Travis S K Kong. The Sociological Review. Volume 64, Issue 3. August 2016.
Introduction
The science that studies sex is called sexology and the core of it is sexual medicine. (Ruan, 1988: 4; author translation)
… homosexuality is unnatural and is against the normal biological and psychological human development. They (homosexuals) are facing a lot of social, moral, legal, economic and etiological problems and have serious consequences. (Liu, 1988: 87; author translation)
… sexuality study, especially in the field of sociology should be based on the indigenous understanding of the sexual issues and concerns, communicate with the western theories and studies critically and selectively, deconstruct over-medicalization and focus on the sexuality in Chinese social and political context based on daily, bodily and diverse experience. (Pan and Huang, 2007: 194)
How can we understand male same-sex relations in contemporary China? What does it mean if a Chinese man calls himself tongxing lian or tongxing’ ai (‘same-sex love’, or homosexual), gay (or lala for lesbian), or tongzhi (a synonym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or LGBT)? This article seeks to examine the changing contours of Chinese sociology of homosexuality in contemporary China, and in doing so, suggests that its development has been shaped by cultural and political considerations at different historical moments. The first and long-dominant frame for understanding homosexuality can be traced to Western biological and medical science, commonly known as Western sexology with its root in the writings of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Haverlock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. It was first adopted in the Republican era (1912-49), became the official state discourse of sexuality during the Mao period (1949-76) and then guised in the national public health framework since the reform era (1978-). This discourse was later to be incorporated in early sociological studies of sexuality.
Sociology was first introduced in China in the late 19th century, but early Chinese sociologists did not pay much attention to sexuality as it was deemed to be in the realm of medicine, biology or psychology. During the Mao period, sociology was officially banned and later rehabilitated in the reform era. Because of this, sociology of sexuality (or ‘sexual sociology’), unlike the West where it emerged in the 1960s, did not emerge as a distinctive area within sociology until the mid-1980s.
It is in this context that this article examines the emergence and development of Chinese sociology of homosexuality in reform China through a meta-literature review. Reviewed literature includes major English and Chinese social sciences books and journal articles on homosexuality since the 1980s. Studies of homosexuality in China focus overwhelmingly on men and the study of female same-sex intimacy was and remains as a minor theme. It is until recently that the studies have become more diversified that exclusive study of female same-sex experiences has emerged since the 2000s. This paper theorizes Chinese sociology of homosexuality based on the literature, thus on male same-sex experiences in the main, but has made remarks on female same-sex experiences. After a brief discussion of the early (mainly sexological) study of homosexuality in the Republican and the Mao periods, I will argue that the development of sociology of homosexuality has been dominated by Western knowledge production (eg Western sexology, American-led sociology) and the political ideology of the communist party-state. These shape the different theoretical orientations and methodologies that construct the male homosexual subject under major socio-economic and political changes over the past four decades: In the 1980s to 1990s, heavily shaped by the bio-medical model and the state’s modernization project, sociology of homosexuality adopted a functionalist and positivistic approach with quantitative and survey-based methodology in the main, focusing on the etiology of homosexuality with strong clinical implications. Since the 2000s, a transnational knowledge production has emerged, facilitated by the state’s opening up to the global capital and knowledge production while confined under its dictatorship. Sociology of homosexuality has slowly departed from the bio-medical model. Theoretically informed by constructivism, queer theory and/or feminism and methodologically inclined to reflexive qualitative methodology, it has started to study the homosexual from a different angle: it examines which socio-historical conditions give rise to the modern forms of male (as well as female) homosexual identities, questions the hetero/homosexual binary that constructs the self, and discusses how an individual makes sense of such an identity (eg coming out) and forms intimate same-sex relationships within the Chinese family institution under the context of Chinese modernity.
By tracing the changes of sociological discourses of the construction of male same-sex desires in contemporary China through a meta-literature review, this article (1) rethinks the dominance of the Western construction and the role of the state in shaping the knowledge of homosexuality; (2) facilitates a critical dialogue between English and Chinese writings in shaping Chinese homosexuality; and (3) conjoins the emerging queer Asian studies with the aim of decentring the dominant Western sexual knowledge paradigm while creating alternative spaces for theorizing Chinese sexual identities, desires and practices.
