men and women and women have sexrdquo Dabin responds ldquoMen and menand women and men have sexual relationships That means that God gave

them their sexual desires and afterwards even gave them the ability to have

sex So who gave men and women the ability to have sex God did The

fact that God gave us this ability proves that he allows us to do itrdquo But the

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 2834

positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

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positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3134

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 27: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 2734

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 451

young man persists ldquoYou said men and women do it for procreation If men

have sex with men they canrsquot procreate How do you explain thisrdquo Dabin

is stumped ldquoI have to turn to the Bible again for this questionrdquoThe moral inconclusiveness of the Bible and the ability to glean multiple

interpretations of desire from it leads the viewer to understand that there is

a distinction between heteronormativity and the normalization of desire

Strikingly Dabin does not condemn these young men for having sex with

other men He does not in other words condemn sexual desire tout court

or even homoerotic desire What he condemns is the exchange of sex for

money

Dabin is passionate in his missionary work In one scene we see him

standing on the bridge where money boys gather Christian Bible held up

high intoning his plea to them ldquoThe end of the world is near and you still

sell your bodiesrdquo No one speaks to him his travails seem fruitless Dabin on

the bridge recalls by contrast the money boys on the bridge But whereas

the money boys were shot in mid-range at wide angle Dabin is shot from

below with a zoom lens that makes him appear more distant as if he is high

up on a pulpit or a cross

Somewhat unexpectedly Dabin takes seriously ill and dies His death

recalls that of Jesus of course dying for othersrsquo sins but there is a distinct

ambiguity in Dabinrsquos death Does he die for othersrsquo sins or has he suffered

under his own illusions Is his the work of a savior or do normalized people

with judgments of others suffer because of their judgmental values Thefilm never resolves this ambiguity

On his deathbed Dabin pleads with his girlfriend to take over his work

to preach the gospel and save male prostitutes She promises to do so and

indeed in the next scene we see her standing on the same bridge holding

up the same Bible intoning monotonously ldquoDonrsquot sell anymorerdquo In the end

the girlfriend also ends up exhausted and sick in bed having similarly sacri-

ficed herself to a hopeless cause

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 2834

positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 2934

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3034

positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3134

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 28: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 2834

positions 182 Fall 2010 452

Image-Theme 4 Others Representing Money Boys

The final image-theme is a minor chord threaded through the film Thisis the filmmaker trying to represent money boys As discussed earlier he

is repeatedly shown sitting in his study talking to one of the money boys

Zaizai Dressed as an intellectual artist he pompously pronounces that the

theme music he has chosen for the film is for Zaizai But in a later scene

Zaizai now standing directly behind the filmmaker asks if this theme music

is just for him or one he can share with his girlfriend The filmmaker gets

annoyed implying that Zaizairsquos request will disrupt his own ideas The nexttime we see them the filmmaker complains that the theme is now all wrong

and ldquois not mine anymorerdquo When we see them together yet again Zaizai is

forthright The filmmaker says the theme music was created especially for

Zaizai but Zaizai responds that he does not want it He insists that he be

the one to choose the music The filmmaker says there is only this one theme

that fits but Zaizai insists again Their disagreement is left unresolved

With this fourth image-theme Cui Zirsquoen reminds us that his film partici-pates in rather than stands apart from the dialogue about how to represent

money boys Filmic representation does not establish unmediated truth At

one level the opposition between the filmmaker in front of the camera and

the one behind it mdash Cui Zirsquoen mdash seems obvious as Cui Zirsquoen clearly dis-

tances himself in his own film from the kind of condescension he portrays

in the filmmaker character Yet curiously Feeding Boys threads the very

theme music the filmmaker character had written for his filmrsquos money boycharacter throughout the film This final blurring of boundaries forces us to

ponder yet again the question of representation The consistent use of mir-

rors throughout the film in which the various characters view their reflec-

tions further pushes us to reflect on how money boys are seen versus how

they see themselves The sparse but telling dialogue between Zaizai and

the filmmaker alludes to the fact that even seemingly sympathetic cultural

producers can also exploit their subjects

The two ldquoscenesrdquo I have presented in this essay exemplify the instabilities

in establishing the proper kind of desiring subject who can carry forth a

neoliberal future for China These instabilities make it difficult to draw

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 2934

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3034

positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3134

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 29: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 2934

