Queer Media in China

Hongwei Bao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000393361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines different forms and practices of queer media, that is, the films, websites, zines, and film festivals produced by, for, and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in China in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It traces how queer communities have emerged in urban China and identifies the pivotal role that community media have played in the process. It also explores how these media shape community cultures and perform the role of social and cultural activism in a country where queer identities have only recently emerged and explicit forms of social activism are under serious political constraints. Importantly, because queer media is 'niche' and 'narrowcasting' rather than 'broadcasting' and 'mass communication, ' the subject compels a rethinking of some often-taken-for-granted assumptions about how media relates to the state, the market, and individuals. Overall, the book reveals a great deal about queer communities and identities, queer activism, and about media and social and political attitudes in China.

Part I
Contextualising queer community media

1
Queer community media in China

An archaeology

When I tell people that I am writing a book on queer community media, my British friends usually assume that I am writing about Grindr and my Chinese friends would immediately think of Blued. Both Grindr and Blued are gay dating apps – otherwise known as social networking apps or hook-up apps installed on smart phones – that use embedded geolocation devices to identify registered users nearby. My friends’ assumptions are not entirely wrong, as gay dating apps can be described as the most popular form of queer community media in 2020. Indeed, queer people meet friends and find sex partners primarily through social media today. When I feel bored or travel to a different place, I often turn on the gay dating apps installed on my smart phone and check out locals online. Even without cruising people or reaching out to strangers, it is tempting to browse people’s profiles and imagine romantic and erotic encounters – feeling the élan vital, or life forces (Bergson 2003), flowing across the small screen; it is also reassuring to know that there are queer people around, and that one is not alone in this world despite one’s own non-normative gender and sexuality. Gay dating apps can be disappointing and even upsetting too, as they often facilitate the expression of a highly normative culture in terms of gender expression, sexual orientation, body type, age, class, race, and ethnicity. It is not uncommon to read ‘no Asian, no Blacks’ type of description in people’s personal profiles. Also problematically, there is a strong sense of individualism, egocentrism, and utilitarianism embedded in gay social media cultures. A crude summary of many profile descriptions can be like this: I am the best; I am like this, and this is what I like; I say that I prefer dating Caucasians and reject blacks and Asians, because that is a personal preference and there is nothing political or racist about it. This book takes issue with this sense of hyper-individualism, a normative gay identity and the apoliticisation of queer culture. It argues that queer community media can be – and must be – articulated with a sense of collectivism, community spirit, and political agency. In fact, if we look at previous forms of queer community media, we can find the presence of these elements and they constitute an important part of the queer histories and community media practices.

This book is not a study of popular gay dating apps, partly because the topic has been extensively researched in recent years (e.g. Jia and Zhou 2017; S. Wang 2018, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; Zhou 2018, 2019; Wei 2020), and partly because of my own interest in queer history and older forms of community media. I am fascinated by historical forms of community media: from pagers to telephone hotlines, from print leaflets and newsletters to do-it-yourself zines, and from bulletin board systems (BBS) to Internet chat rooms. Some of these media forms may sound alien and even ‘archaic’ to many contemporary readers and a younger generation of queer people. It is my contention that ‘new’ forms of media are not entirely new; often, they remediate older forms of media and carry specific technological features, sociality, and affects into the newer ones. Therefore, today’s gay dating apps cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration historical forms of media and sociality – this is a key argument informed by media archaeology (Parikka 2012). Let us then ‘dig’ into some neglected or forgotten queer histories for ‘dead’ and even ‘zombie’ forms of queer community media to debunk the myth of ‘newness’ and to rescue lost collective memories and political impulses.

This chapter introduces the historical context of the book by tracing the development of queer community media in the PRC from the 1990s to the present. Focusing on different types of community media – in particular those prior to digital forms of mediation, such as leaflets, pagers, telephone hotlines, and zines – the chapter highlights some key features underpinning queer community media, including identity, participation, and democracy. It argues that queer media and communities do not precede each other; rather, they are mutually constitutive. Indeed, as queer communities develop their distinct media practices; the use of media by sexual minorities also constructs identities, communities, and cultures. A history of queer community media can thus be seen as a history of queer identity, community, and culture. But these media forms and communication practices are only possible within a specific political economy, policy framework, and media landscape, which I discuss subsequently.