The birth of the homosexual in modern China
The arrival of sociology and bio-medical science and the medicalization of same-sex relations
Ancient China had a rich literature of strong male homosocial culture (Louie, 2002), a tolerance of men with same-sex desires (Van Gulik, 1961: 62-63; Samshasha, 1984; Ruan and Tsai, 1987; Hinsch, 1990), and an admiration of men who possessed feminine beauty (Song, 2004). The reason for this tolerance of male same-sex relations may be that cultural expectations of male sexuality were concerned with conformity to power hierarchies. Behaviours that might be considered inappropriate were permitted as long as the man maintained his social obligations to the family (ie, getting married and bearing children) and avoided excessive sexuality (eg masturbation, prostitution). In other words, masculinity was understood less as sexual identity or orientation and more as a familial and social role, such as being a filial son with the ability to control sexuality. The stories of yutao (‘the peach reminder’) and duanxiu (‘the cut sleeve’) present the two most famous and commonly cited euphemisms among the literati for male homosexuality in Chinese history. Although there was a celebrated rich homoerotic tradition, homosexuality was always seen as pi (an obsession), peripheral to the gendered hierarchies of the Confucian family and marriage institutions (Kang, 2009; Kong, 2011: 151-152). Female same-sex intimacy remained separate from the male homosexual tradition and was generally seen as negligible and insignificant in the patriarchal familial organization (but celebrated in erotic literature) in ancient China (Ruan and Bullough, 1992: 218-221; Sang, 2003).
Homoerotic practices were enjoyed for a long period through history, up to the Qing Dynasty (AD 1644-1911) and ended with the impact of modernity (Hinsch, 1990). Republican China was a time of intense nationalism and state building with the threats of both internal political warfare and Western imperial power. Fused with social Darwinism and the belief that ‘scientism’ and ‘democracy’ could save the nation, many Chinese intellectuals in the early 20th century were keen to import Western ideas and criticize traditional Chinese thought such as Confucianism.
Sociology was first introduced to China in the late 19th century and modern elites either studied in the West and/or Japan. They were keen to translate Western writings (eg Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology) into Chinese. Chinese sociology in pre-1949 fell into two camps: Comtian or bourgeois sociology emphasized idealism, social pathology and reform, and empirical research methods, whereas Marxist sociology focused on historical materialism, the unity of theory and practice, and class analysis. Both of these traditions involved efforts to sinicize sociology and a Chinese sociology slowly emerged in the late 1930s (Cheng and So, 1983; Dai, 1993; Zheng and Li, 2000).
Sexuality did not catch the attention of Chinese sociologists in the Republican period as it was seen to be in the realm of medicine, biology or psychology. However, sexuality was indeed a heated subject more generally among Chinese intellectuals who turned to Western bio-medical knowledge to understand Chinese sexual behaviours. Scholarly journals (eg China Medical Journal), periodicals (eg Xing Zazhi [The Sex Periodical], Xingyu Zhoubao [The Sexual Desire Weekly], Xing Sanrikan [The Sex Journal Biweekly], Xingbao [The Sex Journal]), and other lay texts such as handbooks and marriage guides (Dikötter, 1995) as well as tabloid newspapers (eg Shanghai’s Jingbao [Crystal] and Tianjin’s Tianfengbao [Heavenly Wind]) (Kang, 2009) were abundant in openly discussing the issues of sexuality. Modern Chinese intellectuals were also keen to translate major Western sexological texts (eg Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Edward Carpenter, Sigmund Freud, Haverlock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld), often mediated through the Japanese translation, into Chinese. The term ‘sex’ and ‘homosexuality’ were translated from Western sexology through the Japanese translation sei and doseiai into Chinese xing and tongxing’ ai (tongxing lian’ai, or tongxing lian) respectively. Homosexuality was translated as ‘same-sex love’ (tongxing’ai, tongxing lian’ai, or tongxing lian), which is a gender neutral term referring to both male and female homosexuality (Sang, 2003: 100-106).
Medical science was central to promoting the nation’s revival by disciplining individual sexual desire, eliminating evil habits and regulating couples’ sexual behaviour (Dikötter, 1995). It is in this context that homosexuality was scrutinized, notably through many debates in the 1930s, for example, whether homosexuality was right or wrong, whether it was a personal or social problem, or whether it could be cured or not (see Kang, 2009: 43-49 for the debate between Hu Qiuyuan and Yang Youtian, and Chiang, 2010: 634-647 for the debate between Zhang Jingsheng and Pan Guangdan). Female same-sex love was seen as abnormal and a threat to patriarchal power on the one hand and intense affectionate attachments between women on the other (Sang, 2003; Hershatter, 2007: 40-41). However, it is the English sexologist Havelock Ellis’s medical theory of homosexuality dichotomizing sexual normality and deviation that gained hegemony through repeated citation and translation from the 1920s onwards. Its dominant status was mainly established after Pan Guangdan, an American-trained eugenicist, sociologist and teacher of Fei Xiaotong, who translated the book into Chinese in 1930 (Pan, 1986: 1-7). Ellis’s ideas became the orthodox understanding of homosexuality in modern China.