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 453

effective exclusionary boundaries They make it difficult to create a clear

ldquooutsiderdquo in which particular subjects are deemed incapable of embodying

desires properly or are condemned for displaying passions that turn theminto persons with low quality ( suzhi)34 Neoliberalism has created powerful

and murderous exclusions But in China it has also opened up an imagina-

tive field in which people are encouraged to experiment with desire ldquoDesirerdquo

has been given the weighty task of ridding China of historical constraints

and of creating a new cosmopolitan human nature To be successful the

social practices of desire cannot be fully confined in advance The figure of

the money boy captures this ambivalence and instability This figure mdash we

might say the money boy as signifier mdash blurs the line between sex for money

and sex for love Do money boys pervert what otherwise should be the per-

fectly acceptable desire to have an erotic interchange with men by bringing

it into the impure world of commodification and money The discourse

among gay men about money boys locates an anxiety about the ldquomoney boyrdquo

as a production of the market economy Instead of positing an economy pro-

duced to serve the various desires and needs of individuals the money boy

makes visible the possibility that this is an economy that produces individu-

als to serve the needs of capital accumulation In this regard the figure of

the money boy reveals the prospect that the so-called respectable gay identity

has actually been subjectified with the meanings and effects of the domi-

nant neoliberal order of signification That is perhaps the respectable gay

identity has been misrecognized and is actually more intricately embeddedin a commodified world of labor and desire than that of the money boy In

one of the final lines of Feeding Boys one of the money boy characters com-

ments laconically ldquoIf we fart the black clouds of history are blown away

One ejaculation and the earth tremblesrdquo In this manner queer cultural pro-

ductions such as Cui Zirsquoenrsquos Feeding Boys Ayaya and self-reflective narratives

like that of Ah Pei seek other routes to freedom in our desires

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3034

positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3134

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 30: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3034

positions 182 Fall 2010 454

Notes

My deep appreciation goes to Petrus Liu for his brilliant work on this special issue and to

the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my essay and incisive suggestions

for revision I would also like to thank those who gave me the opportunity to present ver-

sions of this essay the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California ndash Santa

Cruz and Matthew Sommer Stanford University at his conference ldquoSame-Sex Desire and

Union in Chinardquo

I honor the brilliance of Gayle Rubinrsquos classic essay in paraphrasing her title in mine See

Gayle Rubin ldquoThe Traffic in Women Notes on the lsquoPolitical Economyrsquo of Sexrdquo in Toward

an Anthropology of Women ed Rayna Reiter (New York Monthly Review Press 983089983097983095983093)983089983093983095 ndash 983090983089983088

983089 See Wang Hui Chinarsquos New Order Society Politics and Economy in Transition (Cambridge

MA Harvard University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983090 See Wendy Brown ldquoNeo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracyrdquo Theory and Event

983095 no 983089 (983090983088983088983091) musejhuedujournalstheory_and_eventv983088983088983095983095983089brownhtml David Har-

vey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York Oxford University Press 983090983088983088983093) Aihwa

Ong Neoliberalism as Exception (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) and Nikolas

Rose ldquoGoverning lsquoAdvancedrsquo Liberal Democraciesrdquo in Foucault and Political Reason edAndrew Barry Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983097983094) 983091983095 ndash 983094983092

983091 The pressure to visibly express onersquos desires also reflects the traces of colonial history in

which Chinese people have been represented as too repressed by first Chinese culture and

then Chinese communism to have the ability to express desire

983092 Here I refer to Deng Xiaopingrsquos adaptation of Maoism in his introduction of a market econ-

omy in China and to the ensuing inequalities that have resulted from these transformations

983093 I do not have the space here to enter the rather large debates about the relationship of

sexual identities to globalization cosmopolitanism and culture See Lisa Rofel ldquoQuali-

ties of Desire Imagining Gay Identitiesrdquo in Desiring China Experiments in Neoliberalism

