2.1 Qualified Deconstructionism and Queer Sinophone Identities

This is not the first study which deals with queer issues in Taiwan and mainland China respectively (see Kong, Reference Kong2023; Liu, Reference Liu2015; Liu and Rofel, Reference Liu and Rofel2010). As noted, however, it does so from a relatively novel theoretical perspective on queer Sinophone lives. This approach is described in detail in Section 3, but its key implication is to acknowledge, but not to overgeneralise, the everyday articulations of ethnic Chinese identity that are commonly shared between mainland China and Taiwan. Despite clear social trends related to locally specific political and cultural realities (e.g. same-gender marriage is legal in Taiwan but not in mainland China), it would be a mistake to imply that the only pertinent structural influences on contemporary youth in each place are those which are necessarily localised. After all, the ethnically Han Chinese majority in Taiwan has its geographical origins in early modern China and related cultural roots tend to influence trends in social practice. Thus, while queer lives in Sinophone contexts cannot be accurately delimited only according to broad geographical and/or cultural boundaries, and ostensibly widespread social trends are not always universal in their implications for a given life story, I nevertheless acknowledge that there are characteristically mainland Chinese and Taiwanese ways of ‘being queer’ through language and semiotics, at least to some extent.

My discussion on these themes builds upon previous work which engages with the complex similarities and differences in geopolitics, culture and queer life across Sinophone contexts, such as Kong’s (Reference Kong2023) discussion of Taiwan and mainland China (along with Hong Kong), and Liu’s (Reference Liu2015: 313) comparative analysis of the former two, which entails a careful balance between the ‘anti-universalist impulse in Queer Theory’ and the ‘anti-essentialist argument [which] has rendered any indication of “Chinese difference” or “Chinese specificity” politically suspect’. With this in mind, the comparisons made in the following overview of sociopolitical trends, while admittedly somewhat dichotomous, are considered a necessary introduction of Taiwan and mainland China as distinct queer contexts. However, in later sections, I more fully apply a qualified deconstructionist point of view which, in this case, means understanding sociopolitical specificities not only in terms of relatively clear-cut regional distinctions, but also with keen attention to the inevitable variety and complexity of individuals responses, both within and across individual life stories.

Before discussing the two sociopolitical contexts in question, some points about my choice of terminology should be noted. Firstly, I refer to the individuals described in this Element as queer male-identified. The choice to use male-identified, as opposed to male or man, arises from my post-structuralist preference for considering identity in terms of identification, which I describe in Section 3. Meanwhile, using queer allows me to avoid seemingly innocuous but in fact potentially problematic alternatives such as the following:

1. (a) Gay has the potential to be heavily socioculturally loaded. That is, the fact that this is an English term can have important implications in terms of identity (see e.g. Bao, Reference Bao2018; Ho, Reference Ho2010).

2. (b) MSM (men who have sex with men) and other medicalised terms connote sexual activity rather than felt attraction. The focus herein is on how individuals articulate their understanding of sexual self and other, as opposed to their actual sexual practice, because these two things may not necessarily be aligned (see Boellstorff Reference Boellstorff2011).

3. (c) Tongzhi.Footnote ³ Although this has been the most popular Mandarin equivalent to gay or queer, this not usually a term with which the men I engaged usually identified. This term is also socioculturally loaded, both as a Mandarin term and as a term with an overtly communist mainland Chinese history.

4. (d) Homosexual and other terms which foreground (biological) sex over (psychosocial) gender and/or have come to be widely associated with negative, pathological connotations (cf. the close Mandarin correlate tongxinglian).

In contrast to these terms, the label queer allows for a fuller acknowledgement of the diversity of emic understandings and modes of performing sexual identity often subsumed into terms like gay and tongzhi. Thus my choice of terminology helps in exposing the problematic nature of assuming, based on a given category, that an individual’s lifestyle and identity work follow a presumed self-evident path. In previous work, I have used other terminology such as same-gender-attracted on the basis that queer can also be a loaded term due to its political connotations (Freestone, Reference Freestone2023, Reference Freestone2024). However, to avoid unwieldy terminology in this Element, I do not use it herein to refer to a consciously adopted ‘queer’ identity. Although I certainly recognise the potential importance of such identity work, I have opted to use queer not to connote a politicised identity position in itself, but only to refer to an emic articulation of self against the grain of societal norms. That is, queer refers herein only to a positioning of self as different from the mainstream in terms of sexuality, however this might be conceived by the person in question.

2.2 Mainland China

Contrary to certain narratives which are prominent outside the region, the queer community in China is not helpless in its struggle against stigma, nor is it entirely at the mercy of authoritarian social pressure (see Song, Reference Song2021). Indeed, it is important to recognise, as key author Hongwei Bao (Reference Bao2020: 3–4) does, that:

For example, I perceived a widespread sense of acceptance and tolerance of queerness amongst the relatively young, urban and educated communities I worked in as a university teacher (albeit mainly in highly ranked institutions with relatively cosmopolitan students). Similarly, Wang and Ma (Reference Wang and Ma2020) found that the university students they surveyed tended to be generally supportive in their attitudes to queer communities. In fact, I believe that anyone who engages extensively with the queer community in mainland China, especially in relatively developed cities and/or relatively privileged social contexts, is likely to note a significant number of lives shared between queer partners which are largely uninterrupted by broader social and political constraints. Indeed, many such individuals have stable relationships and enjoy acceptance of their sexual minority identity amongst friends, and sometimes amongst family. This reflects what has been a significant overall increase in public and official tolerance of queerness in mainland China over the past thirty years, despite recent setbacks (Engebretsen, Reference Engebretsen2014; Jeffreys and Yu, Reference Jeffreys and Yu2015). Some key related historical events were the 2001 removal of tongxinglian (homosexuality) from the list of mental disorders of the Chinese Psychiatry Association (classified as such in 1978) and the 1997 abolition of the crime of hooliganism through which queer men were often harassed and prosecuted as liumang (hooligans). Widespread changes in salient conceptions of the family have also emerged which have had important implications for the queer community. For example, the taken-for-granted desirability of the traditional heteronormative family unit (a man and a woman married, with children) has been challenged in many ways due to factors such as modernisation and ideological shifts amongst contemporary youth (Davis, Reference Davis2014; Wei, Reference Wei2021).

However, despite these broadly progressive aspects of social context, and despite the continuing need to correct the prevalence of related short-sighted views from outside mainland China, describing sexual minority life there in overly positive terms risks overlooking the significant social struggles that many queer-identified individuals still face. This is especially true when all regions and all social strata of mainland China are considered. Similarly, being overly focused on empowerment and individual agency means risking overlooking the continuing widespread and pernicious impact of normativity, homophobia and repressive institutions on mainland Chinese queers (Song, Reference Song2021). On a broader level, for example, widespread negativity remains around queer sexualities amongst the general public, as noted in a relatively recent quantitative study in which Xie and Peng (Reference Xie and Peng2018) found that 78.53 per cent of their sample (based on national census statistics) believed same-sex sexual behaviour is always wrong. Similarly, a major United Nations report found that 68.5 per cent of respondents in relatively modern and cosmopolitan cities in mainland China ‘could not accept homosexuality’ (UNDP and USAID, 2014). Of course, this study was published over a decade ago and, furthermore, such generalised statistics may not offer accurate representations of opinion amongst the vast range of relevant ethnic, class-based, racial and regional economic realities, but they nevertheless help in sketching general societal trends.

It should also be noted that various other significant factors indicate a general lack of tolerance of queerness in mainland China. For example, Liu (Reference Liu2021) found that ‘gays’ were framed in social media posts in terms of (1) political misconduct in opposition to public opinion, (2) a political movement to promote ‘Westernization’ and ‘independence’ and/or (3) a direct path to immorality and self-destruction. More pernicious forms of stigmatisation also remain common. For example, Zheng’s (Reference Zheng2015: 47–54) study of online content found a high prevalence of ‘extreme, aggressive and sometimes violently anti-gay’ attitudes. Furthermore, it is not uncommon to see queer-identified individuals framed as a threat to the national and cultural integrity of ‘we Chinese’, or as enemies of traditional values. For example, effeminate men are frequently framed as a threat to national stability, as reflected in the discursively powerful and institutionally sanctioned notion of a crisis of masculinity (Zheng, Reference Zheng2015), which puts significant pressure on men, and especially youth, to act in conventionally masculine ways. As in other locations around the world, this type of hegemonic masculine narrative can be seriously oppressive, and not least for those who tend to act in ways generally considered relatively effeminate.

In addition, it is socially significant that traditionalist and pernicious associations with HIV/AIDS also remain widespread (Zheng, Reference Zheng2015). For example, although Wang and Ma (Reference Wang and Ma2020) found that mainland Chinese English-language newspapers’ representations of LGBTQ+ people were relatively progressive overall, they also noted that associations with HIV/AIDS still characterised their reports. These stigmatising conceptions often also correspond to hegemonic narratives of public order, goodness and customs and to the associated construal of immoral, unstable and/or perverted ‘others’. Interestingly, this corresponds to similar conceptions in Taiwan of offences against virtuous customs (shanliang fengsu) or activities entailing obscene conduct (weixie xingwei), although the prominence of these narratives has faded much more there than in mainland China. However, we should remember that these ideas were nevertheless widely and sometimes brutally influential in relatively recent periods of history in Taiwan too.

Another important factor is that mainland China’s centralised and heavily censored media system strongly discourages expression of non-normative sexual identity (Chang and Ren, Reference Chang and Ren2017; Zheng, Reference Zheng2015). This means that positive role models or empowering depictions of non-normative love experiences are very rare, extremely subtle or entirely absent. In fact, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television relatively recently made a decisive ruling which stated that non-heterosexual relations were ‘abnormal’, categorising them along with incest, perversion, sexual abuse and violence (Shaw and Zhang, Reference Shaw and Zhang2018). The effects of such a policy are undoubtedly tangible – for example, in terms of reducing the potentially liberating kinds of queer visibility and queer role models in popular culture for young people coming to terms with being sexually different. In addition, mainland China’s education system and mainstream print media routinely construe queer identity as a social problem and/or in terms of ‘abnormal’ sexual desires, ‘confused’ or ‘sensitive’ individuals and unfortunate individual childhood circumstances (Chang and Ren, Reference Chang and Ren2017).

