“This book explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. It explores what it means for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’, how internet and mobile technologies figure in their everyday processes of sexual categorisation and how these men negotiate orientations and disorientations towards the future in relation to dominant heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction. This book offers vital insights into the production and restriction of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings, while addressing universal questions of how certain ways of living are enabled and curtailed in living together with others through powerful conditions of uncertainty and precarity.
This book will be of interest to scholars in LGBTQ studies, particularly those with a focus on same-sex intimacies and identities in China.”
Author(s): James Cummings
Series: Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 260
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
About the Book
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Initial Notes on Terminology
Margins, Scales and Specificity
Everyday Life as Subject, Theory and Method
Sexual Meanings in Everyday Life
The Problem of ‘Sexuality’
Queer Indeterminacies and Powerful Matter
Thinking Sexuality Cross-culturally
Thinking Sexuality Ontologically
Structure of the Book
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Contexts
Introduction
Hainan
Hainan Scene(s)
Histories of Tongxinglian/Homosexuality
The Republican Era
The Mao Years
The Reform Era
Contemporary Gay, Tongzhi and Homosexual Identities
Modern, Cosmopolitan and Transnational Identities
Family and Filial Piety
Fieldwork/Becoming Someone in the Scene
Bibliography
Chapter 3: The Scene/Quanzi
Introduction
The Scene as a Floating Signifier
Coming in Through Sexual Desires and Practices
Coming in Through Social Interactions and Intimacies
Coming in Through Knowing and Being Known
Being in the Scene and Being Gay, Homosexual and/or Tongzhi
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Being On-and-Off-line
Introduction
Finding Others Online
Finding Selves Online
The Internet and Sexual Modernity
Locating Selves and Others On-and-Off-line
Being Seen
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Life-Times
Introduction
The Future?
Life and Death Under Heteronormative Confucianism
Essentialism as a Narrative of the Future
Accommodating Marriage
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Conclusion
Dis/Orientation and Un/Certainty
Social and Material Relationalities
The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan
Bibliography
Bibliography
Index
