While scholarship on Sinophone queer cinema has foregrounded younger generations’ negotiation between chosen and biological families, it has largely overlooked where grey meets gay—the domain of LGBTQ aging. For older queers bound to heterosexual households, the tension between desire and kinship assumes a different valence. Rather than exiting the family to forge alternative belonging, later-life desire must negotiate from within the very structure it vows to dismantle. Keren He’s presentation argues that the figure of the old patriarch, far from merely capitulating to heteronormativity, can queer the family from within its orthodox roots. Focusing on Suk Suk (2019) and its portrayal of closeted older gay men in Hong Kong, it traces the historical conditions that render this figure possible: from refugee settlements that generated kinship beyond the nuclear family, to a lingering cruising culture in public parks and saunas. Through a close reading of the film’s spatial language, it identifies a structural homology between queerscape and homescape, both sustained by forms of stranger intimacy and communal support inherent in Hong Kong’s working-class neighborhoods. Bringing age studies into dialogue with queer Sinophone studies, this presentation suggests that later life is not where queer desire is foreclosed, but where its entanglement with kinship becomes most legible.

As China confronts a rapidly aging population, care robots are heralded in state media and the tech industry as a solution to the looming eldercare crisis—machines that promise not only physical support but emotional intimacy, even filial devotion. But what happens when care itself is mechanized, and what ethical dilemmas arise when the labor of intimacy, affect, and filial obligation is transferred to artificial agents that both mimic and unsettle the moral foundations of human caregiving? Andrew Kauffman’s presentation turns to contemporary Chinese science fiction to reframe and complicate these techno-utopian fantasies. Focusing on A Que’s “Mrs. Griffin Prepares to Commit Suicide Tonight” (2015) and Xia Jia’s “Tongtong’s Summer” (2014), it examines what it means to delegate intimate, ethically charged practices of care to artificial agents. Drawing on care ethics and the philosophy of technology, this presentation argues that these narratives re-center the vulnerability, agency, and lived experience of aging subjects who are often effaced in state-led narratives of progress and development. At once speculative and deeply human, these stories articulate an ambivalent technomoral vision: they register the appeal of robotic care amid labor shortages even as they confront the unsettling possibility that care itself—and the filial obligations that sustain it—may be surrendered to machines.

Filmmaker Luka Yuanyuan Yang opens her cinematic oeuvre Dance in Herland (2025) by contemplating the “in-betweenness” of Chinese immigrants—figures rendered invisible in both adopted homes and ancestral land—which compelled her to film the documentary Chinatown Cha-Cha (2024), spotlighting Coby Yee, a 92-year-old former burlesque dancer and part-owner of the Dragon Lady nightclub in San Francisco. During their first encounter, Yee asked Yang, “Why would you, from China China (mainland China), be interested in us?” Beneath the question unfolds a vast “in-between” gulf inflected by Sino-US tensions, spatiotemporal gaps, and generational differences. Against this backdrop, Roya Liu’s presentation argues that Chinatown Cha-Cha enacts an intimate form of witnessing—a cinematic lens that deviates from the objectifying gaze predicated on fixed categories—that casts these restrictive boundaries aside. Through the lens of “aging ornamentalism,” drawing from Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism, this presentation demonstrates how this witnessing is materialized in the way Yang animates an aging version of Asiatic femininity, weaving a cinematic portrait of Yee’s sartorial, kinesthetic, and aging embodiment together with a patchwork of archival photographs that reanimate her past. As a transpacific and transhistorical form of witnessing aging, it extends the intergenerational space through which we can see beyond the problematic binaries of Oriental/Occidental, nation/diaspora, and old/young.