The drama series Addicted (Shang Yin), released in 2016, was a poignant example of the associated complexity of queer representation in mainland Chinese media. This was a high-school story focused on the romantic relationship of two male characters which went viral inside and outside the queer community but was subsequently removed by censors, generating widespread discussion in online news and on social media (Ellis-Petersen, Reference Ellis-Petersen2016; Song, Reference Song2021; Yan, Reference Yan2016). This reflected the now classic ambiguity surrounding the online presence of such material and the careful moral negotiation that tends to inform and constrain mainstream popular culture production. Another example is Coming Home (Huijia), a perceptive and moving short video released by PFLAG China, a popular family-focused queer NGO. This video touches on issues of family, normativity and sexual orientation by broaching the typically challenging issue of a queer individual going to the family home for the spring festival and facing the problematic interaction of their queer identification with their family relationships. This video also went viral, reportedly having 250 million online views before being taken offline relatively quickly (Huang and Brouwer, Reference Huang and Brouwer2018). These examples reflect the cat-and-mouse game between censors and queer media producers, which seems to be continuing apace at the time of writing. Also relevant is the more recent active restriction of non-normative media content and the concurrent ‘cancelling’ on key social media platforms of celebrities who are part of the queer community. Indeed, what well-established mainland-China-based LGBTQ+ scholar Wei Wei (Reference Wei2018: 9) argues still seems true: that ‘many insightful observers of Chinese society have noted its turn to greater conservatism in recent years’.

Also relevant here is mainland China’s infamous and sophisticated system of information monitoring, censorship and internet control and its powerful ideological effects (Chen and Ang, Reference Chen, Ang, Herold and Marolt2011; Esarey and Xiao, Reference Esarey and Xiao2011; King et al., Pan and Roberts, Reference King, Pan and Roberts2013). However, the role of the internet in queer mainland China should certainly not be conceived in entirely negative terms. For example, the dramatic rise in internet access beginning in the 1990s was crucial in facilitating increased awareness of queer lives (Kam, Reference Kam2013; Rofel, Reference Rofel2007; Wei, Reference Wei2007). This was especially true in the early days of widespread internet access, when there was a notable proliferation of queer-related websites and web-based tools (Berry et al., Reference Berry, Martin and Yue2003; Cao and Lu, Reference Cao and Lu2014; Ho, Reference Ho2010). More recently, dating apps like Blued and Finka (formerly called Aloha) have played a similarly central role as queer social platforms and this seems to reflect a relative tolerance of queerness on a broader societal level compared with earlier decades. As well as the articulation of queer identity and belonging that these technologies facilitate, they can be especially socially important, considering the relative lack of clubs, societies and other queer-friendly spaces/groups. In a similar way, exploration through online pornography has also been analysed as key to developing ‘sexual literacy’ and queer identity in a context of scarce access to public information and queer social engagement. However, on a critical level, it should also perhaps be noted that these issues pertain to complex questions of class, access to resources (Ding and Song, Reference Ding and Song2023).

Another aspect of sociopolitical context which is relevant here is the widespread trend for self-censorship amongst authors, journalists and academics who write on related topics in mainland China (see Ho et al., Reference Ho, Jackson, Cao and Kwok2018; Kong, Reference Kong2019; Wei, Reference Wei2018; Yang, Reference Yang2019; Yuen, Reference Yuen2015). For example, there is significant stigmatisation in the field of academic publishing of topics deemed ‘sensitive’ (mingan), a somewhat fluid notion which appears to pertain to anything diverging from that which is broadly perceived as ‘normal’. Importantly also, all organised public protest remains illegal in mainland China, and, during the Xi Jinping era, there has been an increasing governmental focus on preventing uprisings and challenges to the current legal and political structure (Yang, Reference Yang2019: 662). This should, of course, also be understood in the context of the great creativity and agency that defines queer resistance in the mainland and which has been described, for example, as nomadic or guerilla activism (Bao, Reference Bao2018; Rofel, Reference Rofel2007) or in terms of playful, creative and resilient engagement with censorship (Ding and Song, Reference Ding and Song2023: 2470).

Clearly, the overall situation concerning the influence of societal attitudes and sociopolitical factors on individuals in mainland China is complex, if not paradoxical. Furthermore, the diversity of developmental, regional and urban–rural social realities across this vast country adds to this complexity. This has been partly illustrated in several book-length ethnographic studies documenting queer male communities in specific regions in mainland China and shedding some light on its huge regional and socioeconomic diversity (Cummings, Reference Cummings2022; Miller, Reference Miller2023; Zheng, Reference Zheng2015). However, what Elisabeth Engebretsen (Reference Engebretsen2014: 4) noted in her ethnographic project amongst the lala (female-identified queer) community in mid 2000s Beijing seems to remain broadly true across all regions and social strata: that in mainland China ‘new freedoms and opportunities for social activism, leisure and intimacies’ interact with ‘strict political authority circumscribing liberating and progressive processes’, with clear effects on everyday lives. Building on such insights, what follows in Section 4 is an investigation of contemporary cases which draws on my own ethnographic observations, and in which I pay keen attention to the diversity of individual life stories across the broader queer community.

2.3 Taiwan

Firstly, it should be noted that I spent considerably less time in Taiwan than in mainland China; I acknowledge the consequent limitations on my knowledge of the former social context. In fact, my choice to carry out research there was, in some sense, made on the grounds of triangulation, because I wanted to compare my experiences in mainland China, across a decade or so, with this culturally ‘similar yet different’ context. I discuss the background to these choices in greater detail in Section 3. Despite these limitations, however, it was abundantly clear to me that there were palpable social and cultural differences between the two sites when it came to queer identity performance and queer identity politics. For example, the queer community in Taiwan is significantly more publicly visible than that in mainland China, and related social issues tend to be much more publicly prominent, for example, in mainstream media and state education. However, it should also be noted that many pertinent sociopolitical changes in Taiwan only emerged in the early 2000s, reflecting the ending of fifty-five years of continuous rule by the repressive, right-wing Kuomintang government. This made way for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has been focused on pluralist policies and liberalisation (Damm, Reference Damm2005). Also, the considerable economic development of the 1980s and 1990s made Taiwan an ‘Asian Tiger’ economy, leading to key related social factors such as increased potential freedom from the family for many young people. Importantly, this occurred at a much earlier stage in history than in mainland China.

It is also important to note that, in the 1970s and 1980s, the queer community in Taiwan, like that of mainland China, was still made up of ‘discrete subcultures largely invisible to the general public’ (Berry et al., Reference Berry, Martin and Yue2003: 90). What makes the two places distinct in this regard, however, is the highly visible and infuential civil–political queer emancipation movement which emerged in 1990s Taiwan (Berry et al., Reference Berry, Martin and Yue2003: 90). For example, numerous queer community groups, university student organisations and recognised research groups formed which became part of an impactful, broader campaign focused on recognition and equality (Lee, Reference Lee2016; Martin, Reference Martin, McLelland and Mackie2014). It is significant that Taiwan’s first openly lesbian social group was formed in 1990, that the first public queer-related human rights hearing was held in 1993, and that both the first public queer rights demonstration and the first application for same-sex marriage happened in 1995. Around this time also, some key literary and popular culture figures were publicly open about their same-gender attraction. Also, various scholars published well-received work calling for more tolerance of sexual minorities and demonstrating that homosexuality was not pathological, but simply a sexual preference (Erni and Spires, Reference Erni and Spires2001; Huang, Reference Huang2011), and key public social groups, online chatrooms (BBS boards) and community magazines also contributed significantly to the LGBTQ+ movement (Erni and Spires, Reference Erni and Spires2001; Jackson et al., Reference Jackson, Martin, McLelland and Yue2008; Tan, Reference Tan and Hawley2001).

These shifts in Taiwanese society were also reflected on the level of popular culture, with various successful queer-themed novels and films released, including the novel Crystal Boys (Neizi [lit. ‘bad sons’]) (1983) by Pai Hsien-Yung.Footnote ⁴ This novel is widely cited as the first novel in Chinese which deals with central (rather than implicit) queer themes and is therefore acclaimed as a significant landmark in the public recognition of the queer community across the Sinophone sphere (Liu, Reference Liu2010; Martin, Reference Martin2003). Similarly, the 1993 release of Ang Lee’s acclaimed film The Wedding Banquet was also a key moment for Taiwan’s queer community. This film was loosely based on another key novel of the 1980s: Paper Marriage (Zhihun) by Chen Ruoxi, a story of a woman from mainland China who marries an American gay man in order to move to the USA. She then falls in love with him in the final stage of his life before he dies of AIDS. Liu (Reference Liu2010, Reference Liu2015) describes this novel as a pivotal critique of heteronormative marriage expectations and citizenship.

These examples reflect the significant changes in public perceptions of LGBTQ+ issues, and the contrast with mainland China is poignantly clear. Indeed, although we must acknowledge the work of mainland activists (see Bao, Reference Bao2018) and the impactful groundwork of academic pioneers like Li Yinhe and Zhang (Reference Zhang1994) (and activists like Wan Yanhai), the reach and sociopolitical impact of similar work in Taiwan was undeniably much greater. In turn, this has ultimately led to a social atmosphere that many locals and visitors consider to be one of the most progressive in Asia, surrounding queer issues (Hsu and Yen, Reference Hsu and Yen2017; Huang, Reference Huang2011). This reputation for tolerance was also significantly bolstered by the 2017 high court recognition of same-sex marriage, which was overtly supported by the president, Tsai Ing-wen (Agerholm, Reference Agerholm2017; Haas, Reference Haas2017). Sociopolitical differences between the two sites in question are also clearly reflected in the relative visibility of queer subcultures in public spaces, such as in the proliferation of queer venues in Taiwan since the late 1980s. The situation in Taipei has led to the development of what is now a highly active and visible LGBTQ+ café and park culture in Taipei’s Ximending, close to ‘February 28th Memorial Park’ (formerly ‘New Park’). Interestingly, this park was an important location in the story the novel Crystal Boys, confirming its iconic status in local queer history.

