Abstract
This chapter explores relationships between mobile media and social and sexual intimacies for gay men in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I pay particular attention to the location-aware gay dating app Blued and what gay men perceive to be its impacts on their self-understandings and intimate relationships. On one hand, mobile media offer gay men in the PRC pervasive access to one another, engendering feelings of community, belonging, and authenticity. On the other hand, the newfound visibility of gay men online raises fears of being ‘outed’ and the uses to which mobile media are put are the subject of intense debates amongst gay men about ‘in-/appropriate’ forms of social and sexual intimacy. These contradictory dynamics highlight the paradoxical function of mobile media for gay men in the PRC as a space within which intimacies are both negotiated and regulated.
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Notes
- 1.
I use ‘gay men’ throughout this chapter to refer to men who describe themselves as ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’ (tongxinglian/同性恋), ‘tongzhi (comrade/同志)’, and ‘in the scene (quannei ren/圈内人)’. While this risks collapsing nuanced self-categorisations into a single term, for the majority of the men I worked with in Hainan, these terms were perceived as interchangeable. Moreover, most men I worked with in Hainan noted ‘gay’ as their preferred term of self-description (see Bao 2018, pp. 28–32, for more on the politics of terminology in Chinese sexualities research).
- 2.
This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom.
- 3.
Sanya is a city on Hainan’s south coast.
- 4.
I place the dividing line between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ participants roughly around age 30. This is not intended as an arbitrary division. Rather, it is based on the disparate experiences these older and younger men had of using ICTs to find and interact with other gay men.
- 5.
Baidu is China’s most popular search engine.
- 6.
‘Situation’ is generally used to refer to appearance, height, weight, body type, preferred sexual role, and geographic location.
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Cummings, J. (2020). ‘Now You Can See Who’s Around You’: Negotiating and Regulating Gay Intimacies on Mobile Media in the People’s Republic of China. In: Cabañes, J.V.A., Uy-Tioco, C.S. (eds) Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia. Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_2
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