Chinese Male Homosexualities

Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy

Travis S. K. Kong

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136953712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book presents a groundbreaking exploration of masculinities and homosexualities amongst Chinese gay men. It provides a sociological account of masculinity, desire, sexuality, identity and citizenship in contemporary Chinese societies, and within the constellation of global culture.

Kong reports the results of an extensive ethnographic study of contemporary Chinese gay men in a wide range of different locations including mainland China, Hong Kong and the Chinese overseas community in London, showing how Chinese gay men live their everyday lives. Relating Chinese male homosexuality to the extensive social and cultural theories on gender, sexuality and the body, postcolonialism and globalisation, the book examines the idea of queer space and numerous 'queer flows' – of capital, bodies, ideas, images, and commodities – around the world.

The book concludes that different gay male identities – such as the conspicuously consuming memba in Hong Kong, the urban tongzhi, the 'money boy' in China and the feminised 'golden boy' in London – emerge in different locations, and are all caught up in the transnational flow of queer cultures which are at once local and global.

1
Study of Chinese male homosexualities

There is a Third World in every First World and vice versa.

(Trinh T. Minh-ha, Of Other Peoples)

So, I think my problem and ‘our’ problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.

(Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women)

In this chapter, I will first delineate the theoretical ideas that have enabled me to carry out a transnational study of non-Western non-normative genders and sexualities. I draw principally from the sociology of homosexuality and queer theory, but also from feminist scholars of the ‘politics of difference’, cultural anthropology, post-colonial studies and cultural studies. Building upon previous work on Chinese homosexualities by myself and others, I situate my work within the recently emerged Asian queer studies, itself within the global/transnational study of sexualities.

Second, I will propose a pluralist model for a power-resistance paradigm, stemming from the post-structuralist conception of identity. In this paradigm, identity consists of a dual process of ‘subject-ification’, a Foucauldian concept of both ‘self-making’ and ‘being-made’ under the ‘art of governmentality’ of ‘scattered hegemonies’ at various levels: systematic, community and personal – in which power is manifested, produced, negotiated, and resisted through schemes of discipline, control, administration and surveillance. The recent sexual citizenship debate illustrates this paradigm and provides the main site for my analysis of Chinese sexual citizenship, using Chinese gay men as an example, in three different locales – namely, Hong Kong, London and China (major sites: Guangdong, Beijing, Shanghai).

Whose gaze? Who’s gay?¹

Genealogy is itself a will to power. Instead of offering a ‘better’ knowledge-regime, Foucault (1977, 1984a, 1984b) uses genealogy to decentre the whole Western form of universal knowledge, by laying down alternative and subjugated knowledges and thereby opening up other regimes of the truth-game – the other; other worlds, other peoples, other identities; other cultures and other languages (Hall 1991: 12).

In a similar vein, Abbas and Erni (2005: 1–12) argue that the current moment of cultural studies is that of the ‘post-colonial predicament’, in which cultural studies scholars from around the world challenge the broad hegemony of Western modernity and knowledge. They suggest taking cultural studies ‘to internationalize the field a little further’ in order to facilitate ‘the visibility, transportability, and translation of works produced outside North America, Europe, and Australia’ (p. 2).

To paraphrase Abbas and Erni: what I propose to do in the following section is to internationalize queer studies a little further. However, I am not adding Chinese homosexuality to a total study of world homosexuality, nor am I recovering a local and authentic origin for the study of Chinese homosexuality. Instead, I am writing a brief alternative genealogy of the study of homosexuality that is aware of some neglected voices and is critical of the constructed singular origin (read: Western) of the study of homosexuality. This brief history enables me to understand contemporary Chinese homosexualities on a transnational scale.

Sociology of homosexuality: essentialism and social constructionism

Let’s start from the West. From the 1900s to the 1950s, the study of sexuality was heavily dominated by sexology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Scholars of these disciplines held what we now call an essentialist notion of sexuality, according to which sex was basically viewed as an overpowering biological force and instinctual drive; and considered sexual identities to be the cognitive realization of a genetic predisposition (Epstein 1987: 11; Weeks 1985: 8, 2003: 7).²

Parallel to the rise of the gay and lesbian movement in the 1960s, the sociology of homosexuality slowly emerged from the sociology of deviance,³ with notions of social stigma and subcultures for understanding the homo sexual underworld (e.g., Plummer 1975: Part 3), and employing the ‘sexual scripts’ perspective to understand the social meanings of being (homo)sexual (Gagnon and Simon 1974: 19–26; Ch. 5). This paved the way for a new sociology of homosexuality that theorized and problematized the notion of ‘homosexual’ and sought to explain the nature, origin, social meaning and changing forms of modern homosexual identities and cultures. This is now known as the essentialist–constructionist controversy. Briefly put, while essentialists believed that homosexuality, as a universal phenomenon, existed across time and space and had its own continuous and coherent history, social constructionists emphasized the idea that sexuality and sexual identities were socially mediated historical constructions that belonged less to biology and more to the world of culture and meaning (Epstein 1987: 11).⁴