Furthermore, this history was described in detail on a large, rainbow-coloured information board placed prominently in the centre of ‘February 28th Memorial Park’, Taipei. Although only one example of what might be considered pertinent linguistic landscapes (Landry and Bourhis, Reference Landry and Bourhis1997), the presence of this board in a city-centre park was representative, for me, of a strikingly different level of overtly queer public artefacts in Taiwan and mainland China respectively. For me, this reflects one key contrast between the two sites in contemporary times: the general level of institutional and public acknowledgement of the queer community and its history. For example, although there is not space to reproduce them all here, I took many photographs of rainbow flags, LGBTQ+-oriented posters and billboards and openly LGBTQ+ venues in Taiwanese urban centres. I also collected many related leaflets and flyers which were publicly available and unambiguously queer. This contrasted sharply with what I was able to note, collect and photograph in mainland China over the years. On this theme, it is also notable that one of the crosswalks near Ximending has also been painted in rainbow colours and become somewhat iconic on social media, which is one example of how the physical landscape of Taipei is very much distinct from that of major cities in mainland China in terms of state-sanctioned queer visibility. Furthermore, Taipei Pride is now a hugely popular annual international event, the biggest of its kind in Asia, while attempts to hold similar events in mainland China have been either unsuccessful or significantly hampered either by direct action by the police, or indirect pressure from authorities resulting in self-censorship. More broadly, it is also well documented that the broader mainland Chinese queer emancipation movement tends to respond to associated structural pressures in less overt and public ways (see e.g. Bao, Reference Bao2018, Reference Bao2020).

Despite the comparatively progressiveFootnote ⁵ context of Taiwan described here, one notable stigmatising force is that of politically influential transnational Christian groups such as True Love Alliance and Alliance for the Protection of Family. Importantly, the social and political influence of such conservative groups is much less powerful in mainland China. Such organisations typically frame sexual minorities as unhealthy, promiscuous and/or a threat to social stability and the well-being of children (Cheng et al., Reference Cheng, Wu and Adamczyk2016; Lee, Reference Lee2016, Reference Lee2017; Wang et al., Reference Wang, Bih and Brennan2009). It is also relevant that there is considerable wealth and political influence within the Christian community, although a very small section of Taiwanese society identifies as Christian (Cheng et al., Reference Cheng, Wu and Adamczyk2016; Lee, Reference Lee2017), as is also the case in Hong Kong (Kong, Reference Kong2023). Furthermore, J. Ho (Reference Ho2010) suggests that direct cooperation between Christian groups and the state has allowed overtly anti-queer groups in Taiwan to gain significant political power.

In sum, although the events and trends discussed in this section should not be used as a basis for broad, generalised conclusions about the lived realities of all queer people in Taiwan or mainland China, they do show how the foundations laid from the 1970s onwards have led to distinct atmospheres in terms of social and political acceptance of queer people. Associated social affordances and constraints are undoubtedly relevant to queer individuals’ choices in identity performance in both sites and, as such, a certain degree of generalisation can be justified. Indeed, the differences I observed between Taipei and Chengdu did seem to have clear implications for identity work amongst people like the men I engaged with. However, although analysis of identity and culture (sexual or otherwise) requires keen attention to potentially consequential historical and sociocultural factors like those discussed in this section, I nevertheless suggest that such factors should not lead researchers to overgeneralised conclusions about social practice and/or perceptions of cultural belonging across a given national, regional, ethnic, cultural or sexuality-based population. That is, I argue that we cannot assume that all queer lives and approaches to identity in Taiwan and mainland China are inevitably fundamentally different, despite the contrasts between the two societies discussed here.

In what follows, therefore, I consider social, legal and political factors like those discussed in this section alongside the variation I noted in semiotically mediated identity performance across related communities. This balanced approach is the foundation of the discursive and ethnographic perspective I offer, and which I will explain in detail in Section 3.

3.1 Queer Sinophone Identity as Performance

As noted above, seeing identity as a partly emergent process allows us to account for some of the social and cultural complexity underlying terms like ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’. This seems especially important in the case of the highly mediated and globalised social worlds of people like the relatively young, urban and educated megacity-urban individuals in this study (see section 3.3 for details). Indeed, the multifarious and diverse identity work which I found to emerge amongst them is useful in bringing the whole notion of identity, as it is commonly understood, into question. For example, despite strong tendencies for study participants in both Taiwan and mainland China to describe themselves as gay and Chinese (sometimes as an ethnicity, sometimes as a nationality and sometimes as both), my analysis of their identity work also showed how these notions interacted with other diverse aspects of belonging, and how this tended to seem important to their navigation of social and ideological contexts.

In investigating identity in the contexts in question, I therefore follow influential cultural studies scholars in understanding it as a process of becoming rather than being, and as featuring their intersecting identifications with various emically conceived communities that become relevant to their interactions (Hall and Du Gay, Reference Hall and Du Gay1996). Such a perspective has also given rise to notions such as LePage and Tabouret-Keller’s (Reference Le Page and Tabouret-Keller1985) acts of identity, Butler’s (Reference Butler1990) performativity and Goffmann’s (Reference Goffman1959) performance of self in everyday life, which also inform the discursive-sociocultural approach to language and identity that I adopt.Footnote ⁶ This perspective is not built upon a stand-alone framework, but a broad body of work which builds on foundational work in discourse analysis and focuses on the mutually constitutive interplay of language, ideology and identity in situated interactions (Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2005; Gee, Reference Gee2014 [1999]; Jones, Reference Jones2016). I argue that this perspective is uniquely suited to tracing the use of linguistic and semiotic tools of identity performance in instances of language use which are often ostensibly banal. In the case of this study, it therefore allows for an especially clear elucidation of the fuzzy philosophical, political and cultural influences on individuals in the two cosmopolitan, urban Sinophone contexts in question.

Importantly, applying this theoretical point of view entails sacrificing the convenience of analytical generalisation. In line with this, while I am indebted to authors who sketch queer life in mainland China and Taiwan in broad terms, the novel contribution I propose is to build on this work by actively recognising diversity in related communities. As noted in the introduction, I therefore draw upon the notion of discourse systems (Scollon et al., Reference Scollon, Scollon and Jones2012) in place of broad notions of culture and descriptions of practice delimited on the level of a whole society. This allows for an alternative understanding of identity based on individuals’ emergent alignments with/distancings from associated ‘ways of seeing the world’ (Sunderland, Reference Sunderland2004). These emerge through what they say and do, so speech and social action are seen here as entailing the navigation of the complex and overlapping frameworks of social, moral and ethical assumptions – that is, discourse systems which delimit and guide that individuals understand to be ‘normal’ and/or self-evidently ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Thus, the appropriation of discourse systems can be seen in terms of the employment of heteroglossic ‘voices’ that have ‘spoken’ before in a given social context, and which have led to a degree of ideological sedimentation within the community in question (Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin1986 [1979]). I will exemplify this in the context of project data in Section 4.

3.2 Identity as Positioning

Along with the notion of discourse systems, a key approach I use for deeper engagement with the complexity of sociolinguistic identity work is to view it in terms of positioning. The notion of positioning is a heuristic for charting the emic senses of belonging articulated in specific moments of communication (Block, Reference Block2022; Bucholtz and Hall, Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005; Davies and Harré, Reference Davies and Harré1990), thus:

For example, although an individual like me may identify (and ‘feel’) ‘British’ throughout their life and across diverse social situations, there will inevitably be moments in which they might be perceived to be ‘being more British’, based on the linguistic and other semiotic signals they gave off to others. These moments would inevitably be shaped, to some extent, by factors like the other people involved in the conversation, the place, the time and the specifics of the social situation. Also, the emergence of ‘Britishness’ in such a case would be a two-way process, with the identifications (i.e. senses of belonging) claimed being recognised and ratified to varying degrees by others (Gee, Reference Gee2014 [1999]). Furthermore, although at some point in their life, such an individual may hypothetically become entirely ‘un-British’ – for example, in legal terms due to renouncing nationality – they would nevertheless still be able to ‘be’ British, at least to some extent, in various ways and at various times. From a discourse-analytic perspective in which scrutiny of language is prioritised, this corresponds to what Davies and Harré (Reference Davies and Harré1990: 47) refer to as the ‘discursive production of a variety of selves … conjured up during conversational interactions’ – that is, the process of positioning.

More recently, De Fina (Reference De Fina2013: 41) has critiqued Davies and Harré’s assumption that ‘positions automatically come with attached world views and philosophies’ and their ‘rather mechanical association between identities and sets of beliefs, lines of arguments and roles’ (cf. De Fina and Georgakopoulou, Reference De Fina and Georgakopoulou2012). Similarly, Block (Reference Block2022) proposes a more nuanced model of positioning which he labels positioning theory. However, perhaps the most widely applied use of the notion is found in Bucholtz and Hall’s (Reference Bucholtz and Hall2004, Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005) framework for charting identity through close analysis of the linguistic and semiotic aspects of individuals’ communication, which productively operationalises the notion of positioning (or positionality, in their terms). Although I do not employ all the specific terminology they put forward, I do build on their work in considering identity as ‘in part an outcome of interactional negotiation and contestation, in part an outcome of others’ perceptions and representations and in part an effect of larger ideological processes and material structures that may become relevant to interaction’ (Bucholtz and Hall, Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005: 606).

With the associated intersectionality and fluidity of identity as a focal point, this Element also considers identity work in terms of the linguistic resources participants draw from their sociolinguistic repertoires in moments of situated communication (Blommaert, Reference Blommaert2005). For example, rather than treating what study participants said as caused by and/or indicative of neatly generalisable cultural, sexual or other identities, I trace the ideological influences that leads them to speak about themselves and others in certain ways, in certain situations. Such linguistic acts exemplify their drawing resources from repertoires or, in other words, drawing words, sounds and gestures from their store of learned communicative tools. Crucially, I also see this in terms of their appropriation of discourse systems in any given moment of communication. However, this does not simply mean ascribing one discourse system to one instance of speech. For example, what some participants said to me as part of this project sometimes seemed to index the influence of various associated interpretive systems of taken-for-granted assumptions some of which could be seen as simultaneously local and globalised, modern and traditional, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ and ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, amongst other things. In such a case, I might draw on notions such as the Confucian discourse system and the utilitarian discourse system to tease out some, but of course not all, of the relevant complexities of ideology and identity (Scollon et al., Reference Scollon, Scollon and Jones2012). Although I do not claim that this approach is the be-all and end-all in terms of identity analysis, I do suggest that it allows us to think outside the usual box of broad societal and cultural sketches in analysis of social practice in queer Sinophone contexts.

