Sexuality, migration and family: understanding Jia and its impact on Chinese young gay men’s migration motives from a temporal perspective

ABSTRACT

Based on analyses of the lived experiences and narratives of Chinese intranational migrant young gay men, this article investigates the complicated ways in which jia (family/home) motivates their migrations from a temporal perspective. I identify three temporal aspects of their migrations—life course, generation, and imagining the future. I also demonstrate the different ways in which jia motivates their migrations in relation to their past (pre-migratory experiences), their present (migratory experiences) and their future (narratives of an imagined future). I argue that by combining hetero – and homonormativity with the intersection of individualisation and familism, or, to use Yan’s term, neo-familism, the complicated role that jia plays in motivating Chinese young gay men’s migration can be better understood. By illustrating the intricate entanglements of sexuality, migration, and family, this article aims to challenge the North-centric conceptualizations of intranational queer migration and open up new possibilities to theorise queer migration from an East Asian perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual migration
• queer migration
• Chinese gay men
• migration motive
• family

Acknowledgement

I sincerely thank Prof. Hua Zhong, Prof. Yiu Tung Suen, Prof. Susanne Y. P. Choi, Prof. Travis Kong, and Prof. Hsunhui Tseng for their various forms of support and constructive suggestions. My thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Despite the different vocabularies used by Chinese male homosexuals as their sexual identity labels such as gay, tongzhi (an umbrella term for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender in China. In most cases, it refers to gay men), tongxinglian (homosexuals), nantong (male homosexuals), most of my participants prefer the term ‘gay’, as they think others are either too old-fashioned or implying different stigmas. So this article uses ‘gay’ to describe my participants’ sexual identity. (for discussions on different sexual identity labels among male homosexuals in China, please see Kong 2011)

2 There are a few exceptions. For example, Bass (2019) examines the biographical time of Indian gay men in Singapore by investigating how their sexuality influences their experiences of the past and the present and their imaginings of the future. Another example is the life course perspective in intranational queer migration studies (Lewis, 2012, 2014; Wimark, 2016a, 2016b). Although they did not use the words ‘time’ or ‘temporality’, their focus on the life course of lesbians and gay men reveals one of the multiple temporal dimensions of queer migration. However, these temporal dimensions are too complicated and multifaceted to be fully captured by so few research studies and more work need to be done.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China [grant number: 19ZDA145].