The official ban of sociology, bio-medical science as the state’s official discourse of sexuality and the silencing of homosexuality
With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Mao period was characterized by revolutionary passion and class struggle. Academic disciplines were subordinated to the organizing principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the overarching goal of socialist development (Jeffreys and Yu, 2015: 151). Sociology was banned in 1952 for three main reasons: (1) the orthodox Comtian sociology which regarded social revolution as ‘abnormal change’ was criticized, especially by Mao Zedong, as an obstacle to socialist development; (2) Chinese universities followed the Soviet system. As the Soviet Union banned sociology in the 1920s, the new China followed suit; and (3) sociology was seen as ‘unnecessary’ as a socialist society had no social problems (Zheng and Li, 2000: 176-179). Marxist sociology (not the study of Marxism) was the legitimate paradigm in which historical materialism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism were the only valid theories to understand society and history. Sociology departments closed and faculty migrated to other disciplines, including ethnology, history, labour economics and philosophy (Lee and Shen, 2009: 111). During the anti-rightist movement (1957) and Cultural Revolution (1966-76), intellectuals (eg Pan Guangdan) often became targets of political torture (Bian and Zhang, 2008: 21; Rocha, 2012). Critical studies of social issues were absent, not to mention studies of sexuality or homosexuality.
Western medical science became the official state discourse of sexuality. According to Evans (1995), the state extensive official publications on female sexuality during the 1950s and early 1960s promoted a model of reproductive sex within monogamous heterosexual marriage under the 1950 Marriage Law which outlawed concubinage and arranged marriage. The compulsory heterosexual marital reproductive model not only constructed female gender as an effect of ‘sexual difference’ and thus reinforced revolutionary puritanism, but also left little room for other forms of sexuality (eg homosexuality, prostitution, pre- and extra-marital sex, pornography) that violated the natural heterosexual order. Public discussion of (both male and female) homosexuality was almost completely silenced.
In the first half of the 20th century China, Western medical science, as a form of modern knowledge, was first used to understand same-sex relations rendering it as a medical problem. Since the 1950s, the state has monopolized the media and academic texts—medical, legal and educational. Western medical science has thus become the official state discourse as well as the knowledge foundation of sexuality (Evans, 1995: 386). Sociology disappeared. From the 1900s to 1979, a dominant sexological construction of the homosexual subject was constructed as the ‘other’—as a sexual perversion to be cured, as a violation of the heterosexual order to be silenced, or as a threat to patriarchal order to be regulated.
Sociology of homosexuality since the reform era
The first wave of sociological study of homosexuality: what makes a person homosexual?
The reform era is characterized as gaige (market-based economic ‘reforms’) and kaifang (‘opening up’ to the rest of the world), emphasizing economic development, the ‘Four Modernizations’ (in the field of agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology), marketization, agricultural decollectivization and land reform. China, in its new turn, has, in principle, aimed to move from a Maoist ‘rule of man’ to a modern ‘rule of law’.
Sexual culture remained profoundly conservative in the 1980s. Homosexuality was classified as a sexual disorder in the first version of the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders (CCMD) in 1978 (Wu, 2003: 128). Moreover, (mainly male) homosexuality had been increasingly associated with (and thus penalized as) a type of liumang zui (‘hooliganism’) when hooliganism was introduced in Article 160 of the Criminal Law in 1979 (Gao, 1995). Even though homosexuality was not on the list, it led to many men (and a few women) being arrested or harassed due to this (Ruan, 1991: 141; Li, 2006). During the 1980s and the 1990s, the male homosexual oscillated between being a mental patient and a hooligan, or both. The construction of female homosexual shared this view but female homosexuality were commonly understood as a reaction to abuse or neglect by men or as a compensatory sex in the absence of men (Ruan and Bullough, 1992: 221-225; Hershatter, 2007: 41).
However, the state’s ‘opening up’ signifies an era where its control over private life is lessened which has led to the creation of new social and sexual spaces or even the arrival of a sexual revolution (Pan, 2006), for example, the widespread practices of pre-marital sex, extra-marital affairs, cohabitation and divorce; the upsurge of blatant forms of prostitution and pornography; and the increased public discussion on intimate issues in the mass media. It is in this context that LGBT communities, facilitated by the LGBT network and commerce from Hong Kong and Taiwan, have slowly emerged in urban cities in China (Kong, 2011: 154-156).
In terms of knowledge production, Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the reform, called for academics to help speed up the PRC’s modernization (Dai, 1993: 92). Academic inquiry was rehabilitated. The Chinese Sociological Association, first established in 1930, was rehabilitated in 1979. The Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS) was set up in 1980. Two pioneer sociological journals Shehui (Chinese Journal of Sociology) and Shehuixue Yanjiu (Sociological Studies) were established in 1981 and 1986 respectively. Since its re-establishment, Chinese sociology has been under two major influences: the communist party-state and American sociology. First, the state dictates sociologists and policy interests inform the discipline. Sociology is thus based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism with the aim to establish ‘Marxist sociology with Chinese characteristics’ for the development of socialist China (Cheng and So, 1983; Zheng and Li, 2000: 179-185). Marxism became more similar to indoctrination than a critical intellectual thought. Theoretical engagement and knowledge accumulation are considered secondary and topics that are considered to be sensitive (eg class, social movement) are marginalized. As a result, Chinese sociology in the early reform era has focused overwhelmingly on applied empirical research (eg large-scale survey and case studies) with policy implications (Zhou and Pei, 1997: 570). Moreover, sociologists can get jobs through only two means: state universities (under the Ministry of Education) or the Academy of Social Sciences (under Ministry of Propaganda), both of which are under the ideological control of the government. There are no private universities and the very few private research institutions do not provide the same benefits as state employment. Academic publishing is strictly controlled by the state through editorial vetting and self-censorship (Lee and Shen, 2009: 113).