Sexuality and Public Culture (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983095) 983096983093 ndash 983089983089983088 See also

Elizabeth A Povinelli and George Chauncey eds ldquoThinking Sex Transnationallyrdquo spe-

cial issue GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 983093 no 983092 Fran Martin offers a useful

mapping of these debates in relation to Asian queerlesbian and gay identities in Situating

Sexualities Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction Film and Public Culture (Hong KongHong Kong University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983094 For an important exception see Elizabeth A Povinelli The Empire of Love Toward a The-

ory of Intimacy Genealogy and Carnality (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094)

983095 See Rofel Desiring China for a fuller discussion

983096 See for example Donald Morton ldquoChanging the Terms (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Real-

f ffi

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3134

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 31: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3134

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 455

ityrdquo in The Material Queer A LesbiGay Cultural Studies Reader ed Donald Morton (Boul-

der CO Westview Press 983089983097983097983094) 983089 ndash 983091983092 and Carla Freccerorsquos response to Morton in chapter 983090

of QueerEarlyModern (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983094) See also Judith ButlerldquoMerely Cultural (Non-Material Leftist Movements)rdquo New Left Review 983090983090983095 (983089983097983097983096) 983091983091 ndash 983092983093

and Nancy Fraser ldquoHeterosexism Misrecognition and Capitalism A Response to Judith

Butlerrdquo New Left Review 983090983090983096 (983089983097983097983096) 983089983092983088 ndash 983092983097

983097 Morton ldquoChanging the Termsrdquo

983089983088 Marshall Sahlins Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago University of Chicago Press

983089983097983095983094)

983089983089 For an elaboration of this allegory see Dai Jinhua Xingbie Zhongguo (Gendering China)

(Taipei Mai Tian Publishers 983090983088983088983094) and my explication of it in Other Modernities GenderedYearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983097)

983089983090 Perhaps I need to state the obvious I do not mean that people in China never felt any

longings or passions prior to the end of socialism But those socialist-inflected desires were

expressed through struggles to embody an appropriate class subjectivity which defined

onersquos humanity

983089983091 See also Tze-lan Deborah Sang The Emerging Lesbian Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern

China (Chicago University of Chicago Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983092 Neferti Xina M Tadiar Fantasy- Production Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Conse-

quences for the New World Order (Manila Ateneo de Manila University Press 983090983088983088983092)

983089983093 For the classic statements see Judith Butler Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion

of Identity (New York Routledge 983089983097983096983097) Gayle Rubin ldquoThinking Sex Notes for a Radical

Theory of the Politics of Sexualityrdquo in Pleasure and Danger Exploring Female Sexuality

ed Carol Vance (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 983089983097983096983092) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley University of California Press 983089983097983097983088)

983089983094 See especially David L Eng Racial Castration Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983089) Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires Queer

Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham NC Duke University Press 983090983088983088983093) and

Martin F Manalansan IV Global Divas Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham NC

Duke University Press 983090983088983088983091)

983089983095 My argument echoes Hans Tao-Ming Huang in this volume in his delineation of how

gay subjectivity in Taiwan is founded on the normative exclusion of the gendered pros-

titute subject and thus is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order Huang builds

his argument on the feminist insights of Ding Naifei about the ldquonormingrdquo of heterosexual

women See Ding Naifei ldquoFeminist Knots Sex and Domestic Work in the Shadow of the

Bondmaid-Concubinerdquo Inter- Asia Cultural Studies 983091 no 983091 (983090983088983088983090) 983092983092983097 ndash 983094983095 For a thorough

discussion of how female prostitution was the object of political discourses and knowledge

making in China from the late nineteenth century to the present see the inspiring work

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 32: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3234

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 33: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3334

Rofel The Traffic in Money Boys 457

Sexuality vol 983089 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (New York Random House 983089983097983095983096)

See also David Halperin ldquoForgetting Foucault Acts Identities and the History of Sexual-

ityrdquo Representations 983094983091 (983089983097983097983096) 983097983091 ndash 983089983090983088 and Carla Freccerorsquos critique of Halperin and callfor expansion of the debate to recognize that contradictory discourses coexist historically

