‘Teach as an outsider’: closeted gay academics’ strategies for addressing queer issues in China

ABSTRACT

Gay academics in China face multiple risks when addressing queer issues on heteronormative and repressive campuses. Little is known about their experiences of navigating the social and political constraints placed upon them. Drawing on interview data from 40 gay academics in China, this article explores participants’ strategies for addressing queer issues in the classroom. It is shown that a number of strategies were adopted by closeted participants to lower potential risks and enhance the legitimacy of engaging with queer concerns. Despite Chinese universities being heteronormative spaces in which teaching about queer issues is constrained, closeted gay academics can exercise pedagogical agency to challenge heteronormativity in the classroom. Such agency is located between the extremes of conformity and subversion. By unpacking closeted teachers’ agency, this research interrogates the normative discourse of the ‘coming out imperative’ which considers queer teachers’ coming out the only way to empower students and challenge heteronormativity.

KEYWORDS:

• Gay
• China
• heteronormativity
• queer
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The concept of queer is used in diverse ways in the existing literature (Burford and Allen 2019). In this article, queer is used as an umbrella term for nonnormative sexual and gender identities, such as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identities (e.g., queer issues, queer teachers). It is also used as a theoretical framework (e.g., queer theory).

2. I use gay as an identity term for Chinese men with same-sex desire. In terms of self-identified terms, many participants in this study did not think there were any differences between tongxinglian (同性恋, homosexual), gay, and tongzhi (同志, a Chinese term for people with same-sex desire). Even those who did see differences used the terms interchangeably. Tongxinglian, gay and tongzhi were words common in participants’ expression and none was used dominantly. By contrast, only one participant chose the word ku’er (酷儿), a Chinese language transliteration of ‘queer,’ which is seldom known about in mainstream society. Research shows that an increasing number of men with same-sex desire in China refer to themselves as, or are more willing to be called, gay rather than tongzhi (Wong 2011).

3. The focus on gay academics means that this paper fails to show the experiences of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender academics in Chinese universities. Despite sharing some common experiences, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teachers are worth researching separately, to highlight the impact of gender and sexual identities on queer teachers’ experiences. For instance, the existing literature has identified unique experiences of gay teachers (Skelton 2000), lesbian teachers (Ferfolja 2009), bisexual teachers (Nathanson 2009), and transgender teachers (Wells 2018).

4. Although I shared the same sexual identity as participants, my outness as an activist researcher contrasted sharply with the vigilance and caution exhibited by many closeted participants. In many ways, the difference between participants and myself broke the assumed ‘sameness’ based on sexual identity. ‘Insider/outsider’ can thus be shifting positions informed by power dynamics as they relate to multiple forms of difference.

5. I use the terminology used by the authors when I introduce other people’s research.