3.3 Participants and Their ‘Identities’

Participants in each location were recruited mainly through existing social links and friend-of-friend recommendations, but also sometimes through online and face-to-face social networks. In each case, I introduced myself as a friend first, then later invited those I thought might be interested in the project to take part. It should be noted that I did not set out to find a representative sample of any particular group (sexual, cultural, or other), because ethnographic approaches to language and identity are focused more on ‘thickness’ of description than on broad ‘samples’ of societies or communities. Thus, while I also acknowledge the partiality or perspective which results from my working with a relatively small group of participants in each site (eleven–twelve) and from my focus only on relatively young, male-identified Han individuals from megacity urban contexts. I do not see this as a methodological limitation but as a part of the nature of the study. Also, in terms of class, it is notable that participants were all either in postgraduate education or at an early career stage in relatively well-paid jobs, and that they were all students or graduates of leading universities (a short biography of the participants featured in this Element is given in the appendix). These factors were potentially significant in terms of the sense of socially stratified identity which may have been shared amongst them, and perhaps also in terms of their senses of belonging to a nation, ethnicity or other broadly delimited community, such as the queer/gay/tongzhi.

None of these similarities in social background are considered a hindrance to research from an ethnographic point of view. On the contrary, they are considered in context, in light of the extended participant observation which focused more on the nuances of individual cases within a social group. In fact, the variation in life stories and articulations of queer identity that I noted amongst even this small group of somewhat socially homogenous participants is centrally important to my deconstructionist and discursive-sociocultural arguments. For example, I focus on the things participants said that seemed to reflect their individualised and/or situational approaches to the forces of tradition and modernity, and to the significant yet not all-powerful influence of globalised models of ‘gay’ life (Oswin, Reference Oswin2006).

3.4 Discourse Analysis, Ethnography and Interviews

The data in this Element are taken from seven 60–90-minute semi-structured interviews carried out with some of the men I engaged with towards the end of their involvement in the project. Interview transcripts were first coded thematically and then analysed qualitatively in terms of discourse and positioning, as will be demonstrated in Section 4. I carried out similar interviews with all twenty-three key participants as a means of reflecting and expanding upon themes that had arisen during the six–nine-month period of engagement with each of them. To remain consistent with a semi-structured interview approach, I made significant efforts to allow them to take the lead wherever possible and I left the choice between Mandarin and English with them (see appendix 2 for a discussion of guiding interview themes).

I am strongly aware of issues concerning the sole use of interviewing as a research method. This is especially important when interviewees’ personal and social backgrounds are not fully accounted for, and if they are uncritically accepted as cultural/societal/community representatives. Furthermore, people sometimes describe their lives in ways which differ from their actual practice. Also, what they say is not always accurately representative of views and practices in their communities/societies. For these reasons, this was not an interview-based project overall. On the contrary, the specific data types to be collected were not defined in advance, and the general approach to data collection was quite open. As noted above, the interviews were only a part of a much broader period of extended engagement in Chengdu and Taipei, entailing visits to various physical and online spaces, whether queer-specific or not, and engaging face to face in as many ways as possible with participants, friends, acquaintances and others I met along the way. Data collection also included making extensive field notes, gathering printed material and taking photographs of scenes, locations, items and people, both when with participants and when I was alone. This reflects the centrally ethnographic orientation of my work and my wide-ranging, grounded research aim of identifying diverse ideological traces related to the performance of Sinophone queer sexuality.

Accordingly, the interviews were recorded mainly as a means of reflecting on my field notes and other forms of data. The interview data used herein can therefore be seen as a kind of ‘easy access’ linguistic crystallisation of the broader themes in identity work and ideological navigation that my use of ethnographic methods established. Indeed, although written (and/or transcribed) texts provide perhaps the most easily accessible examples of the kind of ideological traces I was looking for in language use, my analytical choices were based on a less quantifiable, perceived recurrence of certain themes, and sociolinguistic moves, over an extended stay in each location. Broadly then, I followed De Fina (Reference De Fina2013: 46) in assuming that:

3.5 Data Set and Data Types

Developing the approach described above the project data I gathered consisted of the stories, linguistic styles, stances and vocabulary which seemed salient and discursively significant amongst those with whom I interacted. Specifically the data-collection process included identifying recurring patterns of word use, stories, linguistic styles, vocabulary and stances potentially indexical of corresponding interpretive frameworks. For example, as discussed in detail in Section 4.3, I found the word hexie in Mandarin (and harmony in English) to be especially common when queer people described themselves as a certain type of person and/or when they characterised the ethnic and/or national community to which they stated belonging. Although quantifying the occurrence of such terms numerically is not part of the methodology I employ, I do assume a degree of ‘researcher licence’ in positing a discursive salience of associated notions. However, the observations I make on this basis all come with a reflexive caveat: my aim is to trace the navigation of ideological and cultural influence only from my own consciously subjective position. Furthermore, as discussed above, the focus is on the machinations of ideological navigation only in certain specific cases, rather than on trying to draw broad conclusions objectively about lived realities across a given group.

3.6 Project Motivations and Reflexivity

Following ethnographic norms and aware of the fundamentally two-way nature of research interactions, I remained keenly conscious of the relevance of factors such as my white privilege, my English-as-first-language status and my links to relatively powerful British academic institutions. These are very real manifestations of the fundamentally unequal global system and, as such, I remained alert to their potential effects on my interactions with participants, and the project overall. Positioning theory is very much relevant here because it helps demonstrate the two-way nature of interaction and its effects on identity work. Specifically, the words and actions of both myself and those with whom I engaged reflect the positions we took up, and these were implicitly ratified (and, less often, rejected) by the communicative other in each moment of interaction (Gee, Reference Gee2014 [1999]). In all cases, some of these positions will have been relatively stable across the given periods of interaction. Other positions may have been somewhat more emergent and temporary in nature and shifted according to the specifics of any one social situation and according to which particular person I was engaging with. For example, I was never entirely responsible for my positioning as a friend, which I quite consciously aimed to perform through both my words and my actions, because my interactions with participants always entailed both my own identifying and being identified (or perhaps not) in a certain way.

In addition, although I am aware of the potential for my work to be interpreted through the lens of ‘white saviour’ stereotypes with which white individuals working on non-white communities are sometimes stigmatised, this project was motivated less by culturally arrogant reasons of ‘saving’ the other than by the often poignant stories of dear friends, research participants and acquaintances I met during my many years in mainland China, many of whom had struggled significantly with related issues. Furthermore, it was also centrally motivated by the fact that related academic work tends to be comparatively difficult for locally based researchers to undertake and publish because of widespread editorial vetting, self-censorship and frequent rejection of related publications on grounds of ‘respectability’ and ‘sensitivity’ (Cui, Reference Cui2023; Ho, Reference Ho2010; Kong, Reference Kong2016).

It is perhaps also notable that whilst I lived in mainland China, I put considerable effort into learning Mandarin, understanding local culture and making genuine local connections. In addition, my extensive work as a university teacher during this period entailed engagement with very large numbers of ethnically Chinese students and colleagues not only from all over mainland China but also from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. I trust that this experience, along with my extended period of residence in the region, mitigated the limitations of my ‘cultural outsider’ status to some extent. It is also relevant that, at times, the interplay of my outsider ‘identity’ with other ‘identities’ and identifications, such as as ‘queer’ and ‘male’, meant that the relevant distinction between outside and inside with reference to the communities participants identified as part of was sometimes far from clear. That is, my identification as male and queer might have led to a sense of comfort or social connection for participants who identified in the same way, as might other positions related to, for example, age, socioeconomic background or even social and academic interests. In fact, a combination of such shared identifications may have made me seem like more of an ‘insider’ to some participants than some hypothetical other who identified as Chinese, but as socially distinct from them on other levels of identity. Furthermore, from an ethnographic point of view, ‘outsider’ status is not seen as a barrier to effective research anyway. Instead this and other aspects of my own identity work are considered here as part of the ‘thick’ detail of culture and identity and as a central part of the situated identity work emerging in the cases I analyse.

Another key aspect of my reflexive approach is to recognise that a deconstructionist approach runs the risk of dissolving the categories through which privilege is produced and reproduced. For example, highlighting the social complexity under the term ‘Western’ could potentially eclipse the continuing global hegemony of powerful governments, companies and institutions from Western/Global North countries, from which my own white and British privileges partly stem. However, while culturalist dichotomies such as East/West and Global North/South, and indeed Chinese/Western, are very much appropriate for analysing such geopolitical injustices, I argue they tend to be somewhat overused when it comes to the analysis of queer identity, especially in Sinophone cultural contexts (see also Freestone, Reference Freestone2023, Reference Freestone2024). This is why I frame my work in terms of identity work and discourse systems as opposed to ‘identities’ delimited in national or cultural terms, with a view to a fuller acknowledgement of the mutually constitutive nature of global cultural flows (see also Oswin, Reference Oswin2006). Thus, instead of implicitly dismissing Western geopolitical hegemony, I consider it alongside power imbalances of all kinds, including those pertaining to privileges like that of male-identified over female- and trans-identified individuals, urban over rural citizens (Rofel, Reference Rofel2007), the socio-economically and/or educationally privileged over those who are not, and conventionally masculine over effeminate queer males (Russell, Reference Russell2021).

4.1 Overview

In this section, I draw on the theoretical and methodological perspective described in previous sections as I analyse examples of identity work. In turn, I chart the situated navigation of pertinent discourse systems, with a view to deconstructing common notions of cultural and sexual identity.

4.2 Queer Sinophone Identity Work, Chinese Culture and Hexie (Harmony)

As with other cultural, national and ethnic labels, ‘Chinese culture’ and ‘being Chinese’ are terms which are often taken to have relatively stable semantic reference but which, from my discursive-sociocultural perspective, are also quite arbitrary and fluid in some ways. As such, their use by people like the men I engaged with often seemed to pertain both to their relatively stable, deep-rooted understandings of self and to their more emergent, situated identity work. From this perspective, the use of such terms inevitably entailed the individualised and context-specific navigation of underlying social and structural influences, which is arguably often much less uniform than commonly assumed, amongst a given cultural group. As such, these terms are especially pertinent to the questions of language, ideology and identity that I aim to elucidate in this project overall.

Furthermore, the notions of ‘Chinese culture’ and ‘being Chinese’ that participants frequently drew upon seem to be an ideal starting point for a discussion of positioning and identity work. Given the complexities of national, regional and ethnic belonging in mainland China and Taiwan and across the broader Sinophone cultural sphere, these notions serve as especially clear examples of presumed self-evident but actually complex ‘identities’. Indeed, I chose Taipei and Chengdu as research sites not only for reasons of comparative ethnographic interest, but also to make a theoretical point about the nature of ideology, the instability of spuriously stable cultural notions and the crucial role of language in identity work. My key point here is that ‘Chinese’ can mean very different things to different people. Moreover, while there is undoubtedly something relevant and tangible called ‘Chinese culture’ that significantly affects communication and identity work, associated senses of belonging to associated communities inevitably signify different things to different people. In addition, these become relevant to varying extents and in varied ways, in diverse communicative situations.