The sociology of homosexuality came into full force in the 1980s. It not only problematized the notion of ‘homosexual’, but also challenged the ‘hetero sexist assumptions’ in virtually all social institutions. It turned to the societal reactions towards homosexuality (e.g., homophobia) and documented various levels of discrimination, ranging from personal boycotts and street violence to social and cultural exclusions and legal and political punishment. Two approaches can be seen in this period. First was the sketching of the socio-historical conditions – for example, gay subcultures, professionalization of medicine and the rise of industrial capitalism – that gave rise to the ‘making’ of a homosexuality identity.⁵ The second approach focused on the ‘micro-interactionist’ process that explored the concept of homosexual identity in terms of a coming-out process: identity confusion > identity comparison > identity tolerance > identity acceptance > identity pride > identity synthesis. This rather teleological tendency of the ‘coming out model’ (Cass 1979, 1984)⁶ in turn informed the notion of identity politics and involved ‘a struggle for identity, a development of sexual communities, and the growth of political movements’ (Weeks 1985: 195).

Queer theory – a critique of hetero–homo symbolic configuration

As Fuss (1989: 108–9) rightly points out, the sociology of homosexuality, manifested as social constructionism, has the theoretical capacity to explore the variations among and within sexual subcultures by rejecting the view of homosexuality as an eternal and culturally uniform condition. A constructionist view of homosexual identity thus opens the door to studies of the production of all sexual identities. ‘Homosexuality’, ‘heterosexuality’, ‘bisexuality’ and other sexual identities are all seen as ‘classifications’ – historically contingent categories – rather than as transhistorical phenomena. Thus constructionism allows us to study the ‘making’ of a gay subject, a lesbian subject or even a heterosexual subject in different historical or ethnic contexts. Constructionists finally led us out of the realm of ontology (what the homosexual is) and into the realm of social and discursive formations (how the homosexual identity is produced).

The constructionist position, however, has a major problem. Seidman (1993) argues that, while constructionists have uncovered an ethnocentric bias in gay and lesbian scholarship that universalizes present-centred, culture-bound perspectives, they have not applied the same critical awareness to their own discourse.

If categories of same-sex intimacies are marked by the sociocultural context of their origin, is not the same true of our categories of analysis? And, if representations are embedded in broad national environments, are they not likewise stamped by the more particular social traits of their producers, for example, their class, race, ethnicity, nationality, age or gender?

(Seidman 1993: 128)

Seidman (1996: 9–13) argues that one possible solution to this predicament might be to adopt a post-structuralist strategy. Post-structuralists claim that there has been an epistemic shift – from the humanist standpoint of an individual subject creating himself or herself to the standpoint of a ‘structural’ order, and from the resisting gay subject to the analysis of the homo/hetero code and its pervasive structuring of modes of thoughts, knowledge and culture, the themes of which are both sexual and non-sexual.

The ‘Foucauldian Deluge’ (Plummer 1998: 608–9) heralded a distinctive discursive or post-structuralist turn to the study of homosexuality in the 1980s.⁷ Foucault not only challenged the essentialist view of sex (in this regard, his work is aligned with social constructionism), but contested the very knowledge of sexuality itself, the ‘science of sexuality’, that conceptualized our multifarious erotic experiences as a coherent, organized, hetero/homo sexual being. Foucault (1980) conceived of the rise of modern society that consists of a modern state with other social institutions and various disciplines (‘demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy, and political criticism’ (p. 33)), in which sexuality is centred as the major system of social control of bio-power (pp. 139–57). ‘A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure’ was one of the strategies to transform same-sex desire (‘the sodomite’) to same-sex identity (‘the homosexual’).⁸