Second, due to the shift of the US-China relation since 1978 and the US’s gain of hegemony of the global knowledge production, American sociology has dominated Chinese sociology and has nurtured the intellectual and methodological foundations for the first post-Mao generation of sociologists (Lee and Shen, 2009: 112). Functionalism was the main theoretical lens and quantitative methodology and survey research became the dominant tools for Chinese sociologists. Although functionalism was considered at odds with Marxism, its uncritical stance to power relations (eg the state) was consistent with the state’s modernization project. ‘Marxist sociology with Chinese characteristics’ was thus a paradoxical combination of structural functionalism with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in order to help build a new China.
Xing xue (‘studies of sex’, or sometimes translated as ‘sexology’) or xing kexue (‘science of sex’ or ‘sexual science’) slowly emerged as a distinctive discipline in the reform era in order to contribute to Chinese modernization. Works were mainly clustered around three types: (1) direct translations of canonical sexological classics in order to learn from the West, such as Pan Guangdan’s (1986) reprint of the 1944 translation of Ellis’s Psychology of Sex with scholarly commentary; Pan Suiming’s (1989a, 1990) translation of Kinsey’s Report: Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Female; (2) publication of sex education, mainly targetting the youth, to give them ‘correct’ sex information (eg sexual anatomy, sexual reproduction, and gender and sex roles), promote reproductive health and ‘good’ marital sex, and identify sexual dysfunction and sexual perversion (eg homosexuality) (Ruan, 1988: 1-4; see also Wu, 1982); (3) the birth of xing shehuixue (‘sexual sociology’) which emphasized its importance in contributing to Chinese civilization under ‘Four modernizations’: to build a civilized, healthy and scientific way of life; to enhance and consolidate good family relationships; to nurture healthy adolescent development; to reform incorrect feudal customs and practices; and to prevent sexual crimes and maintain social stability (Liu, 1988: 21-24; see also Pan, 1989b). Dubbing Kinsey’s classical study on human sexual behaviour, Liu et al. (1992) provided the first and the largest national wide survey on Chinese sexual behaviour (n = 20,000) in contemporary China. Although these studies pioneered the long silent topic of sexuality during the Mao period, they were very much informed by the state-dominated bio-medical discourse of sexuality and functionalism (eg emphasizing sex and gender roles and the functions of sex to the well-being of the individual, the family and the society). It thus had a strong sense of pathologizing sex and promoting moralistic sex education (Huang et al., 2009). It also followed very closely within the parameters of the state’s modernization project. Although learning from the West was important, these sociologists were also critical of the West’s sexual revolution as ‘excessive’, ‘extreme and distorted’ (Wong, 2016).
Nevertheless, English writings flourished after the open-door reform policy, mainly by foreign scholars or Chinese scholars who studied aboard after the reform. For example, Ruan’s work (eg Ruan and Tsai, 1987, 1988; Ruan, 1991; Ruan and Bullough, 1992) reputed the general impression that traditional Chinese were conservative about sex by demonstrating the vibrant sexual cultures, influenced by traditional Chinese thoughts (eg Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism), and tolerated a lot of sexual preferences, behaviours and activities including male and female homosexuality (see also Van Gulik, 1961). Built on Samshasha’s work (1984), Hinsch (1990) unfolded the hidden history of male homosexuality and reconstructed the Chinese male homosexual tradition over dynasties, painted a picture of Chinese homosexuality as a distinctive culture and explicitly against the idea that homosexuality was a Western import.
Publications covering sensitive or controversial topics such as homosexuality have slowly emerged under this sexual science or sexual sociology but have always been under state’s control and surveillance. Li and Wang (1992) is seen to be the first sociological Chinese book researching male homosexuals in post-Mao China. The book (Their World: Looking into the Male Homosexual Community in China) was published in Hong Kong and with a different book title (Subculture of Homosexuality) in China in 1998. Using mixed method (in-depth interviews (n = 49) and survey data) and Western theories, the book first drew on world history to justify universal homosexual existence and then investigated male homosexuals in post-Mao China: why people became homosexuals, their love and sex lives, their married lives (as most of them had to get married), their social lives with other homosexuals, their opinions on homosexuality (as a sin, as a disease, as a way of life), and the change of the social status of homosexuality in China. They admitted that they were unable to locate female respondents. In addition, Zhang (1994) provided a comprehensive and theoretical (but mainly medical) discussion of homosexuality—its causes, types, behaviours, related illnesses, prevention, as well as its relationship with ethics and law. An (1995) and Fang (1995) wrote two journalistic style of reports on (mainly male) homosexuals.