The first extract I will discuss is drawn from an interview with Walter, a twenty-six-year-old PhD student, recorded while he and I were discussing approaches to queer visibility in a café in downtown Chengdu.Footnote ⁷ As with all other participants, we had already socialised together regularly for many months and had become good friends. Also, like all of them, Walter was queer male-identified, Han, highly educated, comfortably bilingual and a long-term resident of this relatively cosmopolitan megacity (see appendix 1 for more detailed biographies). Importantly, I see these and other such relatively stable aspects of his and other participants’ ‘identities’ as potentially equally significant to his performance of self as his ‘being’ (i.e. identifying as) Chinese. That is, although social norms associated with his ethnic/national identity would certainly have been relevant to what he said and did, the relative importance of all the other identities/identifications I mention here (as well as others not mentioned) would depend upon many additional factors. These factors include, but are not limited to, the place he was in, the people present and various aspects of his personality and life story.

In the section of the interview cited in what follows, Walter and I built on related discussions of LGBTQ+ politics and Chinese culture in our previous conversations. At this point in the conversation, he had just said that he thought that Chinese queer-identified people were oriented more towards ‘being normal’ than pushing for social change (see also Freestone, Reference Freestone2024).

This excerpt is centrally relevant to the current themes because it can be taken as indexical of Walter’s identification, in this moment, with certain discourse systems, or ‘ways of seeing the world’, which are perceptible through the way he ‘speaks about things’ (Sunderland, Reference Sunderland2004: 28). That is, his linguistic articulation of a sense of cultural and queer self can be understood here in terms of appropriation of complex and diverse structural influences which are fundamentally not as simple as ‘ethnically and/or nationally defined cultures’. When it comes to discourse systems, I interpret Walter’s use of ‘harmony’, as well as the overall tone of this moment of conversation, as representing his positioning in alignment with the world view based on balanced relationships between self, others and nature which is central to the philosophy of Confucius. That is, I interpret this as an appropriation of the Confucian discourse system (Scollon et al., Reference Scollon, Scollon and Jones2012). Specifically, I take his use of the word harmony in line 10, in the context of the overall excerpt and my broader engagement with him, as entailing the appropriation of the related interpretive framework of assumptions, categories, logics, claims, norms, ethics and values. The pertinent underlying philosophical world view stems from ancient times and has clear cultural residues in the present day, which arguably significantly influence social norms across East Asia (Ambrosio, Reference Ambrogio2017). Thus, his saying that ‘you can have a, a wider way to solve it, not so violence’ can be seen in terms of his positioning himself in alignment with a comparatively reticent, harmonious and non-confrontational approach to life corresponds to key concepts in Confucianism, and to interpretive frameworks which still significantly influence social interactions in contemporary times.

Importantly, this is distinct from claiming or implying that because Walter ‘is’ Chinese, he inevitably always does things in a ‘Chinese way’. He may well have taken up different positions in other moments of communication and he may well also have drawn on very different discourse systems, perhaps even within the same conversation. The same is true, of course, for others who tend to identify as Chinese. That is, not everyone who does so takes the same systems of social assumptions for granted in every situation, or indeed at every stage of their lives. In addition, my proposition of discourse appropriation here is not a suggestion that Walter necessarily intended to evoke all the nuanced philosophical connotations of Confucianism simply by using the term ‘harmony’. However, my framing this in these terms allows me to chart his response, in this given moment, to some of the structural influences I perceived as salient in his broader social context. In turn, I therefore use it to exemplify the inevitably individualised and situational navigation of locally salient but not necessarily universally influential discourse systems, and to set the scene for the rest of the following data analysis. In addition, I use it to demonstrate, in relatively simple terms, how everyday language can reflect individuals’ performance of their identities and their drawing on tools from their linguistic/semiotic repertoires.

4.3 Harmony and the Confucian Discourse System

I have chosen to focus on the notion of hexie (harmony) because of my perception of its centrality to Confucian philosophy and because of what I perceived to be its widespread salience and influence in everyday life in Sinophone cultural contexts. Firstly, I understand the English term ‘harmony’ as Walter’s translation of the Mandarin term hexie not only because it is the most obvious and common translation of the term but also based on my having frequently heard it used in similar ways during my broader experience in the region. It is important to consider, however, that the English gloss can simplify the nuanced localised meanings of the term.

Secondly, I am admittedly assuming a certain degree of researcher authority in suggesting that this discourse system is widespread and prominent, based only on my ethnographic and life experience in the region. However, this is not only my perception. In fact, influential modern philosopher Li Chenyang (Reference Li2013) states that if only one word were to be chosen to characterise the ‘Chinese ideal way’ of life, it would be harmony. Somewhat unsurprisingly, then, the prominence of this notion can also be easily traced in educational, institutional and mass media rhetoric.Footnote ⁸ This is exemplified in Hagstrom and Nordin’s (Reference Hagström and Nordin2020: 517) citation of a 2009 statement from the PRC State Council, which reads:

This is not an isolated example, and the general spirit of this statement was very familiar to me as an immigrant in mainland China. As a broad comparison, hexie might be understood as having a similar level of discursive salience to that of democracy in, for example, the UK. Although no precise equivalence in the social functions of these two terms can be drawn accurately, they are both quite clearly ideologically significant across very broad populations. As such, their patterns of widespread use can be taken to connote the hegemony of corresponding discourse systems and therefore of corresponding interpretive frameworks. In turn, this can be taken as indicative of taken-for-granted world views. These incorporate the kind of ‘truths’ that I will be referring to as societal pseudofacts, such as ‘Chinese people are oriented towards social harmony’ or ‘Western people are oriented towards democracy’. Societal pseudofacts are notions whose connotations tend to be taken as self-evident across a broadly delimited community (be it national, ethnic, sexual or other) and can therefore be taken as indexical of aspects of world view that are hegemonic therein.

I should stress that my positing the broader ideological significance of the term ‘harmony’, and the ‘way of seeing the world’ it tends to correspond to, in my experience, was not a quantitative exercise. Even if I had tried to quantify the use of the term in some way, such as through corpus linguistics, it would arguably still have been difficult to gauge the actual extent to which such world views are central to the people of mainland China. Furthermore, I would argue that substantiating such a claim would be especially difficult without extended ethnographic engagement with at least some of those people. Thus, as an ethnographer, a sociocultural discourse analyst and a deconstructionist, I did not assume the right to make broad statements about attitudes and social practice amongst a huge population of people based simply on quantitative analysis of the prevalence of one word in certain related contexts. Furthermore, I did not assume that my perceived prominence of this notion corresponded to inevitable alignments with associated (Confucian) world views amongst the boarder population of mainland China. Instead, I focused on how the discourse system of hexie was drawn upon (and, of course, sometimes resisted) by individuals in specific conversations like the one I had with Walter. In this sense, the discursive sociocultural approach is fundamentally different to other methodologies.

In addition, while I considered instances of the use of the term harmony as potentially indexing a broadly Confucian world view, the aim was not to attribute the appropriation of entire discourse systems to the use of individual words. Instead, my focus is on the situated implications of words like harmony, aiming to exemplify sociolinguistic and ideological processes which are often much more complex than a one-word-to-one-discourse-system correspondence. In fact, there are usually also numerous other linguistic and/or semiotic tools employed alongside such discursive keywords, and these tend to function together, indexing a general orientation towards certain interpretive systems. For example, Walter’s use of the notion of the ‘Chinese way’ and his positioning of self and community as relatively smart, non-confrontational and non-violent can be seen to contribute to an overall sense of orientation towards reticent communication styles (see also Freestone, Reference Freestone2023) and/or non-confrontational approaches to queer politics.

Finally, the notion of Confucianism used here should be acknowledged to be a porous heuristic. For example, although the notion of hexie and the vision of society it reflects are central to the writings of Confucius himself, it also features in the writings of various other classic Chinese philosophers (see Halverson et al. Reference Halverson, Goodall and Corman2011). Also, hexie was an influential concept long before Confucius. For example, it was a feature of inscriptions on bone and tortoise shells dated as early as the sixteenth century BCE and also of inscriptions on bronze utensils in the Zhou dynasty period (1066–256 BCE) (Li, Reference Li2006). Thus, I acknowledge that delimiting the discourse system in question as Confucian is a simplification. However, even in deconstructionist analysis, there is a need for some kind of analytical stability. That is, while unpacking the cultural notions we tend to take for granted, it would be unproductive to dissolve all categories of social influence to the point where nothing remains from which to draw analytical conclusions. More broadly, then, the notion of discourse systems is used in this Element to strike the intended balance between productive generalisation and reductive essentialism.

4.4 Positioning, Confucianism and Chinese Culture

A second illustrative case of discursive positioning in identity work came about when notions of Confucianism and Chinese culture were drawn upon together in conversations about participants’ sense of self. For example, I had the following conversation during an interview with Tim, a twenty-seven-year-old translator from Taipei (who shared the same broad social identifications which I listed for Walter and others and had known me for a similar amount of time). The conversation was, once again, centred around being gay and Chinese culture:

Firstly, I found this statement by Tim to be indicative of the appropriation of the Confucian discourse system, as in my conversation with Walter. For example, by saying ‘being gay it’s like so … contradictory to … Chinese culture, like Confucianism’, Tim can be seen to position himself in distinction from his emic understandings of both Chinese culture and Confucian ideology. He achieves this positioning interactionally, partly by virtue of his implied identification as ‘gay’ (i.e. when he says ‘being gay it’s like so contradictory’). He thereby frames being gay as diametrically opposed to all things Chinese and/or Confucian. Also, through the conjunctive use of ‘like’ here, he seems to equate the notions of Chinese culture and Confucianism, and he uses them together to imply a perceived tendency for traditional viewpoints amongst the relevant community, as he sees it. In doing so, he also positions himself firmly against their ‘way of seeing the world’, again, as he sees it. In addition, when Tim goes on to say that his parents are ‘less acceptive to being different’ and that ‘sometimes you lose … I cannot come out’, he alludes to the salient issue of normativity (Freestone, Reference Freestone2024; Wei, Reference Wei2018). Specifically, these words show his sense of constrained agency in the face of strong normative constraints related to sexual orientation. He appears to see these constraints as widespread in the broader community he feels part of, when he suggests that this community (the ‘we’) is ‘heavily sedated’. This is a relatively emotive word choice, implying a strong feeling of subjectification by structural influences, which Tim seems to consider ubiquitous and intrusive within his home community.

