‘I can’t see myself, even with my eyes closed, but I can see you’: Queer listening and fluid aesthetics in Blue Gate Crossing

Set in a Taipei high school, Blue Gate Crossing (Yee Chih-yen, 2002) stages queer adolescence through a delicate interplay of sound, image and desire. This article reads the film through the Chinese philosophical concept of shi to argue that its audiovisual textures generate what I call ‘tri-fluidity’: a shifting relation among sonic movement, visual rhythm and queer feeling. Rather than treating sound as a secondary accompaniment to image, I show how voices, timbres, music and ambient sound participate in Meng Kerou’s unfolding sense of self and in the unstable dynamics of the film’s love triangle. Bringing queer theory, sound studies and qi philosophy into dialogue, the article further develops the concept of queer listening as a reciprocal mode of attunement shaped by breath, resonance and relational openness. Through this framework, Blue Gate Crossing emerges as a queer coming-of-age film in which listening becomes a way of sensing fluid identity, embodied intimacy and the uneven process of self-discovery.