Keeping A Distance: Changing Everyday Lives of Married Migrant Gay Men in China’s State-owned Enterprises

ABSTRACT

This study examines continuity and change in the lives of rural migrant gay men working in China’s state-owned enterprises (SOE) from an everyday life perspective. By examining their sexuality, migration histories, and heterosexual marriage experiences, this study contributes to sexuality and migration literature by exploring how rural-to-urban migrant gay men maintain their everyday homosexual intimacies in post-socialist China. It adds to the perspective that gay men’s perceptions, interpretations, and reactions to marriage and sexuality vary, due to their personal migration experiences. These findings also contribute to scholarly discussions of everyday life by providing a nuanced analysis of how spatial tactics are employed as forms of everyday resistance by gay men for maintaining their sexualities.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• tongqi
• everyday life resistance
• urban sexual practice
• gay marriage

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Professor Susanne YP Choi, Professor Jonathan Unger, Professor Yiu-tung Suen, the anonymous reviewers, and the CAS editor, Robert Shepherd, for their valuable comments. We also thank those who accepted our request for interviews, as well as NGO staff and volunteers who contributed to this project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

N/A

Notes

1 Tongqi (同妻) refers to women who are married to gay men without acknowledging their husbands’ sexual orientation. It combines tong (tongzhi, 同志, "gay comrade") and qi (wife, 妻).

2 Burton-Bradley 2022.

3 Traditional gender roles and the implementation of the one-child policy created an environment that pushed men into marriage. Parents in China have high expectations for their sons to marry and produce a male heir to continue family bloodlines, especially for those with only one male child. Although the one-child policy was abolished in 2016, its influence on procreation continues. Parents from both rural and urban regions keep longing for their children to marry and continue family lines.

4 Liu et al. 2015.

5 For example, performative marriages among gays and lesbians. See Choi & Luo 2016.

6 Tsang 2021.

7 Cheng 2016.

8 Tsang 2021.

9 Wei 2012; Kong 2011; Luo 2021; Choi 2022.

10 de Certeau, 1984, xiv.

11 According to Simmel (1950), social distancing is an instrumental practice to accommodate the complex rhythm of city life. However, physical proximity and social distancing are passively perceived and become a kind of indifference to metropolitan life. Simmel did not consider the possibility that metropolitan everyday life practices can also be tools for resisting unwanted city life or constructing a subjective ideal life.

12 Zhang et al. 2019.

13 Kong 2011.

14 Choi and Luo 2016.

15 The 1980 Marriage Law permitted divorce only if based on the complete breakdown of affection. See Marriage Law of the PRC, 1980.

16 Davis and Friedman (2014) use this term from Andrew Cherlin to note that the "taken-for-granted assumptions or even necessity of marriage no longer prevail.” David and Friedman 2014, 3.

17 Farh et al. 2008

18 Gui and Meng (2023) document how gay men employed in state agencies and SOEs engage in performative marriages to keep marriage surveillance at bay.

19 Liu, 2019. Her research on rural migrant lesbians illustrates how their lives are still influenced by patriarchal-homophobic family norms. She argues that Chinese rural families still persist in their preference for male offspring and devalue divorced daughters.

20 Simmel 1950. The origin of this question is rooted in problematizing everyday life interactions of the self and others in the modern metropolis. In city life, the spatial sense of physical proximity disassociates with the social.

21 Scott 1985.

22 de Certeau 1984; Butticci 2012. Chin and Mittelman (1997) conceptualize sites as a spatial dimension of resistance. Everyday life resistance is situated in social spaces. Johansson and Vinthagen (2016) argue that “resistance is practiced in and through space as a central social dimension.”

23 Every representation of space reflects the dominating norms and values monopolized and defined by the power holder. Therefore, to implement such an ideal dominant space, the powerless minorities may be excluded. However, although minorities may passively experience the space, they can appropriate and/or try to change this. See Lefebvre 1991.

24 Kong 2011; Kam 2013.

25 Binnie 1997.

26 Wei 2012.

27 This includes businesses such as saunas, mahjong clubs, gyms, and tea houses that cater to gay customers.

28 Most married gay men fear having their real sexuality exposed to their families. Therefore, the involvement of local NGOs was essential for recruiting targeted informants. We have worked closely with NGOs in Xiamen and Guangzhou for many years. Their service networks are wide enough to reach married homosexual men. We sent over a hundred interview invitations, and forty-two men accepted. Among these, eighteen were considering or preparing for marriage; the remaining twenty-four were married or divorced.

29 Given the sensitivity of our research topic, we used a double-checking measure to facilitate the interviews. We conducted each interview with an oral history approach and inserted questions when the interview content conflicted with an answer an interviewee had given in the questionnaire. This measure is important in two aspects: first, it helps clarify the sequence of their migration processes and journeys in exploring their sexualities. Second, it is crucial for clarifying how each considers tongzhi and homosexuality, as well as men’s roles. Comparing and challenging the answers they provided in the questionnaire and their responses in our interviews reveals how their sexualities are interwoven with their migration process and their changing social circumstances.

30 Walder 1984.

31 Song 2018. The number of SOEs declined from 118,000 in 1995 to 34,000 in 2003, and by 2007 had declined to below 10,000. However, strategic and key industries, including defense, power generation and distribution, and telecommunications, are still one hundred percent owned and controlled by the state.

32 Davis and Friedman 2014.

33 Wu and Chou 1996; Li 2009.

34 Walder 1984.

35 Diamant 2000.

36 Bailey 1993.

37 Xia and Long 2007.

38 Ren 2021.

39 Scott 1985.

40 Scott 1990, 136.

41 Simmel 1950.

42 Carrillo 2017.

43 Luo 2021.

44 Goffman 1966, 83.

45 Simmel 1950, 402.

46 Yan 2003, 235.

47 Government officials implicitly banned any feminine male image and gay-related topics in the mass media since 2017. For example, in 2016, the gay online drama ‘Addicted’ was forced to go offline In 2018, a female online novelist was sentenced to ten years because of her online gay fiction ‘Attack and occupy’. The sustainability of the liberation of sexual plurality is majorly driven by the direction of the present political leadership. See Ellis-Petersen 2016 and Wang 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Javier Pang

Javier Pang is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include marriage and family, gender and sexualities, China and Hong Kong, and social innovation. His current project explores intimate partner violence in Hong Kong.

Kaxton Siu

Kaxton Siu is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Hong Kong Baptist University. He researches comparative labor studies, migration studies, urban sociology, and youth. He has authored two books: Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer Domination: Comparisons with Hong Kong and Vietnam (Springer, 2020) and Hong Kong Society: High-Definition Stories beyond the Spectacle of East-Meets-West (Springer, 2022). His current research focuses on Chinese investors in Vietnam and Cambodia and their impact on industrial relations systems and labor standards, and Chinese and Vietnamese industrial trainees in Japan.