On Monday, 6 June 2022 at 7pm Bangkok time, the Faculty of Oriental Studies, the University of Oxford, the United Kingdom, will present a free online Zoom seminar on Beyond Heteronormativity? Intimacy and Intersectionality of Lesbians and Gay Men in Post-Reform China.
The TU Library collection includes many books on gender studies issues in China.
This event may be useful for students interested in history, political science, sociology, gender studies, Asian studies, and related subjects.
As the online description of the event explains,
Following the growing cultural visibility of sexual minorities, there has been a proliferation of research on LGBT lives, particularly those related to their identity, marriage, family and activism.
However, limited research about their intimate/sexual lives beyond a public health perspective has been conducted. Based on the analysis of 127 life stories of LGBT people from elite, middle- and working-class backgrounds, this talk examines their expectations and practices of intimacy. By engaging in same sex relationships, sexual minorities could be considered as directly challenging a core pillar of heteronormativity – the assumption that heterosexuality is the only normal expression of sexuality. Yet gender expectations and practices in some LGBT intimate relationships may reproduce heteronormativity. At the same time, some intimate relationships have become a key site of reflexivity, providing spaces for decoupling the naturalized links between gender and sexuality. It is this internal diversity that calls upon an intersectional analysis that will help illustrate the factors and contexts that in some instances produce conformity while in others bring about changes in intimate lives in post-reform China.
The speaker will be Professor Susanne Choi Yuk Ping, who teaches sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her recent research projects examine the intersection between gender, migration, family and sexuality in Chinese societies.
The event will be hosted by Dr. Chigusa Yamaura, a sociocultural anthropologist, specializing in contemporary Japanese and Chinese society at the University of Oxford.
TU students are invited to participate in the webinar by registering at this link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_okEENtanQOiL7vhnhLzj9A
For further information or with any questions, kindly write to
information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
TU students have access to a book coauthored by Professor Choi, Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family, and Gender in China from the TU Library Interlibrary Loan service.
On the publisher’s website, Professor Choi observed,
Migration is a pivotal event that dramatically alters family life and shapes gender relationships. With a specific focus on changes in men and masculinities, our book shows how rural-urban migrant men in China have actively renegotiated their multiple gender identities as a romantic lover, responsible husband, caring father, and filial son, and how these identities have formed part of their engagement of urban lives post migration, and served as a platform for n trans-local familial networks and responsibilities to be maintained and fulfilled. In some instances, migrant men’s changes in practice are surprisingly big. For example, we have identified nearly forty per cent of migrant men in couple and family migration as active participants in housework and child care post migration. In other instances, our findings contradict cultural stereotypes of Chinese men as emotionally detached disciplinarians and moral instructors of their children. Migrant fathers in our book reflect on rich emotions, including attachment, longing, sadness, guilt, disappointment, pride, satisfaction and joy, for their left-behind children. In summary, our exploration of the subjective experiences, strategies and agency of migrant men complicates the interaction between population movement and gender dynamics in the context of rural-urban inequalities and family changes in post-Mao China…
Masculine compromise refers to migrant men’s effort to preserve the gender boundary and their symbolic dominance within the family by making concessions on marital power and domestic division of labor, and by redefining filial piety and fatherhood. This concept provides an overall theoretical frame and a new perspective to analyze the ways in which migration has transformed family life and how migrant men have interpreted and responded to these transformations. The concept highlights how changes in gender relationships ushered by migration are characterized by a combination of pragmatic adjustments and the continued salience of male gender identity and traditional ideology. While masculine compromises arguably contribute to the ‘successful’ functioning of migrant families, they have limitations – they arise more out of pragmatism than transformation of equalitarian gender values and ideals…
We believe that the main themes of the book, including migrant men’s masculine compromises, the diversity of their coping strategies, and their emotional consequences of and responses to migration could also be observed in societies where migration is a prominent phenomenon. Our book shows that despite being viewed as the de facto beneficiaries of patriarchy, migrant men’s experiences are not unproblematic and do not warrant extensive investigation. It offers gender, migration and family scholars a new approach to focusing on male migrants’ agency through a gendered lens. It also provides researchers and students insights into how inequalities between the sexes underpinned by interactions between men and women at the intersection of migration and family dynamics, and the interplay between the interactional and the institutional in specific social and cultural contexts.
Extensive academic research has been done about gender studies issues in China, including an article that appeared two years ago in BMC Public Health, an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on the epidemiology of disease and the understanding of all aspects of public health. The journal has a special focus on the social determinants of health, the environmental, behavioral, and occupational correlates of health and disease, and the impact of health policies, practices and interventions on the community.
The article, Mapping out a spectrum of the Chinese public’s discrimination toward the LGBT community: results from a national survey was written by Yuanyuan Wang, Zhishan Hu, Ke Peng, and colleagues.
Here is the article’s abstract:
Background
China has the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population. This study assessed the discrimination experienced by LGBT individuals in China in a comprehensive way, covering discrimination perpetrated by family, media, medical services, religious communities, schools, social services, and in the workplace.
Methods
The current study involved a national survey of 31 provinces and autonomous regions. Discrimination was measured both in terms of heterosexual participants’ attitudes towards LGBT individuals, and LGBT participants’ self-perceived discrimination. Pearson correlation analysis was performed to examine the difference between heterosexual participants’ attitudes towards LGBT individuals and LGBT participants’ self-perceived discrimination. Linear regression was used to investigate the association between gross domestic product per capita and discrimination.
Results
Among 29,125 participants, 2066 (7.1%) identified as lesbian, 9491 (32.6%) as gay, 3441 (11.8%) as bisexual, 3195 (11.0%) as transgender, and 10,932 (37.5%) as heterosexual. Heterosexual people were generally friendly towards the LGBT community with a mean score of 21.9 (SD = 2.7, total scale score = 100) and the grand averaged score of self-perceived discrimination by LGBT participants was 49.9 (SD = 2.5). Self-perceived discrimination from family and social services is particularly severe. We created a series of provincial level choropleth maps showing heterosexual participants’ acceptance towards the LGBT community, and self-perceived discrimination reported by members of the LGBT community. We found that a higher level of economic development in provinces was associated with a decrease in discrimination, and we identified that every 100 thousand RMB increase in per capita GDP lead to a 6.4% decrease in discriminatory events perpetrated by heterosexuals.
Conclusions
Chinese LGBT groups consistently experience discrimination in various aspects of their daily lives. The prevalence of this discrimination is associated with the economic development of the province in which it occurs. In order to reduce discrimination, it is important for future studies to discover the underlying reasons for discrimination against LGBT individuals in China.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)