In addition, it also seems significant that Tim positions himself as relatively resistant to associated social pressures, by saying that ‘you know, you are actively fighting against it’. This sits in contrast to saying that ‘I still haven’t come out to my parents … that would hurt the harmony in the family.’ and seems to show that he feels significantly constrained by associated moral and ethical expectations, or as he calls them, related ‘concept or ideals’. I would delimit these in terms of the Confucian discourse system. Thus, although Tim seems to imply that being ‘out’ would be desirable for him, he also seems to feel that a reticent approach to sexual identity in the family might be an appropriate linguistic/semiotic tool for avoiding ‘hurt’ and guarding positive family relationships, which falls in line with broadly Confucian social expectations in line with the discussion of harmony. Considering his words in terms of positioning and discourse systems in this way helps show how he makes active choices in managing such expectations.

More broadly, a discourse and positioning approach also helps in mapping, to some extent, the complexity of associated ideological influences, and highlighting their inevitable diversity. It is not only the Confucian discourse system in play here, since other interpretive frameworks will surely have become significant to Tim, for example, due to his growing up in Taiwan, his socialisation in his own unique family and his relatively cosmopolitan educational and professional and life experience. Thus, Tim’s process of ideological navigation in this conversation can also be interpreted in terms of the interplay of the Confucian with other discourse systems. This kind of interplay was, of course, also relevant in Walter’s case, but I mention it only now for reasons of clarity, and of logical development of my theoretical position.

One discourse system which can be usefully seen as interacting with the Confucian in a socially signficant way here is what I refer to as the global queer discourse system (Freestone, Reference Freestone2024). This corresponds to relatively ‘out and proud’ approaches to queer identity across the globe, and a globally hegemonic interpretive system which entails related moral and ethical assumptions. When seen in terms of the simultaneous influence of these two key discourse systems, Tim’s words can be seen to index his being simultaneously subjectified by and resistant to both. For example, the idea that Tim might want to be ‘out’ might be seen as common sense, from the perspective of the global queer discourse system. That is, when he says, ‘I can’t come out,’ there is an implied self-evident assumption that he should do so, or that he would want to. The Confucian discourse system, however, might (re)produce the assumption that one needs not ‘come out’, at least not in the sense of an outright declaration of sexual orientation to all significant others in life.

By extension, the interplay between Confucian and global queer influences here, along with Tim’s sociolinguistic response to them, can be seen in terms of his navigation of the diverse structural influences which appear to bring about both social affordances and constraints for him (Jones, Reference Jones2016). In this sense, the discursive interplay can be taken as a model for the broader tension between structure and agency, and between subjectification and resistance, which is a key theme in post-structuralist and discourse theory (see e.g. De Fina et al., Reference De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg2006). From this perspective, it is clear how identity work is not always a simple case of taking up one ‘identity’ (e.g. ‘Chinese’, ‘out’/‘not out’ or ‘straight’/‘gay’) but is more often a case of selecting the communities and viewpoints which we want to foreground, which arise in a given interaction. Furthermore, it is clear that identity work is not simply a process of conforming to or rejecting the presumed self-evident and generalisable norms of one monolithic culture. Of course, it is also important to acknowledge that delimiting Tim’s positioning in terms of only two specific discourse systems is a significant simplification of the ideological complexity which pertains to this moment, and to his life more generally. However, even in this simplified form which I present for reasons of clarity, a discursive, sociocultural approach provides important heuristics for avoiding the culturalism which features prominently in the broader body of work on related issues (see discussion section).

4.5 Chinese-ness and Queerness in Taiwan and Mainland China

Another palpable manifestation of the relationship between language, identity and ideology was participants’ positioning with reference to certain notions of culture and nationality. For example, despite the cultural commonalities just established, all the men I engaged with in Taiwan consistently positioned themselves as ‘Chinese’ only in cultural/ethnic (i.e. not national) terms, whereas all those in mainland China positioned themselves consistently as ‘Chinese’ both ethnically and nationally. I found that these trends emerged across all relevant communicative situations. I feel confident in positing such universality because, due to the political sensitivity of this topic and the stark contrasts in taken-for-granted societal pseudofacts in the respective locations, any examples of Taiwanese participants positioning themselves as Chinese in national terms would have stood out quite prominently. It was especially clear, therefore, that the latter, highly salient identity category tended to carry quite different cultural-national connotations in each respective location. This may seem like a relatively obvious point. It is of course no surprise that when a disputed territory is concerned, people tend to identify in opposing ways, according to their side of the dispute. However, since many prominent works on queer Sinophone issues seem to take Chinese identity and/or Chinese culture as unproblematic and unambiguous (see discussion section and Freestone, Reference Freestone2023, Reference Freestone2024), I do feel the need to emphasise this point now.

Mandarin language identity terms also added a layer of nuance when it came to positioning with reference to notions of culture and nationality. For example, I noted that the term huaren, an ethnic label, was frequently used by Taiwanese men as part of the same unanimous tendency to position themselves as Chinese in ethnic but not national terms. More broadly, given the majority political view in Taiwan of the island as a separate national entity to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), huaren and taiwanren (Taiwanese) were the generally preferred terms for national and ethnic identity (cf. Kong, Reference Kong2019). It is also worth noting that I found similar sociolinguistic identity work to be ubiquitous during my time in Hong Kong, through positioning using the label hoenggangjan (Hongkonger). This type of usage can be seen as a politically significant act of identity positioning in both locations, especially in contrast to the term zhongguoren, which is ubiquitous in mainland China and which, roughly meaning ‘person from China’, has clear connotations of nationality as well as ethnicity. Unsurprisingly, it was zhongguoren that I found to be most used by the men I met from mainland China when they positioned themselves in terms of ethnic and/or national identity. Interestingly, huaren has deep-rooted connotations of Han ethnicity which emerged around the warring states period (475–221 BCE), in connection with the ancient tribes of the Yellow River. Zhongguoren, however, is explicitly linked to the mainland Chinese state and emerged after the nationalist revolution.

With reference to the broader sociopolitical questions that are relevant to this study, it is also important that the prominence of the term huaren has been explained by Tan (Reference Tan and Hawley2001) with reference to the process of ‘Sinification’ in Taiwan (from 1949 to 1987). This process took place under successive presidents from both sides of the political spectrum and began with the rapid dismantling of oppressive military rule in the 1980s. It also entailed the colonialist suppression of aboriginal culture and people (Chun, Reference Chun1996). This historical process has arguably been a key factor shaping Taiwan’s civic-political context, which reflects recent governments’ priority of achieving/retaining global recognition as a fundamentally democratic political unit separate from (mainland) China (Kong, Reference Kong2019). In turn, this has significantly boosted the local drive towards liberalisation and plurality, which pertains to the narratives of democracy and human rights favoured by the DPP, the party which came to power in 2000. Liu (Reference Liu2007: 519) argues that this corresponds to the creation of ‘a desperately needed cultural distinction from the People’s Republic of China (where human rights continue to be a “sensitive” issue) and its similarities to the United States (which sees itself as the guardian of democratic values)’. This is also reflected in discussions which explicitly relate to issues in the queer community. For example, Kong (Reference Kong2019: 11) suggests that support for the Taiwanese queer community stems, to a significant extent, from an attempt to gain recognition from the international community for Taiwan as a globalised and tolerant society, entailing implicit and conscious distinction from the PRC, which is thereby construed as backward and repressive (see also Ho, Reference Ho2008). I also found this ‘othering’ of the PRC, in terms of tolerance and cosmopolitanism related to queer identity, very common in everyday talk in Taiwan (as well as in Hong Kong).

In sum, positioning using national/cultural/ethnic identity terms is a case in point of discursive appropriation/resistance and clearly corresponds to the role of salient interpretive frameworks and societal pseudofacts in shaping speech and social actions, especially when it comes to expressing central senses of belonging. As the current example has shown, this sometimes corresponds to diametrically opposite ways of seeing aspects of the world and to central aspects of individuals’ positioning in term of national and ethnic communities.

4.6 Queer Sinophone Identity Work and Notions of ‘the West’

Another related sociolinguistic feature of identity work that I found salient, both in research and in daily life, was an interplay between the notions of ‘Chinese culture’ and ‘Western culture’. Whether or not queer topics were being discussed, I found that these notions often arose together in identity work as part of a highly salient system of interpretation based on perceptions of diametrically opposed local and foreign cultures. In fact, whether explicitly mentioned or merely implied, ‘the West/Western culture’ seemed to be very often taken, in both the research sites, as a convenient benchmark for delimiting what the Sinophone is not. As with the ‘othering’ of the PRC mentioned in Section 4.5, this speaks to foundational work in Social Identity Theory, which demonstrates how identity is typically based on in-/out-group distinctions, and often as much related to the ‘us’ and ‘them’ comparisons which tend to be a fundamental part of identity work around the world. However, what is of central interest here is not the simple fact that humans tend to understand and articulate their sense of belonging in ‘them and us’ terms, but which particular ‘others’ tend to become the most salient models of social difference in given communities. On an anecdotal level, I can draw a parallel with comparisons made with the USA amongst the British communities in which I grew up. Of course, it was not the case that everyone always saw the former as a point of cultural comparison, but it did seem that US culture was a highly salient point of reference when it came to articulating a sense of Britishness. As with the case of othering the West in Sinophone communities, this type of positioning often seemed to come hand in hand with divisive cluturalism and sometimes pernicious stereotyping. Resisting this type of paradigm at home and abroad, from my intercultural perspective as a serial immigrant and cultural explorer, is a major motivation for my research, for my personal goal of increasing intercultural understanding and for my quest for true global citizenship.

The following extract demonstrates one example of positioning in East–West terms. It is taken from a conversation with John, a twenty-seven-year-old patent agent from Taipei. As with all the other participants cited, I had known him for a long time at this point and he shared many of the aforementioned relatively stable aspects of identity (i.e. queer male-identified, Han ethnicity, highly educated, comfortably bilingual and a long-term resident of a relatively cosmopolitan megacity).

