Overview
- Presents the first book-length ethnographic study of gay men’s experience in Hainan
- Explores the lives of non-heterosexual people in smaller cities and rural areas in China
- Interweaves theory and analysis with data from interviews and ethnographic vignettes
Part of the book series: Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences (GSSS)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (6 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
“This book explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. It explores what it means for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’, how internet and mobile technologies figure in their everyday processes of sexual categorisation and how these men negotiate orientations and disorientations towards the future in relation to dominant heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction. This book offers vital insights into the production and restriction of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings, while addressing universal questions of how certain ways of living are enabled and curtailed in living together with others through powerful conditions of uncertainty and precarity.
This book will be of interest to scholars in LGBTQ studies, particularly those with a focus on same-sex intimacies and identities in China.”
Reviews
—Wei Wei, Professor of Sociology, East China Normal University, China
“This is a welcome addition to the literature on queer lives in China. Where most prior research has focused on the major cities of Eastern China, this study takes us to a quite different location: the island of Hainan. It offers a sensitive and often moving account ofthe everyday pleasures and challenges of finding spaces of belonging and negotiating the constraints of a highly heteronormative social environment.”
—Stevi Jackson, Professor of Women’s Studies, University of York, UK
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
James Cummings is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of York, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan
Book Subtitle: Sociality, Space and Time
Authors: James Cummings
Series Title: Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92253-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-92252-8Published: 16 March 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-92255-9Published: 16 March 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-92253-5Published: 15 March 2022
Series ISSN: 2947-8782
Series E-ISSN: 2947-8790
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 252
Number of Illustrations: 11 b/w illustrations
Topics: Gender and Sexuality, Men's Studies, Asian Culture