Queering Femininity in Globalizing China: Exploring Willful Subjects through The Last Year of Darkness

Abstract

This thesis explores the queer potential of femininity in contemporary Chinese screen culture through a close analysis of The Last Year of Darkness (Ben Mullinkosson, 2023), a transnational queer documentary grounded in the underground nightlife of Chengdu. By examining drag performance, queer community life, and the documentary’s filmmaking mode, this study investigates how femininity operates as a site of resistance under the affective governance of the Chinese Dream. In this project, I conceptualize femininity not as a fixed identity or an aesthetic symbol, but as a fluid formation that can exist in women, men, and those who defy the gender/sex binary, traversing gendered and geographic boundaries. Femininity is approached as a visual style, an emotional logic, and an ethical mode of filmmaking that engages with aesthetic practices and affective politics. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of willful subjects, along with insights from queer Asia studies, affect theory, and feminist scholarship, I analyze how queer subjects in the film embody “willfulness” “too much will,” and “weak will” as forms of queer will. I argue that femininity unfolds aesthetic and political possibilities for queer will in a globalizing Chinese context. Entangled with Chineseness, this will is marked by ambivalence and ambiguity, embodying an alternative mode of resistance against the cultural regulation and emotional norms shaped by nationalism and heteronormativity. While existing scholarship on Chinese queer screens has often regarded femininity as either a conservative virtue for women or an iconography of effeminate men, I affirm femininity by rethinking its aesthetic and political potential. By queering femininity through the lens of transnational queer documentary, this thesis offers an alternative mode of queer resistance in a globalizing China.