Following the discussion in the previous section, it is notable that John positions himself pronominally within the ‘us’ of ‘Chinese culture’ (lines 4–5) and also within the ‘us’ of ‘Taiwanese culture’ (line 8). Clearly, however, these are distinct concepts for him, since he also frames the notion of Taiwan in explicit distinction from that of mainland China by saying, ‘Taiwanese culture, maybe more than in China’ (line 9). However, he still implies a shared ‘culture’, in terms of approaches to sex, by framing Taiwan and mainland China together, more generally, as a point of contrast to his emic understanding of the Western ‘other’. In addition, he directly attributes the difference he perceives between Taiwan and mainland China, in terms of sexual openness, to the influence of the West, saying, ‘I guess, because we are more Westernised’ (lines 9–10). By positioning himself and his home culture in this way, he can be seen to be drawing on the same interpretive system described previously, whereby ‘Western culture’ and ‘Chinese culture’ are understood as fundamentally different, in terms of his perceptions of approaches to what he calls ‘free sex’ and ‘open relationship’. This is therefore another case in point of the fundamental importance of individualised and situational positioning in identity work, especially when taken in the context of the huaren/zhongguoren discussion above.

A further related example of positioning in East–West terms came from Bailey, a twenty-eight-year-old finance employee from Taipei, during our discussion in a lounge bar in the city. On this occasion, building on previous discussions based on social and cultural comparison, we discussed the topic of violence against sexual minorities, which I raised with reference to the UK. Bailey responded by saying that:

In discourse terms, I once again understand this framing of Chinese culture in terms of a presumed self-evident orientation towards harmony and non-confrontation in social interaction. That is, when Bailey says, ‘Chinese culture we never … admire violence … even if we hate them, we’ll exclude them’, he aligns himself with an interpretive framework of values which is oriented towards both subtlety in communication and non-violent approaches to social others. In this way, he can be seen, like the other men discussed in this Element, to draw upon the Confucian discourse system as part of his articulation of self. More centrally relevant to the current discussion, however, is that the same interpretive system, through which ‘the West’ and ‘Chinese culture’ are understood as fundamentally different, appears to be in play here in terms of the way people are seen to treat those they know/perceive to be gay. I will refer to this system as the discourse system of East–West cultural dichotomies, which I would also posit as being appropriated in John’s case.

In accordance with my broader theoretical and methodological position, my intention here is not to deny nor minimise the importance of broadly generalisable and/or documented social trends related to the level of homophobic violence in each state in question. Indeed, I find some truth in Bailey’s cultural comparison, since it seems generally clear to me (anecdotally at least) that the number of instances of homophobic violence would be higher on average in many Western contexts than in Taiwan. This viewpoint is also supported by published work related to a prominence of overt, and sometimes violent, homophobia in, for example, some Southern states of the USA (Davis et al., Reference Davis, Smith and Marsden2005; National Election Study, 2004), Russia (Tudor, Reference Tudor2018) and certain other locations (e.g. Carrillo, Reference Carrillo2007; Graff, Reference Graff2010; Roseneil and Stoilova, Reference Roseneil, Stoilova, Kulpa and Mizielińska2016). My key point, however, is that the qualified deconstruction entailed in a discursive-sociocultural approach to identity means also considering such trends in the light of the inevitable diversity of lived realities, both within and across sociopolitically delimited regions.

From this perspective, such social trends can and should indeed be acknowledged. This need not, however, lead us to make overly broad statements about identities or life stories across a wide geographical and/or cultural space. For example, when foundational author Chou Wah-Shan (Reference Chou2000: 106) claims that tongzhi, as a broadly generalisable group, ‘tend to romanticize the Western world as a lesbigay haven, and are shocked to be informed of the prevalence of gay-bashing and the extent of homophobia in the United States and United Kingdom’, I would recognise underlying social trends but also call for qualified deconstruction and recognition of the social diversity in the queer Sinophone community he speaks for. Similarly, instead of taking Bailey’s words as representative of distinct social realities in Taiwan and the West respectively, I prefer to understand them in terms of his situated navigation of discourse systems. What seems most analytically significant in my conversation with him, then, is not some substantive regional difference in levels of homophobic violence, but instead the ways in which a presumed self-evident idea of ‘the West’ is used in positioning.

4.7 Reflexivity, Identity Work and Positioning

As noted in Section 3.6, a key aspect of an ethnographic approach is keen reflexive attention to the role of the researcher. This means that researchers should remain keenly conscious of the cultural, professional and personal ‘baggage’ they bring to their projects and participants. In addition, from a discursive-sociocultural perspective, it means that researchers should also consider their own and other participants’ identities as constructed and sometimes actively negotiated through interaction. For example, my own and others’ interpretations of me as white, British-national, male, urban-socialised, queer, pre-1990s-born and immigrant/expatriate (amongst other things) were inevitably relevant to the interactions in question. As such, my own role in identity work in these moments was sometimes also significant, not only because of my inevitably bringing my own identifications/identities to the table, but also because I often brought up issues of cultural comparison in conversation.

A reflexive approach also necessitates attention to the broader sociopolitical factors relevant to my perceived salience of East–West comparisons in identity work. For example, I acknowledge that the deep-rooted influence of colonialism, racism and a fundamentally unfair global system also undoubtedly contributed to the salience of such comparisons. That is, the continuing hegemonic influence of Western powers on the global stage, and the residues of unfair treatment based on race, inevitably push the presence of notions of the West into the lives of people outside of the West. However, while I fully appreciate the gravity of such issues, the focus here is on how individuals draw upon notions as part of their identity work.

Secondly, in mainland China in particular, the prominence of notions of ‘the West’ which I noted may have been partly due to certain influential state narratives which have remained hegemonic throughout modern local history. These feature a presumed self-evident notion of ‘the West’ that has been consistently taken as a point of social comparison and often also as an implied reference point for the socially undesirable (Freestone, Reference Freestone2024). Of course, I acknowledge that the same is true of some hegemonic state and media narratives in places like the UK and the USA through which, for example, all things communist and/or Chinese have tended to be construed in similarly negative terms. What is most pertinent to the current discussion, however, is that I found positioning with reference to notions of the West very common across all the Sinophone cultural contexts in which I spent time. This may well have been influenced by these powerful state-level narratives but may also have arisen for other reason, depending on the case in question.

The key point in this section is that I see all project data from a consciously reflexive point of view, with a careful awareness of the mutually constituted nature of identity work. However, based on my broader experience in the region, I would also argue that the type of East–West framing of culture and social practice discussed in the previous section would be quite common even when a Western-identified interlocutor was not present in each moment of communication. Indeed, I believe that it was much more than my own Western-ness, or my specific conversational choices, that made this notion so salient among the men I engaged with.

4.8 Queer Sinophone Identity Work and East–West Framings of Family

Another salient theme when considering the articulation of queer Sinophone identity seemed to be associated perceptions of cultural realities related to family. This theme is centrally relevant to the current discussion because, when issues of family arose in relation to queer identity, appropriation of both the Confucian discourse system and that of East–West cultural dichotomies seemed common. This was the case in both research sites and, as with the discourse of harmony and framings of violent homophobia, I found the discussion of family to be especially indicative of widely presumed societal pseudofacts. Thus, this again called for qualified deconstruction of attendant notions of culture, identity and, specifically, of family.

Firstly, I noticed that East–West cultural dichotomies tended to come into play simultaneously with a taken-for-granted cultural centrality of family in Chinese societies, which typically came along with an implication that family is less important in the West. I found this to be a societal pseudofact that was very widely taken for granted amongst participants and many others I interacted with. The presumed centrality of family, in the Chinese case, is also reflected in literature on queer lives, such as in Whyte’s (Reference Whyte1997: 2) claim of an ‘overwhelming Chinese emphasis on obligations to the family’. It came as no surprise to me, in light of the general salience of related cultural schema, that conversations around the theme of family life in Sinophone cultural contexts often also featured such taken-for-granted points of view. I also found it common for them to be associated with presumptions of inevitably rigid and codified family expectations, including that of a son to his parents. What was perhaps more remarkable to me, however, was the frequency of attendant implications about the situation in Western families being self-evidently different. Related themes were part of the conversation cited next, which I had with Peter, a twenty-nine-year-old travel agent from Chengdu.

Although Peter was making points that resonated with many other conversations I had in mainland China, I was reluctant to take such broad ideas of cultural reality for granted and, instead, aimed again for qualified deconstruction. Indeed, I considered it significant that I had also found many cases in which family seemed to be less important to certain Chinese-identified individuals than might be expected (see also Freestone, Reference Freestone2023). Furthermore, I found many instances where participants who identified as Chinese (ethnically and/or nationally) had distanced themselves from the natal family to varying extents. For example, migration to the big city from rural areas was often a key life choice, as was choosing to live long term in a foreign country and in a number of cases, this was directly linked to avoidance of family. On the other hand, it also seemed relevant that my experience of growing up in the UK presented many examples of life stories where family seemed extremely important to queer individuals, contrary to the parallel societal psuedofacts which lead to hegemonic perceptions of Westerners as inherently less oriented to family as a priority in life. In addition, the East-West dichotomy being drawn upon here did not accord with my knowledge of family culture in some countries in the West which are renowned for the centrality of family, in similar ways to the Chinese example.

Thus I interpret this statement not as a reflection of broadly generalisable social reality in mainland China and/or across Sinophone cultural contexts but instead of Peter’s positioning by drawing upon the discourse system of East-West dichotomies, and his concurrent navigation of the discourse system of filial piety, which I see as a subsystem of the Confucian discourse system. Specifically, this means I see him drawing upon interpretive frameworks which are widely influential in guiding and reproducing expectations about parent and child in mainland China, Taiwan and across the broader East Asian cultural sphere (Hu and Wang, Reference Hu and Wang2013; Wang et al., Reference Wang, Bih and Brennan2009). These frameworks pertain to social practices associated with ‘being a good son’ in the Confucian terms of xiaoshun (filial piety) and, in many conversations I had, this corresponded to presumptions of fundamental and self-evident cultural difference from the West. As with the notion of harmony discussed earlier, a sociocultural discourse analyst would view related identity work in terms of how associated societal pseudofacts and interpretive frameworks are appropriated or resisted when the topic of family is being discussed. Thus Peter’s positioning in this excerpt is understood here not in terms of monolithic cultural or structural forces which uniformly influence social actions across a broad community, but instead in terms of discourse systems that individuals draw upon to achieve certain identity effects in certain situated conversations.

