Dead End of the Rainbow: How Environmental and Spatial Factors Create a Necropolis for Gay Sex Workers in China

ABSTRACT

In China, the correlation between environmental space and drug use by gay male sex workers remains an under-researched public health concern. Drugs are commonly used to enhance sexual performance as well as provide feelings of euphoria but they also increase the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. The spatial and environmental factors that create synergies between drug consumption and sex work are explored through qualitative data obtained from 16 HIV-positive male sex workers. Alienation and instability are markers which encourage drug use in the sale of sex. The concept of necropolitics explains how environmental and spatial factors expose them to death conditions where they survive without help from the state and subsist only through the support of their own insular communities.

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful for the invaluable comments from the editor/reviewers of Deviant Behvior. The research would not have been successful without the generous support from the 16 male sex workers in North China. Any remaining errors are our own.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by the Strategic Funding entitled “Disappointed and Despondent? Single-Adult Migrant Men, Entangled Masculinity and China’s Commercial Sex Industry” (Project No. 7004952). The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the City University of Hong Kong (2-87-201703-01).

Notes on contributors

Eileen Yuk-Ha Tsang

Eileen Yuk-ha Tsang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include the sociology of the middle class; sociology of gender and sexualities; gender, crime and human trafficking. She is the author of The China’s Urban Sexscapes: Rethinking intimacy, masculinity, and criminal justice (University of Toronto Press 2019), The New Middle Class in China: Consumption, Politics and the Market Economy (Palgrave 2014). She has also published in The China Quarterly, Higher Education, American Journal of Men’s health, Deviant Behavior, Psychology of Violence. e-mail: [email protected]

Jeffrey S. Wilkinson

Jeffrey S. Wilkinson is Associate Professor of Journalism, Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. He completed a B.S. in Broadcasting from the University of Florida and worked as an award-winning broadcast news reporter before earning his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. He has held tenured positions at the University of Tennessee and the University of Toledo and taught over a dozen years in Hong Kong and Zhuhai, China. He has more than a decade of educational leadership experience in the United States and abroad. His research interests include international communication, media technology, journalism, and mass media effects. e-mail: [email protected]

Jerf W. K. Yeung

Jerf W. K. Yeung, PhD and RSW, is associate professor at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences in City University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on youth development, family and children, and religion and health, and he has recently published in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Marriage and Family Review, Journal of Family Studies, and Personality and Individual Differences. e-mail: [email protected]

Chau-Kiu Cheung

Chau-kiu Cheung, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the City University of Hong Kong, China. He has recently published research results concerning civility, social inclusion, resilience, character education, moral development, peer influence, and class mobility. His current research addresses issues of protest, thriving, early child development, organizational culture, and drug and vocational rehabilitation. Over the years, he has endeavored to scrutinize and advance knowledge concerning sociomoral development, social capital, and life quality. He actively engages in applied research on various social services for youth, elders, people with disabilities, education, policing, correctional services, and other community concerns. e-mail: [email protected]

Raymond K. H. Chan

Raymond K. H. Chan is Dean of Students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His major research interests are in risk and social policy, comparative social policy, and family and labor policies. He has authored and edited books, as well as published articles on topics concerning risk and social policy, social change and social policy, gender and care, with special focus on Asia. e-mail: [email protected]

David Norton

David Norton is a current PhD student with the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong. He holds an MA in Media & Communication studies from Bournemouth University (UK). HIs thesis focuses on the transformation of gendered logics amidst institutional change in modern Japan. He recently completed a 6-month stay in Osaka via the Japan Foundation’s research program for Specialists in Cultural and Academic Fields, a government-funded initiative to promote advanced language-training for academics based overseas. Related research interests include Asian hegemonic masculinities and the impact of cultural globalization on localized gender schemas. e-mail: [email protected]

Chung-Yan Yeung

Chung-yan Yeung is a research assistant at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, City University of Hong Kong. She finished her master’s degree in Applied Sociology from the City University of Hong Kong in 2018. Her research interests are sociology of gender and sexualities, queer theories on LGBTQ, and sociology of sex work. In addition, her research interests focus on identity conflicts involving sexualities, religion and culture; masculinities, and intimacy. e-mail: [email protected]