Foucault’s ‘deconstructivist turn’ has been largely employed in ‘queer theory’, which is post-structuralism/postmodernism applied to sexualities and genders.⁹ The contributions of canonical queer academic theory (e.g., Eve Sedgwick 1990; Diana Fuss 1989; Judith Butler 1990; Teresa de Lauretis 1991; and anthologies Diana Fuss 1991 and Michael Warner 1993), according to Seidman (1995: 123–31), are twofold. First, queer theory criticizes the closure of the ethnic modelling of homosexuality by rethinking identity as a category containing conflicting and multiple meanings that interlocks with other categories such as those of gender, race and class. This multiplicity renders identity permanently open, hybrid and fluid, which in turn facilitates coalition-building based on a politics of difference.¹⁰ Second, queer theory criticizes homosexual theory as merely a theory of a social minority, and opens up the idea that ‘homosexual’ theory can be seen as a general social theory and critique. Mainstream sociology of homosexuality views homosexuality as the property of an individual or group. This property, or identity, is explained either as being natural (the essentialist position, which claims that there is ‘some “essence” within homosexuals that makes them homosexual – some gay “core” of their being, or their psyche, or their genetic make-up’ (Epstein 1987: 11, emphasis original), or social being (the constructionist position, which claims that ‘“homosexual,” “gay,” and “lesbian” are just labels, created by cultures and applied to the self’ (p. 11, emphasis original)). Queer theorists argue that both of these approaches have favoured a view of homosexuality as the condition of a social minority. Queer theory, however, treats the heterosexual/homosexual binary as a master framework for constructing the self, sexual knowledge and social institutions. This binary sex system, or power/knowledge regime, creates rigid psychological and social boundaries that inevitably give rise to systems of dominance and hierarchical organization.

Queer theory contests the unified notion of homosexual identity, that is the ‘very telos of Western homosexual politics’ (Seidman 1996: 11), and addresses a problem that seems to be neglected by sociologists, namely, the social functioning of the heterosexual/homosexual binary. Since the focal terrain of critique for queer theorists is the Western symbolic configuration, they tend to ignore the ‘lived experiences’ of gays and lesbians (and hence the whole idea of empirical fieldwork) and devote themselves mainly to literary criticism (Plummer 1998: 609–11).

Sociology/queer theory

The sociology of homosexuality is still a major force in shaping current political debates about homosexuality and lesbian and gay politics, but some of the most innovative work in lesbian and gay studies has occurred in the humanities. Sociology has much to learn from queer theory, as queer theory has from sociology. Instead of dismissing one or another, I join other scholars who take into account the merits of each approach. These scholars, while putting articles together in anthologies, have a clear awareness of the dynamics between sociology and queer theory. The anthologies include: Seidman’s Queer Theory/Sociology (1996), Medhurst and Munt’s Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction (1997), Richardson and Seidman’s Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2002), and Corber and Valocchi’s Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (2003). The present work is attentive to the dynamics of institutional and structural order in the formation of the sexual self, but preserves the critical spirit of queer theory that is sensitive to the textualization of queer experiences.

The advances of both sociology and canonical queer theory in understanding Western queer cultures and communities, however, offer very little to an understanding of non-Western homosexuality. The complex intertwining relationship between culture and sexuality outside the Western world has only been seriously examined in studies in cultural anthropology and post-colonialism and the later studies of the globalization of sexuality, and in new queer studies.

Studies of non-Western, non-normative genders and sexualities

Anthropology and post-colonialism

Anthropologists have the tradition of studying ‘other’ cultures (with the earliest studies based mainly on travel reports from missionaries, traders and seamen), and anthropological texts and ethnographic materials provide some discussion of non-Western sexuality. Early key scholars (e.g., Malinowski 1922; Mead 1952) touched upon the issues of gender and sexuality in people living in Melanesia. Later scholars who carried out gender and sexuality studies have tended to charge former scholars with being Eurocentric, pointing to the fact that they exoticized/eroticized the ‘other’ and over-emphasized the ‘differences’ of non-Western sexual cultures as sexual ‘excess’, ‘promiscuity’, largely ritualized or visible homosexuality, and transgenderism. They have also pointed out that the sex/gender systems in non-Western countries seem to be different from the systems found in European and Anglo-Western countries, in that terms such as male/female, man/woman or masculine/feminine may not be so easily distinguished in non-Western countries and are believed to be modern inventions heavily influenced by Western biological and medical discourses.¹¹

Another major force in examining the intertwining relationship of race and sexuality is post-colonial theory (Williams and Chrisman 1993; Mongia 1996)¹² and diasporic studies. Chow (1998: 2–5) summarizes four major forms of post-colonial critiques. The first is that of the Western representations of non-Western cultures, pioneered by Edward Said’s notion of Orientialism (1978). The second is that of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ – the ultimate silent female subaltern, who always lives under the multifarious hierarchical discriminations of race, class and gender. The third is conducted through analysis of minority discourse, with an emphasis on voices of subordinated ‘others’ (e.g., Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, David Lloyd). The final critique is that provided in the celebration of hybridity, advanced by Homi Bhabha and others.¹³

As noted by Chow (1998: 2–5), alt...

Table of contents

• Routledge Contemporary China Series
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Note on romanization
• Introduction
• 1 Study of Chinese male homosexualities
• Part I Hong Kong
• Part II London
• Part III China
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Filmography
• Subject index
• Author index
• Interviewees