Under the control of the official medical and scientific discourses on homosexuality advanced by the communist party-state, this first wave of sociological studies of homosexuality was heavily shaped by the bio-medical model and fused with functionalist, positivistic and scientific idioms to investigate (mainly male) homosexuals. Similar to the first strand of homosexuality studies in the West (Stein and Plummer, 1994), the key question was ‘what makes a person homosexual?’ and they sought to describe and clarify the etiologies of homosexuality, focused on the ‘homosexual’ as an object of sociological investigation, and viewed homosexuals as members of an altogether different culture or even species. Although they tried to humanize the homosexual, promote acceptance and weaken the language of the exotic, they tended to be uncritical to the nature of sexuality as a social category and were concerned more with the presentation of ‘scientific’, ‘objective’ data, usually carried out by the presumed heterosexual and objective researchers. An essentialist and medical approach seemed to be dominant in this period. In terms of knowledge production, the writings tended to first display studies conducted by major academic figures of Western sociology of homosexuality (mainly American sociology with Alfred Kinsey as the most cited figure). This could be seen as a way to protect themselves by positioning the theories as Western and thereby align themselves with the ‘opening up’ policy. Second, they discussed Chinese experience using survey data or interviews. However, theories and experiences were often unrelated to each other during the process of analysis.
The second wave of sociological study of homosexuality: the emergence of queer/tongzhi identity and the issue of coming out
China has shifted to what is usually called a post-socialist society since the 2000s, which has resulted in a further lessening of state monitoring of private life and the burgeoning of more social spaces for sexual and romantic interactions (Jeffreys, 2006; Rofel, 2007). There have been a lot of significant socio-political and legal changes related to homosexuality: first, the deletion of hooliganism from law in 1997 which implicitly ‘de-criminalized’ homosexuality (although it was contested because homosexuality was not technically listed as hooliganism (Guo, 2007)); second, the removal of homosexuality from the list of mental illness in 2001 which ‘de-medicalized’ homosexuality (Wu, 2003: 133); and third, the official recognition of the ‘existence’ of male homosexuals from the government in 2003 due to the AIDS epidemic (He and Detels, 2005: 826). Parallel to these changes is the emergence of various LGBT consumer markets and communities, the increasing visibility of LGBT representations in the media and the internet (Wu, 2003: 132) and the emergence of LGBT activism (Chase, 2012; Rofel, 2012; Chua and Hildebrandt, 2014; Engebretsen and Schroeder, 2015). However, these new sexual spaces have always been under surveillance, for example, frequent raids and closing down of LGBT related venues and activities (Kong, 2011: 156; Rofel, 2012; Engebretsen and Schroeder, 2015).
Since the 2000s, the catchphrase ‘internationalization’ or later ‘globalization’ has been used to facilitate knowledge exchange but also enhance the penetration of Western, especially American, knowledge production. American sociologists have continuously outsourced theories, methods, and thematic issues to their counterparts in China and have trained a large number of Chinese students who have contributed to the development of Chinese sociology (Bian and Zhang, 2008; Li, 2012). Even global sex research collaborations (eg IASSCS, Queering Paradigm) have been formed. However, knowledge production is still heavily under governmental control.
Two major trends in the study of homosexuality are prominent. First, bio-medical science remains the dominant model but has shifted from a pathological to a national public health framework due to the onset of HIV/AIDS. The male homosexual subject has been re-conceptualized less as a mental patient or social outcast (hooligan) and more as an individual at risk, characterized as ‘men having sex with men’ (MSM). This reconceptualization has a significant implication: homosexuality can be openly discussed, examined, and researched as long as it is framed under ‘public health’. For example, Fudan University started a course titled ‘Homosexuality, Health and Social Science’ in 2003 which attracted many students, academics and reporters. However, its emphasis on the risk factor of male homosexual sexual behaviour, over-concerns with the well-being of the general population and the alignment with the state’s neo-liberal design of a ‘harmonious society’ have all played down the radical edge of (homo-)sexuality studies that link sex, desire and identity to ‘politics’ and ‘human rights’, which are highly sensitive terms in China.
