3 Women Dancing Otherwise tHe queer feminiSm of gu jiani’S Right & Left Emily E. Wilcox Right & Left in conversation with Gu Jiani/Emily Wilcox Despite the fact that one of China’s most prominent contemporary choreog- raphers is a publically transsexual woman, 1 and that indigenous theater in China has a long and well-known history of homoerotic spectatorship and patronage, 2 the idea of “queer dance”—or public relection on queer identi- ties and experiences more generally—is almost nonexistent in twenty-irst- century urban Chinese professional dance circles. 3 Out queer choreographers are few and far between in major domestic dance festivals in China, as are dance productions or academic works that explicitly draw attention to non- normative genders and sexualities through dance. For women, this is even more pronounced, due to a more circumscribed set of possibilities of what constitutes “normal” and “appropriate” for women’s performed subjectivities and dancing bodies. 4 The ifty-minute contemporary dance duet Right & Left 右一左一 (2014) by Beijing-based female choreographer Gu Jiani, 5 danced by Gu and Li Nan with projections by media artist Li Ah Ping, presents an important and unusual departure from this larger trend. When approached for inclusion in this anthology, Gu said that she does not consider Right & Left a work of queer dance. Thus, the following reading represents my interpretation of the work OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Wed Nov 30 2016, NEWGEN acprof-9780199377336.indd 67 11/30/2016 7:09:26 PM