Browsing by Subject "Homosexuality"

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    Chinese Comrade Literature, Queer Political Reality, and the Tongzhi Movement in Mainland China
    (2012-12) Leng, Rachel
    This thesis explores the development of Mainland China’s online “Comrade Literature” (同志文学tongzhi wenxue), a body of fiction linked to the experiences of Chinese homosexuals that emerged in the late 1990s. The central question is: How has Chinese Comrade Literature responded to changes in political rhetoric and government policy affecting queer identity in modern China? This thesis looks at samples of online Comrade stories as they correspond to political developments in China from 1996 to 2006, with an eye to how these narratives problematize the struggles of a marginalized queer Chinese population. An investigation of implicit and explicit references to laws, policies, and government action in Comrade stories reveals how they establish solidarity by communicating messages about China’s repressive political and social environment for homosexuals. The analysis focuses on the fictional texts themselves – on what they tell us about China’s political reality and State control affecting the gay community and what imagery they provide that can be interpreted as social mobilization and political protest. This thesis argues that this emergent queer literary discourse constitutes much more than meets the eye. It is not simply an expression of an underground gay culture; it is a dynamic form of resistance to the particular social and government discrimination towards Chinese homosexuality and protest against the broader environment of political repression in China.
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    Gender Relations in Chinese Comrade Literature: Redefining Heterosexual and Homosexual Identity as Essentially the Same yet Radically Different
    (2012-08-20) Leng, Rachel
    Throughout the twentieth century, homosexuality has been and remains a highly sensitive and controversial topic in China where homosexual people were actively persecuted under Communist rule. It was not until the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s that Comrade Literature (同志文学 tongzhi wenxue), an indigenous genre characterized by fictions of homosexuality, came into existence in China. Comrade Literature swiftly became popular as a medium for modern Chinese homosexual people (tongzhi) to express powerful emotions and protest the dominant heterosexual standard. This paper will discuss Beijing Story (1996) and The Illusive Mind (2003), two texts that have appealed to a large number of readers under the genre of “Comrade Novels.” Both fictions share a common characteristic in that they portray ambiguous relationships between and identities of characters to destabilize the dichotomous homo/hetero paradigm of sexuality in Chinese society. These Comrade novels comment on issues of sexuality and repressive social practices in two distinct but interrelated ways: as a plea for others to understand that homoerotic desire is essentially the same as heteroerotic desire, but also as an affirmation of the legitimacy of homosexual relations as radically different and even more ideal than dominant heterosexual practices in Chinese society. By examining the sexual and emotional attachment of the male protagonist to his male and female subjects of desire in these Comrade texts, I will explore how these differing viewpoints simultaneously coexist yet contest each other. I posit that it is possible to borrow from Western queer theory to understand the emergence and logic of Comrade Literature in China, demonstrating that queer texts converge across national and cultural borders in the way they challenge the dominant heteronormative categorical order of sexual hierarchy. Nonetheless, Comrade novels still exhibit divergence from texts produced in the Euro-American milieu to address dilemmas specific to tongzhi in China’s sociopolitical environment.
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    Pornographesis: Sex, Media and Gay Culture
    (2018) Stadler, John Paul

    How does gay pornography inscribe gay identity, and what might that inscription reveal? Pornographesis asks how gay pornography has come to organize the feelings, desires, pleasures, memories, attachments, and identifications of the male homosexual subject. LGBTQ scholarship tends to forego a rigorous study of gay erotic media altogether in favor of less sexualized, more recuperable objects. As a result, the representational histories and media cultures of gay pornography remain largely obscured from contemporary discourse. This dissertation examines regimes of gay pornography that make visible its shifting contours. Unlike other studies that take pornography as their subject, mine does not aim to reduce pornography’s meaning to monolithic postures of either pleasure or harm, but rather locates the possibility for vexed in-betweens, discontinuities, and ruptures. The central question of Pornographesis is not just how gay pornography inscribes gay identity, but how that inscription changes over time and according to circumstance. Across four sequential eras, I examine notable shifts in the narrative structures, cultural position, and reception practices of gay pornography. I link these shifts to changes in media, from 8 and 16mm film to video, print, telephonic, theatrical, and digital technologies.

    Situated as an Americanist project, Pornographesis engages the historical materialism, media shifts, and narrative dynamisms that attend its development from the 1960s to today. Following Laura Kipnis’s notion that pornography is one of culture’s honored sites for working through social problems, I approach gay pornography as an engagement with the “problem” that homosexuality has been thought to constitute. In each era, gay pornography inscribes identity around a different set of relations to produce figures that range from necessarily clandestine, to defiantly perverse; from obsessively technophilic, to exploitatively entrepreneurial. Moreover, each era reveals the many and changing demands that the producers and viewers alike place on pornography: that it be beautiful, liberated, narrative, risky, safe, carnal, political, elegiac, honest, authentic, masculine, interactive, and so forth. As such, this dissertation argues that there is not just one uniform gay pornographic culture, but many. The mercurial quality of gay pornography delivers not just pleasure, but critical intervention in political crises, alternate imaginings of social structures, and valuable contestation of the rigid demands of heteronormative masculinity. Pornographesis makes the case that the study of gay male pornography is not merely instructive, but is in fact crucial for comprehending modern gay identity.