The Self-Understandings and Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, my doctoral research examined the construction and regulation of sexuality in a context of rapid social, technological and political change. Focusing on the lives of gay men in Hainan, a socio-economically marginal province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), I explored how local, national and global processes play out in everyday life as gay men negotiate liveable lives in relation to shifting fields of people, discourses, spaces and technologies. I offer vital insights into dynamics of sexuality in the PRC and advance the conceptual horizons of global sexualities studies.
Over the past 40 years in the PRC, rapid urbanisation, greater geographic mobility, technological development and increased access to information have fostered a proliferation of non-heterosexual identities, communities and ways of life. At the same time, these are curtailed by Confucian notions of a responsibility to 'continue the family line' through heterosexual reproduction, state censorship of sexual diversity in the media, and cuts to public welfare that have entrenched the need to have children as a source of care in later life. Further, socio-economic disparities along regional and urban/rural lines make living non-heterosexual lives in certain sites easier than in others.
These issues have been explored within the limited literature on non-heterosexual lives in the PRC. However, existing work has focused on major urban contexts. As such, there is a lack of knowledge on how historical and ongoing dynamics of change and continuity are shaping non-heterosexual lives in smaller cities, towns and rural areas. This is both an empirical knowledge gap and a limitation on current understandings of sexuality. As my research shows, exploring how non-heterosexual lives are shaped by processes of change and continuity beyond global centres of cosmopolitan modernity can open up new avenues of enquiry which, in turn, can expand the meanings of 'sexuality' itself.
I have analysed processes through which gay men in Hainan find one another, develop feelings of commonality, navigate the rural, urban and digital spaces in which they live and variously contest, conform to and accommodate the dominant orientation of their lives toward heterosexual marriage and reproduction. These are shown to entail complex entanglements of discourse, technology, desire, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and material relations of co-dependence. As such, I argue for an expanded conception of sexuality that looks beyond the individual, human subject and towards ecologies of power and possibility that shape what counts as a liveable life. I make this argument in dialogue with recent work in social theory that seeks to understand the inseparability of human relationships, institutional discourses, material contexts and environmental systems.
The Fellowship will facilitate the publication of this important research as a book and series of articles that significantly advance the field of sexualities studies by expanding the notion of sexuality to include complex relationships between people, discourses, spaces and technologies. These new research directions are vital if contemporary scholarship is to grapple with changing dynamics of sexuality from a cross-cultural perspective in an increasingly complex world. These ideas will also be shared and consolidated through a symposium bringing together scholars addressing related themes. The Fellowship will also enable my research to support LGBT groups in Hainan and across the PRC. This will be done through a series of workshops with the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) and wider LGBT communities in Hainan. These will result in a co-designed findings report to be shared locally and nationally. This will assist PFLAG in planning their work effectively and will help national LGBT groups understand the contrasting experience of LGBT people in different regions of the PRC.