Representing homosexuality in Chinese media

To understand how queer community media works in China, we need to bear in mind three contexts that have shaped the contemporary community media practices: (1) the legal and social status of gender and sexual minorities in China; (2) China’s media censorship and its impact on mainstream and alternative representations of queer issues; (3) China’s complex media landscape, which gives rise to a vibrant informal and grassroots cultural economy.

In the first two decades of the post-Mao and postsocialist period (1978–present), homosexuality was seen as a criminal offense for a long time. Although there was no explicit mention of homosexuality in Chinese law, gay people were often punished under the category of ‘hooliganism’ (liumang zui), an umbrella term for all forms of sexual and social deviance (Guo 2007; Kang 2012). The term ‘hooliganism’ was removed from China’s Criminal Law in 1997, partly due to the ambiguous nature of the term which was incongruous with the general principle of codification in the civil law system. This event was generally celebrated as the ‘decriminalisation’ of homosexuality in China (Guo 2007). After that, queer activists worked closely with mental health professionals and their joint efforts led to the partial removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder from CCMD-3 in 2001 (Wan 2001). With these two landmark events of decriminalisation and depathologisation, gay identity and queer desire emerged in Chinese society in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Rofel 2007; Ho 2010; Kong 2011; Bao 2020). However, due to its long history of stigmatisation and the general public’s lack of knowledge about it, homosexuality is still seen in some parts of Chinese society as a form of abnormality (bu zhengchang), deviance (biantai), disease (youbing), or even criminality (liumang), despite the increasing acceptance of homosexuality among the younger generation. Homosexuality is also often seen as a Western import and thus incompatible with traditional Chinese values. With the achievement of marriage equality in Taiwan in 2019, this cultural nationalist line of argument begins to lose its persuasiveness (Baculinao 2020). Many gay people in the PRC still face enormous pressure and discrimination from family and society and most have to stay in the closet. Some choose to get into a pro forma heterosexual marriage (xingshi hunyin) simply to meet their parents’ expectations (Kam 2013; Engebretsen 2014). The legal and social environment for LGBTQ people has improved dramatically in the past two decades; queer people are slowly gaining some limited rights and legal protection. For example, in 2019, as a result of the relaxation of the legal notarisation process, some same-sex couples were able to register with their local notary offices as ‘legal guardians’ (hefa jianhuren), thereby acquiring limited rights and legal protection (Chen and Wang 2019). Meanwhile, queer activism in China and transnationally has also yielded some positive outcomes, demonstrated by the National People’s Congress spokesperson’s open acknowledgement of the popular demand for same-sex marriages within the queer communities in 2019 in response to successful queer community mobilisation (Longarino 2020).

Despite the decriminalisation and depathologisation of homosexuality, the Chinese government’s attitude towards queer issues is highly ambiguous. Overall, it has adopted an unofficial policy of ‘no approval, no disapproval, and no promotion’ (bu zhichi, bu fandui, bu tichang) vis-à-vis queer issues (Chen and Wang 2019). Implementation of the policy is highly inconsistent, subject to political agenda, social context, and individual interpretation. There are also times when explicit policies and directives have been issued to ban queer issues. For example, in 2017, China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television (SAPPRFT) explicitly banned service providers from presenting queer content. Following the ban, dating apps, including ZANK and Rela, were shut down, and yet Blued, the largest gay dating app miraculously survived (Liu 2020). Queer cinema is another contested area: in a country with no film rating system in place and all film productions and commercial releases must gain government approval in advance, queer-themed films are usually banned from official production and commercial circulation. Therefore, most existing queer films have been made unofficially or underground without government approval, and this had led to a greater risk of an official ban on queer films that have already been produced. For example, in 2012, queer filmmaker Fan Popo’s film Mama Rainbow (Caihong Ban Woxin) was taken down from several video streaming websites, and this resulted in China’s first court case against media censorship led by Fan (Bao 2018). Official policies and their implementation are often inconsistent and sometimes full of contradictions. In recent years, the government has started to allow a small number of officially approved films with latent queer themes to be produced and exhibited, often for commercial reasons and to create a positive international publicity. For example, in 2018, Looking for Rohmer (aka Seeking McCartney), a French–Chinese co-production that features ambiguous gay love – a ‘gayish film’ so to speak – was released in China’s commercial cinemas (Qian 2018); in 2019, Bohemian Rhapsody (dir. Byran Singer, 2018), a biopic of the queer singer Freddie Mercury, was released in Chinese cinemas with significant cuts to the gay content (Bao 2019). All these examples demonstrate that media censorship continues to restrict and shape media representation of queer issues in significant ways. Gay people, if allowed to appear in mainstream and commercial media, are often represented with specific visual codes and within certain interpretative frameworks: HIV/AIDS prevention, effeminate stereotype, or ambiguous friendship or homo-sociality between men and women. For example, Feng Xiaogang’s box-office hit If You Are the One (Feicheng wurao, dir. Feng Xiaogang, 2008) features an effeminate gay man (Wei 2010). In the context of commercial and entertainment media, inexplicit representations of queer people can often lead to ‘queerbaiting,’ that is, a marketing technique of trying to attract a queer audience for commercial purposes but without openly acknowledging their existence and rights, as demonstrated in the marketing in China of the game Magic: The Gathering (Adams 2019).

