The Self-Understandings and Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan

在18个月的人种学田野调查的基础上，我的博士研究考察了在快速的社会、技术和政治变化的背景下性的构建和调节。我聚焦于海南男同性恋者的生活，海南是中华人民共和国中国(中华人民共和国)的一个社会经济边缘省份，我探索了当男同性恋者谈判与不断变化的人、话语、空间和技术领域有关的宜居生活时，地方、国家和全球进程如何在日常生活中发挥作用。我对中国的性行为动态提供了重要的见解，并推进了全球性行为研究的概念视野。在过去的40年里，中国的快速城市化、更大的地理流动性、技术发展和更多的信息获取促进了非异性身份、社区和生活方式的激增。与此同时，这些问题也受到了儒家观念的限制，即通过异性生育、媒体对性别多样性的国家审查以及对公共福利的削减，都有责任通过异性生育来延续家族血统，这些都根深蒂固地要求在以后的生活中有必要将孩子作为照顾的来源。此外，地区和城市/农村地区的社会经济差距使得在某些地方的非异性生活比在其他地方更容易。这些问题已经在中国关于非异性生活的有限文献中进行了探索。然而，现有的工作侧重于主要的城市背景。因此，对于历史上和持续不断的变化和连续性如何塑造较小城市、城镇和农村地区的非异性生活缺乏了解。这既是一种经验知识差距，也是对目前对性行为的理解的限制。正如我的研究所显示的，探索非异性恋生活是如何被超越全球大都市现代中心的变化和延续过程塑造的，可以打开新的探究途径，反过来可以扩大“性”本身的含义。我分析了海南的男同性恋者如何找到另一半，发展共同感，在他们生活的农村、城市和数字空间中穿梭，并以不同的方式竞争、顺应和适应他们生活中对异性婚姻和生殖的主导取向。这些都显示出话语、技术、欲望、体现、主体间性和相互依存的物质关系的复杂纠缠。因此，我主张扩大性行为的概念，超越个人和人类主体，着眼于塑造可居住生活的权力和可能性的生态。我在与最近的社会理论工作对话中提出了这个论点，这些工作试图理解人类关系、制度话语、物质环境和环境系统之间的不可分割。该奖学金将促进这项重要研究的出版，作为一本书和一系列文章，通过将性的概念扩展到包括人、话语、空间和技术之间的复杂关系，大大推进了性研究领域的发展。如果当代学术要在一个日益复杂的世界中从跨文化的角度应对不断变化的性行为动态，这些新的研究方向是至关重要的。这些想法还将通过一次研讨会分享和巩固，研讨会汇集了讨论相关主题的学者。该奖学金还将使我的研究能够支持海南和中国各地的LGBT群体。这将通过与海南男女同性恋者父母和朋友(PFLAG)以及更广泛的LGBT社区举行的一系列研讨会来完成。这将产生一份共同设计的调查结果报告，供地方和全国共享。这将有助于PFLAG有效地规划他们的工作，并将帮助国家LGBT团体了解中国不同地区LGBT人群的不同经历。

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, my doctoral research examined the construction and regulation of sexuality in a context of rapid social, technological and political change. Focusing on the lives of gay men in Hainan, a socio-economically marginal province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), I explored how local, national and global processes play out in everyday life as gay men negotiate liveable lives in relation to shifting fields of people, discourses, spaces and technologies. I offer vital insights into dynamics of sexuality in the PRC and advance the conceptual horizons of global sexualities studies.Over the past 40 years in the PRC, rapid urbanisation, greater geographic mobility, technological development and increased access to information have fostered a proliferation of non-heterosexual identities, communities and ways of life. At the same time, these are curtailed by Confucian notions of a responsibility to 'continue the family line' through heterosexual reproduction, state censorship of sexual diversity in the media, and cuts to public welfare that have entrenched the need to have children as a source of care in later life. Further, socio-economic disparities along regional and urban/rural lines make living non-heterosexual lives in certain sites easier than in others.These issues have been explored within the limited literature on non-heterosexual lives in the PRC. However, existing work has focused on major urban contexts. As such, there is a lack of knowledge on how historical and ongoing dynamics of change and continuity are shaping non-heterosexual lives in smaller cities, towns and rural areas. This is both an empirical knowledge gap and a limitation on current understandings of sexuality. As my research shows, exploring how non-heterosexual lives are shaped by processes of change and continuity beyond global centres of cosmopolitan modernity can open up new avenues of enquiry which, in turn, can expand the meanings of 'sexuality' itself.I have analysed processes through which gay men in Hainan find one another, develop feelings of commonality, navigate the rural, urban and digital spaces in which they live and variously contest, conform to and accommodate the dominant orientation of their lives toward heterosexual marriage and reproduction. These are shown to entail complex entanglements of discourse, technology, desire, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and material relations of co-dependence. As such, I argue for an expanded conception of sexuality that looks beyond the individual, human subject and towards ecologies of power and possibility that shape what counts as a liveable life. I make this argument in dialogue with recent work in social theory that seeks to understand the inseparability of human relationships, institutional discourses, material contexts and environmental systems.The Fellowship will facilitate the publication of this important research as a book and series of articles that significantly advance the field of sexualities studies by expanding the notion of sexuality to include complex relationships between people, discourses, spaces and technologies. These new research directions are vital if contemporary scholarship is to grapple with changing dynamics of sexuality from a cross-cultural perspective in an increasingly complex world. These ideas will also be shared and consolidated through a symposium bringing together scholars addressing related themes. The Fellowship will also enable my research to support LGBT groups in Hainan and across the PRC. This will be done through a series of workshops with the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) and wider LGBT communities in Hainan. These will result in a co-designed findings report to be shared locally and nationally. This will assist PFLAG in planning their work effectively and will help national LGBT groups understand the contrasting experience of LGBT people in different regions of the PRC.