Documentary as Trans Critique: Performance of Neoliberal Gender in The Two Lives of Li Ermao and Beyond

China’s New Documentary Movement in the 1990s has inspired a body of post-millennium documentaries portraying women and gender/sexual minorities, in which the blurring of living and posing on filmed subjects reveals gender subjectivity as a performed negotiation with neoliberal modernisation. This article focuses on trans documentaries emerging from this framework, reframing them as a critical lens for examining the postsocialist stakes of gendered selfhood. It theorises a critical project of ‘documentary-in-trans’, which plays with documentary form to expose transgender as less a stable identity than a mediated performance. Echoing transfeminist theory’s challenge to subject-based knowledge, it articulates trans selfhood as a liminal condition that refuses fixed representations, unstably situated between morphological liberation and socioeconomic limitation, and thereby verges on a mode of social critique. The article reads The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019) by Jia Yuchuan as an illustration, situating transgender/migrant selfhood within the liminal space between global neoliberal individualism and local realities.