Although subject to its surveillance, the state’s opening up to the global capital and knowledge production (eg numerous exchange programmes, new generations returning from studying abroad as well as information circulated on the Internet) contribute to the formation of a new transnational knowledge production. It is in this context that the sociology of homosexuality has slowly departed from the bio-medical science which offers a more complex and humanistic understanding of the kaleidoscopic lives of homosexuals although there are emerging views on this development (Wong, 2016). Scholars have shifted away from the etiological question of ‘what makes a person homosexual?’ to a constructionist question of examining what socio-historical conditions give rise to the modern form of homosexual identity (eg ‘gay’, ‘lala’, or ‘tongzhi’) or a queer theory question of challenging the operation of the hetero/homosexual binary for constructing the self. In the West, social constructivism (1970s-) and queer theory (1990s-) emerged at different periods but they overlap in the Chinese context. In either way, they seek to understand the transition from homosexuality-as-same-sex-experience in ancient China to homosexuality-as-an-identity in contemporary China (Tong, 2005; Sun et al., 2006; Wei, 2007; Bao, 2012). They engage with social constructivism, queer theory and/or feminism and examine how an individual makes sense of such an identity and forms same-sex intimate relationship under China’s opening up to cultural, sexual and economic globalization. Drawing on qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviews, ethnography, participant observation, scholars are collecting life stories of these men and women in urban China, for example, Beijing (Rofel, 2007; Ho, 2010; Engebretsen, 2014), Shanghai (Sun et al., 2006; Bao, 2012; Kam, 2013), Chengdu (Wei, 2007), Dongbei (Fu, 2012), and Guangdong (Kong, 2011: 145-173). Studies have become more diversified and exclusive examination of distinctive groups such as ‘lala’ (same-sex desiring women like lesbian, bisexual, or transgender) has emerged (eg Kam, 2013; Engebretsen, 2014). Moreover, scholars are reflective to the data collection process and reflexive of their own position as researchers (Ho, 2010: 60-61). Some even came out during interviews and fieldtrips, collapsing the old split between subject/researcher and the object/researched (Kong, 2011: 12-13; Kam, 2013: 14; Engebretsen, 2014: 25; Wei, 2012: 26). The research process becomes a political act but it also implies that only LGBT researchers could conduct such research as they are more ‘authentic’.
The newly emerged sexual identities (‘gay’, ‘lala’ or ‘tongzhi’) have slowly dissociated from the pathological (mental patient) and deviant (hooligan) subjects and signify a new kind of humanity—individuality, difference, sophistication, liberation and modernity. These newly emerged identities have been compared with the ‘global queer identity’ (Altman, 1997) and the question is how to criticize the universalism of Western gay identities with political and cultural hegemonies and understand Chinese queer/tongzhi identities as a social process of discrepant transcultural practices (Rofel, 2007: 89-94; see also Ho, 2010: 15-20; Kong, 2011). Moreover, these newly emerged identities uncritically embrace the reign of cosmopolitanism and nascent capitalism. The LGBT community sometimes serves less to enhance solidarity and identification than it does to demarcate those who can fully access the urban and cosmopolitan ideal from those who cannot, such as those who are poor, rural, HIV positive, non-monogamous, selling sex, etc. A small body of work is dedicated to ‘money boys’, the local parlance for men selling sex to other men in China, as a typical sexual ‘other’: ‘low’ quality, ‘immoral’ and ‘unrespectable’ (Jones, 2007; Rofel, 2010; Kong, 2012; Lu, 2013).
The major debate centres on the process and issues of coming out under the family and marriage institution, highlighting the notion of ‘face’ and ‘filial piety’ in the Chinese context. Scholars are aware that the Western coming out model, usually based on a confessional model (Foucault, 1980: 53-57) and which serves as the foundation of a confrontational identity politics, may not be applicable in the Chinese context. One argument thus discusses the distinctiveness of Chinese coming out politics (Li and Wang, 1992; Chou, 2000). Rather than making a verbal declaration of one’s homosexual identity as in a Western-style coming out model, Chou (2000) argues that gays and lesbians in China introduce a same-sex partner to the parent family where s/he would be tacitly integrated into the family circle without disclosing the couple’s same-sex relationship. Chou views the Chinese family kinship system as a culturally distinct, harmonious and tolerant entity and ‘coming home’ as a uniquely Chinese approach to integrate gays’/lesbians’ personhood into the context of family relationships. Drawing from queer theory, Liu and Ding (2005), Kam (2013) and Engebretsen (2014) challenge this essentialist notion of the Chinese family and argue that this silent tolerance of the Chinese family is an inherent violence against gays and lesbians. Liu and Ding (2005) refer to this as a ‘politics of reticence’ as it is a ‘sufficiently effective form of homophobia and discrimination’ (2005: 49) which not only makes the repressed subject silent but also erases it entirely from sight. In other words, silence can be ‘a violent form of symbolic erasure’ (Kam, 2013: 92; for a summary of the debate, see Martin, 2015).
The recent debate focuses on the strategies gays and lesbians use to handle the pressure to marry. Instead of being single or living with a same-sex partner as commonly found in the West, gay men and lesbians in China take two major routes—the first is to get married with a heterosexual woman or man and either suppress their same-sex desires or have a secret homosexual life outside marriage; and the second, cooperative marriage in which a gay man marries a lesbian (Wei and Cai, 2012; Kam, 2013; Engebretsen, 2014). Although this discussion of coming-out politics (and the corresponding marriage strategies) is usually framed as resistance to heteronormativity, it is precisely the Chinese construction of the relational (as opposed to Western individualized) self that apparently enables them to create multiple self-formations.