It is important to acknowledge the persistent existence of media censorship, but we should also note where China’s media censorship fails to work perfectly, and what social relations and creative agency the censorship mechanism enables and mobilises. Media scholar Wanning Sun comments on China’s media policy in a study of media representation of migrant workers:

[T]he Party line is not without its internal and external contradictions. The official rhetoric has had to be reworked and adjusted, as mandated by the demand of economic growth and efficiency, social justice, and, in recent years, social harmony and a humanitarian emphasis on respect for ‘the people.’

(2014: 4)

Importantly, LGBTQ people are generally not seen as the most politically sensitive and subversive social groups in China, and therefore the government can potentially recognise their existence and rights if it has to do so, if only nominally and temporarily. This is demonstrated by the official recognition from a National People’s Congress spokesperson that the legalisation of same-sex marriage was among the most popular requests for revisions to China’s civil code in December 2019 (Baculinao 2020). The Chinese government’s relatively relaxed attitude towards queer issues – in comparison to other issues such as religion or ethnic minorities – also reflects a complex and changing international politics: in November 2017, Chinese government delegates stated at the third Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council held in Geneva that China respects the health rights of LGBTQ people (Peng 2018). Although the implementation of this statement has been far from satisfactory to date, the Chinese government’s open acknowledgement of queer issues on international occasions has been cheered by some as a major achievement and others as ‘pinkwashing,’ that is, using queer issues to conceal or downplay other political issues and social problems.

The Sina Weibo ban of queer content in 2018 is a good example to illustrate how media censorship and public opinion interplay with each other to shape queer issues. The Chinese-language social media microblogging website Sina Weibo announced a ban on queer content on 13 April 2018. During the weekend that followed, queer activists and ordinary citizens rallied against the ban, creating a pro-queer public opinion online. Two days later, on 15 April, the People’s Daily published an article on its social media account calling for respect for gender and sexual difference. On 16 April, Sina Weibo reversed the ban on queer content after the public outcry (Liao 2019). This chain of events demonstrates the complex media landscape in China: there are different types of media, each functioning with its own rationale and interests. Although they all work within the same policy framework, the distance they keep towards the state policies and the editorial freedom they enjoy differ from one another. This has made it possible for limited queer representations in mainstream media.

Queer community media has emerged in China’s complex media landscape, amid a booming informal and grassroots cultural economy. Although China’s mainstream state media are inevitably subject to political control and regulation, there are, however, plenty of commercial media that are predominantly driven by commercial incentives and citizen media that frequently put self-expression, citizen rights, and editorial autonomy at the top of their professional values. All these different forms of media, situated in a constantly changing policy environment, have created a space for the emergence and development of queer community media. Many queer community media work under the administration of NGOs. For example, Queer Comrades, a community webcast which I examine in Chapter 5, is administered by the Beijing Gender Health Education Institute, an LGBTQ NGO. The majority of these NGOs are unregistered and therefore officially seen as illegal organisations because of the strict control over NGO registration in China. Some NGOs are registered as commercial businesses or social enterprises. There are also plenty of queer community media that are not linked to NGOs; advances in technology make these community media possible. The urban youths’ increasing access to media, together with their enthusiasm, dedication, and growing media literacy, is the single most important driving force for the emergence and development of queer community media. For example, community zines Gayspot and Les+ have been run by some literary and cultural enthusiasts, most of whom are university students and young professionals working voluntarily. These community zines often exist in policy grey zones and form part of China’s loosely regulated and highly vibrant informal cultural economies. These zines are self-published and informally distributed in queer public spaces or online. Their production, circulation, and consumption have contributed to the construction of queer identities and communities in China.

An archaeology of queer community media in China

Since the 1990s, LGBTQ issues have started to emerge in China’s mainstream media and public discourses, although they have often been framed in limited ways...