Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Hypatia Vourloumis

Thesis: The Weight That Stays: Dead Voices, Fissioned Inheritance, and Enduring Silences

July 2025

Abstract

This thesis emerges from a refusal to follow the killer. In contemporary Chinese suspense narratives set during the 1990s economic transition, I turn away from conventional male protagonists to trace “the dead”—those who carry the weight of unresolved historical contradictions. I practice what I call “recognitive viewing,” dwelling in narrative fissures where lived experience exceeds sanctioned frameworks, refusing the “pursuit of the killer” structure that repackages structural violence into digestible crime stories.

Drawing on my own inheritance of post-reform China's “structure of feeling,” I examine three categories of ungrievable lives: female victims punished for existing as “free bodies,” spectral children inheriting fractured histories, and maternal figures whose endurance transforms into accusation. These deaths occur in liminal spaces where socialist structures collapsed while capitalist alternatives remained inaccessible, revealing structural contradictions within China’s dual position as both participant in and resistor to global capitalism.

Borrowing from Ho Sok Fong’s ethics of “walking alongside circuitous silences,” I practice a queering form of attention that sustains patience across time rather than rushing toward closure. Between my own emotional inheritance and these textual ruins, I seek an alternate frequency—one that emerges not from solving mysteries, but from listening to what the story cannot contain.

Author: Qiaoling Cai