Identity, coming out and forming relationships are the main topics, yet other issues have been studied such as space and desire (Wei, 2009, 2012; Fu, 2012), sexual citizenship (Kong, 2011), and sexual politics and activism (Engebretsen and Schroeder, 2015), all of which are a part of the latest debates in sexuality studies worldwide, as discussed by Plummer (2015). In the course of the knowledge production process, these issues are critical to hegemonic Western knowledge production and sensitive to the tension between Chinese or English language discourses in constructing the knowledge of homosexuality, produced by Chinese and non-Chinese researchers, and the assumed English or Chinese target audience (Pan and Huang, 2007: 190-191; see also Huang and Pan, 2009; Wang, 2011). For writing in English, they use Western concepts and ideas even though they are sensitive to how these ideas can be understood in the local context. For writing in Chinese, they struggle with how to translate the Western ideas (eg ‘sexuality’) into Chinese (Pan, 2005: 7-30) and discuss which local terms to adequately describe indigenous experiences, for example, yuanfen (‘fateful coincidence’) in understanding romance, and xingfu (‘sexual happiness’) in understanding the quality of individual happiness (Pan and Huang, 2007: 187-190).
Queer/tongzhi knowledge and activism
In the West, gay/lesbian or queer research is closely aligned with politics and activism. Notable scholars include Ken Plummer, Jeffrey Weeks, Dennis Altman, Christine Delphy and Stephen Whittle, just to name a few. But it is much more difficult to combine theory with activism in China. As said before, the government dictates academic studies. However, a few sociologists do try to combine theory with activism. Li Yinhe was the most famous sociologist in China working at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences until her retirement in 2012. She proposed same-sex marriage to the National People’s Congress, though her proposals were turned down many times. Pan Suiming and his student Huang Yingying from Renmin University have been organizing biannual conferences and workshops on sexuality since 2007 to facilitate exchanges among local and overseas academics as well as NGO staff and activists concerning LGBT, sex workers, and HIV/AIDS issues. However, queer/tongzhi activists have to take their own risks as they have to be ‘creative, thoughtful, flexible and nimble in relation to where the government draws the line between what is permissible and what is not’ (Rofel, 2012: 158). Recently, five Chinese feminists, who are known for their work and advocacy on women’s and LGBT rights, were detained after planning to highlight sexual harassment on International Women’s Day in March 2015. They were later released but are still under police surveillance.
Discussion and conclusion
This article examined the emergence of sociology of homosexuality in contemporary China and has argued that its development has been shaped by socio-economic and political conditions at different historical moments: from intense nationalism and state building in the Republican era to revolution and class struggle in the Mao period to the opening up in the early reform era, and finally, to globalization in the present post-socialist state. The first and long-dominant frame for understanding homosexuality is Western biological and medical science, which was first adopted in the Republican era and which viewed male homosexual as a sexual perversion. It later became the official state discourse of sexuality in the Mao period and silenced male homosexuality as a deviant case of normal (hetero-) sexuality. Since the reform era, the major discursive frame embraced a national public health model and conceptualizes male homosexuals from a mental patient/hooligan to a high risk group. The construction of the female homosexual follows a similar trend, that is, seen as abnormal or a threat to patriarchal order in the Republican and Mao periods. In the early reform era, female homosexuals were also considered as a mental patient/hooligan but were commonly understood as a reaction to abuse or neglect by men or as compensatory sex in the absence of men. These discourses were incorporated in early sociological studies of sexuality.
Sociology of homosexuality as a distinctive area within sociology started in the reform era. Early study (1980s-1990s) focused overwhelmingly on male homosexuals. Over the past 40 years, the study has been dominated by Western knowledge and controlled by the political ideology of the state. Under the bio-medical paradigm and the state’s modernization project in the 1980s-1990s, the first wave of sociological study of homosexuality adopted a more functionalist, positivistic and essentialist approach, employed largely quantitative and survey research methodology, and focused on the etiology and pathology of homosexuality with the key question of ‘what makes a person homosexual?’ Presumed heterosexual and objective scholars ‘discovered’ homosexuals and researched them as the ‘other’ to the presumably heterosexual ‘normal’ population. The writings tended to display studies conducted by major academic figures of Western sociology of homosexuality and then discussed Chinese experience using survey data or interviews. During the process of analysis, theories and experiences were often unrelated to each other. Heavily dominated by what Connell (2015) calls a ‘pyramidal model’, Western theory is considered as universal and Chinese experience is just a particular case to supplement Western propositions.
