‘Love is Love’ and ‘Love is Equal’, Fansubbing and Queer Feminism in China

Despite a solid body of legislation defending women’s rights and interests, inequalities between genders remain a significant problem in various areas of Chinese society, from education and employment to health. While there is growing literature on the connection between the Chinese feminist movement and international gender politics (e.g. Liu et al., Feminism & Psychology 25: 11–17, 2015; Wesoky, Chinese Feminism Faces Globalization, Routledge, London and New York, 2013; Yu, Translating Feminism in China: Gender, Sexuality and Censorship, Routledge, London and New York, 2015), little attention has been paid to lesbians as a marginalised group in Chinese gender politics and the impact of Western feminism on queer feminism in China. Drawing from research on fansubbing studies (e.g. Perez-Gonzalez, Audiovisual Translation: Theories, Methods and Issues, Routledge, London, 2014; Dwyer, Perez-Gonzalez (ed), The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation, Routledge, London and New York, 2018; Guo and Evans, Feminist Media Studies 20: 515–529, 2020) and queer media activism (e.g. Bao, Queer Comrades, Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China, Nias Press, Copenhagen, 2018, Engebretsen et al. 2015, Wark, General Intellects: Twenty-one Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, Verso, London and New York, 2017, Yang, G. B. 2017. ‘The Online Translation Activism of Bridge Bloggers, Feminists, and Cyber-nationalists in China’. Media Activism in the Digital Age, 62–75. London: Routledge.), this chapter examines the negotiation and circulation of international queer feminist knowledge in the Chinese context through queer fans’ translation of foreign queer films. Focusing on a case study of Jihua Network, one of the most influential lesbian subtitling groups in China, and its translation of a documentary Political Animals (Markowitz and Wares 2016), this chapter explores how its translation of Anglophone lesbian media content has been intertwined with global gender politics and has participated in the emergence of queer feminism in China. It argues that on the one hand, the process of researching, comparing and choosing the appropriate Chinese equivalents becomes an important process of Chinese queer feminists’ ‘self-making’ (Rofel, Desiring China, Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2007). On the other hand, Anglophone feminist and queer knowledges are also renewed, expanded or critiqued in this process.