Hainan lies in the Gulf of Tonkin, 30km off the southern coast of mainland China. I wanted to find out how gay lives are lived on the margins of global LGBT politics and activism, away from cities imagined as cosmopolitan centres of modernity. Inspired by those experiences, for the past eight years, I have been carrying out research with gay men in the region and, in 2018, completed a PhD thesis exploring gay lives in Hainan. When I began my own research, I wanted to see what was happening in China’s marginal provinces and smaller cities.īack in 2009-10, I spent 12 months studying Mandarin Chinese in Hainan and made friends in local gay communities. One 2018 study detailed gay bars in Shanghai that rivalled those of any western capital, the organisation of “pride” events and the tense contexts in which “queer” film festivals and wider cultural production and activism occur in the face of continued regulation by the authoritarian state.īut this rich and vigorous research has focused overwhelmingly on China’s biggest, most affluent and most globally connected cities – namely Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. There has been some excellent research into the emergence of gay and lesbian identities in China, including how these have been shaped by euro-American ideas of “gay sensibility” and characterised by “individuality, difference, sophistication, liberation and modernity”. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges. The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. This article is part of Conversation Insights
This work has explored how, under Maoist socialism (and especially during the fraught years of the Cultural Revolution) “acceptable” modes of gender and sexuality were largely confined to reproductive, cisgender, and heterosexual coupledom.įollowing Mao’s death in 1976, China’s transition into a market economy, its reconnection with global capitalism and the arrival of the internet have combined to create opportunities for a greater diversity of gender and sexual identities and lives – though these remain subject to state regulation in the form of media censorship and limitations of the activities of feminist and LGBTQ+ activists. The past 20 years have seen increasing research interest in issues of gender and sexuality in China. I’m here to take a tour of its gay scene and 29-year-old Ah Tao is my guide. With a population of about 198,000 Jiaji is a small city. I turn around to find Ah Tao* hurrying towards me, scrambling over a low hedge. I’m standing in a park watching middle aged women dance in formation to music blaring from a loudspeaker when a voice from behind me shouts: “Ah Kang! Let’s go! I’ll take you to see the place where the gays go to play mahjong.” When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.It’s around 7:30pm on a warm November evening in Jiaji, the county capital of Qionghai, on the east coast of Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls. PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards. Furthermore, you represent and warrant that you will not allow any minor access to this site or services. This website should only be accessed if you are at least 18 years old or of legal age to view such material in your local jurisdiction, whichever is greater. You are about to enter a website that contains explicit material (pornography).