Beyond the Affect of Queer Liberalism: Queer Retro-temporality and Aging Queer Subjects in Hong Kong Cinema

In recent years, queer leftist critiques based in North America have examined how gay marriage, pink capitalism, and liberal inclusions of LGBTQ subjects led to the ascendency of homonationalism. This essay departs from existing critiques on the affect of queer liberalism in order to examine how gay men, lesbians, and queer subjects work through the affective economies of illiberal pragmatism in post-colonial and post-2019 protest Hong Kong. It explores the queer affect of the everyday in Ray Yeung’s two films on aging gay men and lesbians, namely Suk Suk (2019) and All Shall Be Well (2024). Whereas Suk Suk portrays the two contrasting worlds of everyday affects of heteronormative kinship and gay cruising and intimacy, All Shall Be Well attends to an immediacy of lesbian intimacy in the ‘now’ and a queer retro-temporality that dwells on an elsewhere utopia that exceeds the violence of everyday homophobia against lesbian intimacy and rights to inheritance. Comparatively, the two films illustrate how aging queer subjects in Hong Kong practice queer forms of everydayness that contest the onslaught of multiple hegemonic forces such as heteronormative kinship, real-estate capitalism, and the alliance between religious conservatism and mainstream politics that altogether condition queer lives in Hong Kong.