4.9 Tongzhi versus Western Queer Politics: A Qualified Deconstruction

As noted in my introduction, the choice to work on this project’s central themes is partly driven by a desire to contribute to queer emancipation in local communities. For the avoidance of any ambiguity, I define queer emancipation as the process of helping more sexually/gender different people to live and love without political, cultural and/or social constraints on their sexual and romantic lives. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was a salient topic in project data and I therefore find it important to link the discussion in the previous sections with broader questions of how associated social change can be fostered in Taiwan, mainland China and perhaps elsewhere. For example, Walter’s conversational moves in the cited excerpt struck me as relevant to key questions of LGBTQ+ politics and provided relatively accessible examples of positioning with reference to salient interpretive frameworks. When he said, ‘if you are strong enough, you can have a, a wider way to solve it, the Chinese way … not so violence but … smarter … too many activities makes things tense, turns into worse … ’, he seemed to echo a societal pseudofact according to which LGBTQ+ activism and advocacy in Sinophone contexts is best oriented towards societal harmony, as opposed to confrontation. For me, this demonstrated a powerful interpretive framework which takes as self-evident a ‘Chinese’ orientation to harmony and confrontation avoidance both on the personal level already discussed and on a the broader level of politics and advocacy.

Thus, Walter’s employment of the notion of the ‘Chinese way’ can also be seen as his positioning himself in alignment with the discourse of East–West cultural dichotomies and with an approach to queer emancipation which he seems to indirectly compare to that of the West. Specifically, by describing the approach he associated with his own community as ‘not so violence but … smarter’ because ‘too many activities makes things tense’, he seems to be advocating a broadly reticent and non-confrontational approach to LGBTQ+ identity politics, in implied distinction from mine, as interlocutor. More broadly, I interpreted Walter’s positioning in these terms as pertinent to assumptions that the broad population labelled as ‘Chinese gays’ or tongzhi will always accord to a conveniently generalisable approach to achieving queer emancipation: one which is non-confrontational and therefore significantly different to that of the West. It is perhaps worth reiterating my broader position here. I am not, of course, claiming that there is no difference between the broader queer emancipation movements in what can be loosely perceived as the ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ cases. Instead, I am drawing attention to the inevitable diversity of associated political orientations, social actions and identity work within and across the huge variety of relevant countries, cultural contexts and individual cases on both sides of the presumed East-West divide. Moreover, I am drawing attention to Walter’s framing of approaches to LGBTQ+ politics in terms of a presumed self-evident ‘Chinese way’, which seems to eclipse some of this diversity, and which also demonstrates his positioning in implied ‘them and us’ terms. I interpreted this, on the basis of the many similar conversations I had had during my research and life experience, as an implied East vs. West reference.

Another related example can be seen in the following conversation which I had with Dave, a twenty-four-year-old teacher from Chengdu, in a teahouse we often visited. Again, Dave shared the key aspects of sociocultural background mentioned in Walter and others’ cases. When discussing the extent to which he felt a need to be ‘out’ to friends and family, he said:

I understood the statement ‘I’m not proud’ as a reference to the narratives of ‘pride’ that characterise the relatively outgoing and individualistic models of queer identity typically associated with the ‘gay rights’ movement consolidated by events like the Stonewall riots in the USA. Importantly, however, in the contemporary world, this model corresponds to forms of queer identity work which are prominent in countless LGBTQ+ lives not only in broadly Western contexts, but also in contexts around the world.

In terms of the positioning in Dave’s statement, however, what we see is him describing himself in opposition to those he sees as ‘proud’ and thereby positioning himself in distinction from a discourse system (and interpretive framework) which assumes that overtly indexing one’s queer sexual orientation is broadly desirable. Specifically, I understood his statement that ‘I’m not proud … ’ not as an index of his presumed ‘non-Western-ness’, but instead as a moment of alignment with what I will be referring to as the post-gay discourse system, which is itself globalised. This system corresponds to a broadly homonormative interpretive framework which entails rejecting, at least to some extent, models of queer identity performance and LGBTQ+ politics which are overtly visible, and which may be considered by some as confrontational. This system produces and reproduces oppositional stances to perceived hegemonic norms of a ‘proud’ contemporary queer society (Russell et al., Reference Russell, Clarke and Clary2009). Jones (Reference Jones2018) also noted this type of viewpoint being expressed by attendees of a UK youth group, as reflected in a quote – ‘I’m not proud, I’m just gay’ – from one participant in her study, which is also the article’s title.Footnote ⁹ The relevant point here is that, just as the participants in Jones’ study should not necessarily be taken as broadly representative of British youth culture, Dave should not be taken as ‘being’ the way he is simply because he ‘is Chinese’. Indeed, by extension, no other such moment of appropriation of the post-gay discourse system should be mistaken for a cultural inevitability. Instead, although globally hegemonic, the ‘proud’ stance against which individuals might position themselves (and/or the ‘post-gay’ discourse system that they might align themselves with) can arise in any global location and, as such, is arguably best investigated in the context of the specific sociopolitical contexts, life stories and communicative moments in which they are drawn upon.

It is also interesting that this kind of ‘not proud’ positioning seems to echo the positioning in terms of ‘harmony’ which we saw in excerpts 1 and 2. That is, all these moments of positioning seem to entail an articulation of the self as someone who prefers not to ‘shout’ about their queerness (i.e. be actively visible as queer-identified). The ideological influences that seem to be most relevant here, however, are not easily attributed to a single source, be that geographical or cultural. So, it came as no surprise that I encountered very many examples of ‘out’ and ‘proud’ positioning amongst young, relatively cosmopolitan individuals in Sinophone contexts (see Freestone Reference Freestone2023 for further examples). For me, this once again highlighted the inevitable diversity of corresponding identity work, despite the hegemony of certain discourse systems like the post-gay and the Confucian.

Thus, although the global historical significance of events leading to and including the Stonewall riots in the USA and the subsequently galvanised gay rights movement should not be overlooked, the mutually constitutive nature of discursive influences from diverse global regions should also be emphasised in any analysis of queer identity in non-Western contexts. In addition, it should be recognised that decisions on whether to be ‘out’ or ‘not out’ and/or ‘proud’ or ‘not proud’ should be understood as made in response to specific social situations and as inevitably shifting across moments and lifetimes. This also draws attention to the fact that many instances of ‘proud’ (i.e. actively visible) steps towards queer emancipation will inevitably have emerged outside ‘the West’, whether on an individual or a group level and, conversely, that many comparatively ‘reticent’ steps have been taken in locations within it. In this light, the interplay between Dave’s performed sense of Chinese-ness and his alignment with/distancing from post-gay narratives of LGBTQ+ politics can be taken as exemplary of the typical ideological complexity of contemporary queer lives, and especially the lives of modern, cosmopolitan, megacity-urban queers in Sinophone cultural contexts. Furthermore, the whole notion of ‘being out’ (or being visible as queer) is itself highly situational and unstable. That is, one may well be ‘out’ and/or ‘proud’ by acknowledging queer sexuality to certain specific others and in certain specific situations but, not in others (Freestone, Reference Freestone2023).

A final relevant example came from Dan, a twenty-four-year-old accountant from Chengdu who, once again, knew me well at the time and shared the aforementioned aspects of relatively stable identity/identification as the other participants. He said that:

Firstly, like the other participants, Dan seems to see queer politics in cultural terms, understanding ‘the Chinese people’ as having a unique and predictable approach. One novel aspect of Dan’s positioning, however, is his construal of ‘the Chinese’ as having no ‘sense of fight’. This again seems to echo the aforementioned construals of Chinese culture in terms such as non-confrontational and harmonious, which also seemed to imply a characteristic opposition to fighting. Similarly, Wei (Reference Wei2021: 328–329) claims that ‘many ordinary tongzhi are politically docile and indifferent, uninterested in rights advocacy or confrontational queer politics’. This speaks to emergent social trends of youth non-participation, both in politics and also in other aspects of life such as parenthood, which are framed as ‘lying flat’ (tangping). However, both Wei’s and Dan’s statements are ripe for qualified deconstruction. The notions of ‘many ordinary tongzhi’ and ‘Chinese people’, in a society as vast and culturally diverse as mainland China, need to be problematised. For example, there are also many cases where those who tend to identify as tongzhi do, in fact, take actions to change society in ways that entail visible and active resistance to political, legal and social constraints on queer people (see Bao Reference Bao2018 for examples).

Furthermore, the framing of a localised and presumed self-evident ‘Chinese’ approach to social struggle as inherently harmonious and non-confrontational, both by Wei (Reference Wei2021) and Dan, is problematic not only in terms of the inevitable diversity of individual approaches that it eclipses, but also when some of the numerous militant and violent political moments in broader Chinese history are considered. For example, many instances of highly confrontational sociopolitical resistance, often based around the rights of a certain group united under a certain identity term, have emerged in mainland China in relatively recent history, such as the June 4 Movement and the communist revolution of 1949. Also, the corresponding implication that no aspects of the queer emancipation movement across the modern history of ‘the West’ (which is, like China, a vast and diverse cultural and geographical space) have been non-confrontational and harmonious is, at best, blinkered.

It is also of sociolinguistic interest to note, that this excerpt features some interesting individual words which can be taken, in this context of use, as indicative of relevant discourse systems. The first is luan (chaos) which I often found to emerge in interplay with the opposing notion of wending (stability). The salience and social significance of these notions corresponds to Zheng’s (2015: 57) discussion of the stigmatising framing of queer people, in public and media narratives in mainland China, as sources of social chaos and disorder. The political implications and historical persistence of such narratives are also reflected in Anagnost and Comaroff’s (1997: 275) discussion of ‘narrative(s) of despair’ which they found to be key strategies used in mainland China to address ‘concerns about stability and social control’ by ‘invok(ing) the fear of chaos’ and thereby producing ‘willed consent’ for an authoritarian state. However, the implications of these notions are not universal and can reflect quite divergent attitudes and social perceptions. This is why it is useful to consider their use only as reflecting the navigation, in situated moments of communication, of powerful structural influences salient in given social contexts. In Dan’s speech cited here, then, I see these notions as functioning in a similar way to the notion of hexie – that is, as appropriations of the Confucian discourse system. This is because they pertain directly to the aforementioned ideas of balance between society and nature that are central to Confucian philosophy, which Dave can be seen to align himself here through the stance he takes up on ‘Chinese people’.