Carla Freccero ldquoActs Identities and Sexualityrsquos (Pre)Modern Regimesrdquo Journal of Womenrsquos

History 983089983089 no 983090 (983089983097983097983097) 983089983096983094 Within the literature on sexuality in China the acts versus

identities debate has been imbricated with a debate about the role of colonialism in foster-

ing homophobia in China See Wu Cuncun Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China

(New York RoutledgeCurzon 983090983088983088983092) for a nuanced framing of these sensibilities within

elite menrsquos aesthetic philosophy and cultural tastes which by distinguishing these practices

from a sexual identity displaces any simple notion of a presumed period of acceptance ofhomosexuality prior to colonialism See also Kang (this volume) for an insightful displace-

ment of this hoary debate for the early twentieth century in China

983090983094 Here I mean entrepreneurialism in a broad sense precisely to indicate how the activities of

creating surplus value through capitalist investments is seen to seep into the realm of the

intimate

983090983095 One need only contrast Ah Zhuangrsquos condemnation of Ah Pei as a money boy with the

quite different role of male prostitution in late imperial China to discern the radical discon-

tinuities with modernity in China in evaluations of sex between men of different statuses

See Wu Homoerotic Sensibilities for an insightful historical study of homoeroticism in late

imperial China

983090983096 This film made in 983090983088983088983091 was also given the title Money boy riji ( Money Boy Diaries) by the

Hong Kong distributor of the film Cui Zirsquoen is a prolific independent filmmaker He has

made over eighteen films including the better known Man Yan (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter) Nar-

row Path (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Night Scene (983090983088983088983092) (screenwriter director) Welcome

to Destination Shanghai (983090983088983088983091) (director) Jiu Yue (983090983088983088983091) (screenwriter director) Choujue Dengchang ( Enter the Clowns) (983090983088983088983090) (book author producer screenwriter director) and

Man Man Woman Woman (983089983097983097983097) (screenwriter)

983090983097 Judith Halberstam In a Queer Time and Place Transgender Bodies Subcultural Lives (New

York New York University Press 983090983088983088983093) 983089

983091983088 Gayatri Spivak ldquoCan the Subaltern Speakrdquo in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture ed

Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago University of Illinois Press 983089983097983096983096) 983090983095983089 ndash 983091983089983091

This method of deconstruction that Spivak adopts addresses not only the explicit represen-

tations of subalterns that appear in texts but also those symptomatic silences lacunae andblank spaces in the texts mdash what the writers do not directly address and what they proclaim

they will not be discussing that is the silences they speak voluminously about See also Gail

Hershatter ldquoThe Subaltern Talks Back Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese His-

toryrdquo positions east asia cultures critique 983089 (983089983097983097983093) 983089983088983091 ndash 983091983088 for a nuanced approach that finds

possibilities for subaltern discourse

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091

Page 34: Rofel China Money Boy

8182019 Rofel China Money Boy

httpslidepdfcomreaderfullrofel-china-money-boy 3434

positions 182 Fall 2010 458

983091983089 Hayden White The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

(Baltimore John Hopkins University Press 983089983097983096983095)

983091983090 See Tadiar Fantasy- Production for a beautiful elaboration of this issue983091983091 For an elaboration of the concept of mimicry in which he demonstrates how mimicry both

puts colonial domination in relief but also dislocates it see Homi Bhabha ldquoOf Mimicry

and Man The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourserdquo in The Location of Culture (London

Routledge 983089983097983097983092) 983090983091983094 ndash 983093983094

983091983092 For more on suzhi see Ann Anagnost ldquoThe Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)rdquo Pub-

lic Culture 983089983094 no 983090 983089983096983097 ndash 983090983088983096 and Yan Hairong ldquoNeoliberal Governmentality and Neo-

humanism Organizing SuzhiValue Flow through Labor Recruitment Networksrdquo Cul-

tural Anthropology 983089983096 no 983092 983092983097983091 ndash 983093983090983091