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Abstract
This thesis examines queer embodiment and spectatorship in Lou Ye’s Spring Fever (2009), a Chinese underground film that centers on Jiang Cheng, a closeted gay man navigating romantic entanglements and social marginality in 2000s Nanjing city. By analyzing the film’s use of voyeuristic perspectives, haptic visuality, and pornographic discourse, I argue that Lou crafts a complex cinematic language that reveals how queer life is simultaneously visible and vulnerable, legible and erased, desired and disciplined. Through techniques such as handheld camerawork, jump cuts, intimate close-ups, and perspectival alignment with a character’s POV, Lou constructs a haptic aesthetic that not only renders queer bodily desire as something continuously negotiated, but also implicates the viewer in both the quasi-surveillant perspective and affective disorientation experienced by the protagonist. In particular, the thesis analyzes the film’s sex scenes as moments of ambivalent intensity. Rather than functioning as pornographic spectacle or narrative climax, these scenes foreground the condition in which queer intimacy remains inescapably surveilled and persistently unsettled—even within acts and spaces of supposed privacy and closeness. In this context, the queer body becomes not a symbol of liberation, but a surface of inscription—marked by historical trauma, state power, and personal compromise. By situating Spring Fever within broader discourses of queer theory, Sinophone cinema, and Chinese modernization, this thesis contributes to conversations on how queerness is represented and felt across cultural boundaries. It challenges Euro-American paradigms of queer visibility by attending to China’s “nonconfrontational” strategies of resistance and the cinematic techniques used to express them. Ultimately, Lou Ye’s film offers not a celebration of queer identity, but a meditation on its precarious endurance—one that invites viewers to reckon with their own role in the politics of looking, feeling, and knowing.