CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Ji, Qing |
|---|---|
| Title | Flowing Qi, Vibrating Frequency: Toxicity, Healing, and Queer Animated Matters in Techno-biopolitical China (1980- ) |
| Summary | This research examines a new site of techno-biopolitics enacted by the entanglement of toxicity, alternative healing, and technoscience in “neoliberal post-socialist” China. Drawing from Mel Chen’s notion of animacy and in conversation with other feminist theorists including N. Katherine Hayles, Michelle Murphy, and Donna Haraway, I investigate how three (in)corporeal matters and concepts—toxicity, qi 气 in Chinese metaphysics, and frequency in science—are animated and incorporated into techno-biopolitical governance throughout Chinese people’s grappling with healing from the 1980s’ “qigong fever” 气功热 to a contemporary context. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines archive research, visual and cultural analysis with ethnographic inquiry, this study attends to scientific research papers, popular science readers, qigong drawings, media coverages, and interviews and participant observations conducted in Dali, China. In so doing, I trace a genealogy of alternative healing from qigong 气功 prevalent in the late twentieth century to emergent lingxing 灵性 healing at the present; and its interrelationship with both material and metaphoric toxicity, intertwined with cybernetic remnants in techno-oriented China. To explore these dynamics, first, I discuss how a scientific field, named “somatic science” 人体 ;科ֶ 6;, reformulates and abstracts human bodies and qi into the metrics of experiment data by integrating cybernetics, Marxist political ideology, and East Asian cosmo-epistemology. This process not only reshapes the techno-epistemological framework of Chinese alternative healing but also broadly reconfigures understandings of the human-environment relationship. Subsequently, I focus on a Chinese woman artist, Guo Fengyi 郭凤怡, whose drawings and personal history urge a reconsideration of toxicity, gender, and (post-)socialist political economy of medicine and labour. Following this, I turn to contemporary lingxing’s reinterpretation of frequency as a healing lexicon, through which toxicity unfolds as an invitation of what I call “a queer technology of attunement” of living. Through these examinations, I suggest that toxicity, qi, and frequency are arguably queer animated beings—they are flowing and transmitting across boundaries of subjects, objects, and related discourses while unsettling liberal humanist normative notion of individual and security—showing a potential to destabilize the order of livings and non-livings across geopolitical differences, chemical exposure, chronic illness, gender, and class. |
| Supervisor | Yoon, Hyaesin; Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/ji_benjamin.pdf |
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