The politics of gay male media cultures in China

This thesis explores the various media cultures and practices in the everyday life of gay men in China, investigating how they engage with media technologies, texts, and practices. Gay male media histories and experiences cannot be separated out from their social-political, economic, and cultural settings. This allows me to argue that media technologies, media representations, media con/pro-sumptions, and media productions/regulations are integral to the politics of gay men in China. Understanding media technologies as always cultural and articulated to different values, feelings, practices, and institutions, this thesis works towards supporting creative interventions aimed at re-articulating Chinese gay male media cultures.

Drawing on ethnographic interviews with self-identified gay men, and empirical research across a range of online sites, I employ a qualitative methodology that seeks to explore the ‘circuit’ of gay male media cultures. I first examine the questions of ‘representation’ and the politics of ‘visibility’, looking at the ways in which media digitisation in China contributes to the (mis)representations of gay men. My second case study then employs both textual and ethnographic methods to engage with gay men as consumers and producers of digital media content. I explore how normative understandings of race are constructed, performed, and gain meanings in everyday communicative practices of gay men and broad mainstream society. My third case study incorporates the critical insights of a political economy approach into a cultural analysis of the ‘production’ and ‘regulation’ of the gay app Blued. This allows me to think beyond the question of ‘visibility’ and investigate the politics of ‘homonormativity’ that structure, and are structured by, Chinese gay male digital culture.

This thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of how these three main themes shape, and are shaped by, the media cultures of gay men in China – the politics of ‘visibility’, the politics of ‘race’, and the politics of ‘homonormativity’. It demonstrates that Chinese gay male sexualities and politics are mediated products of ongoing interactions between the local and the global, intersecting with race, gender, class, nation, and body. Together, these categories undermine the homogeneity of gay male identities in China, while simultaneously creating inclusion and exclusion.