Since the 2000s, the state continues to enable and limit the development of the sociology of homosexuality—creating a new space for (homo-) sexuality studies under ‘internationalization’ or ‘globalization’ (eg exchange programmes, overseas study) whilst confining its development within post-socialist and authoritarian parameters (eg dictatorship and self-censorship). Endorsed by the state, the medical and public health paradigm of studying homosexuality is still dominant, yet a new body of transnational work has emerged which shifts to constructivism, queer theory and feminism as its theoretical orientation and turns methodologically to reflexive qualitative research (eg in-depth interviews, ethnography). Etiological and pathological discourses give way to socio-psychological and cultural-political discourses. A sociological construction of the homosexual subject has shifted from a mental patient or social deviant in the 1980s to a different person in the 1990s to a cosmopolitan and suzhi (‘quality’) citizen in the 2000s. This bulk of work has started to examine the modern forms of both male and female homosexual identity, challenge the hetero-homosexual binary, and discuss how an individual makes sense of such an identity (eg coming out) and forms an intimate same-sex relationship within the Chinese family institution. These studies are more sensitive to the ‘global queer identity’ and the Western coming out model in framing Chinese identities, experiences, rhetoric and politics. They are more critical of mainstream sociology and incorporate radical thoughts in their writings and are reflective to the ways they do sexuality research. A few even came out from their research and wrote their own stories of self-representation. Some have engaged with queer/tongzhi activism though they are struggling within the state’s surveillance and control.
Through an examination of the Chinese sociology of homosexuality, it is clear that Western theory of homosexuality and the political ideology of the state have been hegemonic in China. Western sexology as a form of bio-medical model has been dominant, as a solution to diagnose social and national problems in the Republican era, as the official knowledge adopted by the state in the Mao period, and as the form of sexual science guised in the national public health paradigm in the reform era. Chinese sociology of homosexuality has been heavily shaped by this paradigm and later by the Western sociological/anthropological paradigm, both of which are subject to the state’s modernization project (1980s-1990s) and later globalization project (2000s-). It is only recently that the dominance of the Western knowledge system has been challenged.
A growing body of work has attempted to decentre the Western form of universal knowledge in sociology (eg Qi, 2014; Connell, 2015). Queer Asian studies follow similar patterns (eg Johnson et al., 2000; Chu and Martin, 2007; Martin et al., 2008; Liu and Rofel, 2010; McLelland and Mackie, 2014). Martin et al. (2008: 6) articulate three approaches: ‘global homogenization’ in which the sexual Westernization on a global scale triggers the ‘Rest’ to imitate, appropriate, or resist the West; ‘local essentialism’ in which traditional cultures are seen as ‘repositories of presumptively authentic, local sexual identities’; and ‘queer hybridization model’ in which ‘both Western and non-Western cultures of gender and sexuality have been, and continue to be, mutually transformed through their encounters with transnationally mobile forms of sexual knowledge’. Neither a wholesale adaption of a Westernization approach (eg ‘global homoegenization’) nor a separatist approach (eg ‘local essentialism’) seems to be satisfactory. Scholars working in Asia have acknowledged the fact that the West has entered the history and become part of Asia. The task is to seek ways to understand the complex process of Western, local and inter-regional knowledge systems in shaping experiences in specific sites in Asia and engage in a critical dialogue with the West and within Asia.
The recent Chinese sociology of homosexuality seems to exemplify the ‘queer hybridization model’. It critically applies Western theory and avoids the reductiveness of earlier approaches (‘global homogenization’ and ‘local essentialism’) and tries to explore the complex processes of tongzhi identities, experiences and sexual cultures under the influence of the state in China in an increasingly networked world. It thus contributes to the political economy of sexuality. Mainstream sociology views homosexuality as the property of an individual explained either as being natural (‘essence’) or social (‘constructed’), thereby favouring a view of homosexuality as the condition of a social minority. Queer theory criticizes this minority view by challenging the hetero/homosexual binary as a master framework for constructing the self, sexual knowledge and social institutions and thus opens up the idea of homosexual theory as a general social theory and critique. In a similar vein, Chinese sociology of homosexuality, as part of queer Asian studies, could view itself not as a minority study. By exposing the unstable and arbitrary binaries (eg West/East, global/local, heterosexuality/homosexuality) that form a master framework to understand non-Western non-normative identities, Chinese sociology of homosexuality could force Western theories of sexuality to rethink its own ethnocentric bias and thus open up a general social theory of sexuality, identity, intimacy and desire.
Given that the global structure of knowledge production is uneven with the Western theory and framework as the most dominant and richest in resources, it is difficult to challenge this institutionalized knowledge-power regime, yet various attempts have been made to de-centre, ‘provincialize’ or ‘queer’ the West as well as to urge for inter-Asia as well as West-Asia comparison (Chen, 2010). By tracing the changing contours of Chinese sociology of homosexuality through a meta-literature review of both Chinese and English writings, this paper highlights the dominance of Western knowledge and the importance of the state in shaping the understanding of homosexuality—its terminology, knowledge and practices—in contemporary China. By doing this, it hopes to open up discussions of how to find a more nuanced understanding of Chinese homosexual identities, desires and practices that is sensitive to local experiences and global parameters under the geopolitics of the world system of knowledge.