WeChat and the Chinese Queer Diaspora

Communication, Culture & Critique , 2024

This commentary focuses on a rising transnational queer Chinese digital culture-Girls' Love (GL) webtoons. I consider this queer womenfocused entertainment as an epitome of the queer convergence of transnational flows, women's cultures, and digital platform technologies in today's Asia. My discussion sheds light on its multilayered queer-transnational characteristics, as well as the controversies surrounding its transcultural mediation of queer women. Rather than simplifying it as an anti-heterocentric Chinese convergence culture in an age of globalization and digitization, I highlight GL webtoons' role in stimulating various voices concerning women during transnational encounters of gender and sexual knowledge.

Media International Australia, 2019

This article examines the placemaking experience of first-generation Chinese gay migrants (18–35 years old) in negotiating their cultural and sexual identities in Sydney and Melbourne. Tongzhi is used as a lingua-cultural reference to their double identity as Chinese and gay. Drawing from interviews and contact with 22 Chinese gay men who initially arrived in Australia on student visas, this article explores how tongzhi migrants use digital/social media to reconstitute their home abroad and to live out their transnational gay identity, politics and desire. Their placemaking practices take place in the intersections of the Internet and outernets, as well as the interzones of one’s gay desires for sexual fulfilment and cultural empowerment.

2003

Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, 2018

In the article the author made an attempt to find out which familiar ways of interaction and daily practices are carried out by Chinese migrants using the WeChat messenger. The corpus of empirical data was interviews with Chinese workers living in the territory of the Irkutsk region. Based on these interviews, we can talk about maintaining communication in all three spheres of the Chinese society identified by V.V. Maliavin, as well as about some of the daily practices that are implemented with the help of this messenger. When using WeChat, the Chinese who live overseas manage to maintain and build new connections with the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom, as well as with the residents of their region of residence.

Journal Article, 2021

Drawing on the ethnographic work conducted inside the digital platform WeChat, this article contributes to the ongoing discussion about the multi-sited ethnographic tools and the digital methods available for investigating virtual worlds and online practices. It analyses the communications, interactions, sociality, and economic activities produced on the application WeChat by Chinese migrant women, together with the same practices constructed offline in Taiwan. Taking a close look at the offline context from which these digital practices are generated, the article shows that when studying online practices, it is essential to understand what corresponds to them in the offline worlds. By updating the four Goffmanian interactionist fieldwork sequences, this research provides some reflections on the necessity to mix and merge online and offline ethnographic techniques in order to apprehend the new practices and scales of interaction at the crossroads where online and offline social spaces intersect. Virtual ethnography cannot be exclusive. Rather, it needs to be designed and performed in dialogue with ‘physical’ observations.

SHS Web of Conferences, 2017

The study of communication and culture are interrelated with each other and with semiotics. This study attempts to explore the intercultural identity of foreigners via their use of social media in China. As the most popular social media used in China, a foreign teacher from America (named as Liz)'s posts via WeChat Moments from 2013 to 2015 were coded based upon photos and texts to indicate her identity in China. As a result of semiotic analyses, five main themes were identified in her posts, ranging from personal interests and needs, occupation, family, Chinese traits to American traits. Based upon these identified themes, Liz's intercultural identity as Chinese culture experiencer and promoter is reflected by her description of Chinese traditions, showing contrasts between American and Chinese culture, and using Chinese characters in writing. Overall, not much anxiety and stress during Liz's acculturation process are shown while most cultural posts reflect her active and ongoing adaption to Chinese culture.

Using the case of queer economic immigrants to Canada from China, in this chapter I argue that transnational sexuality should not be simplified as queer immigrants’ pursuit of sexual liberation by crossing international borders; rather, it should also be viewed as comprising heterogeneous, multi-sphere trajectories in which these immigrants’ sexualities are simultaneously shaping and being shaped by various familial, social, cultural, economic, and political forces in both the host and home countries. It thus also provides an alternative narrative that has the potential to challenge the sexuality-centric conception of and geopolitical progress discourses on ‘queer migration’.

Television and New Media, 2022

This paper investigates Chinese gay men's consumption of domestic pornography on international social network platforms following the country's anti-porn campaigns targeting live streaming. Set against the backdrop of China's illiberal digital landscape characterized by rapid platformization and evolving Internet governance, the paper draws on in-depth interviews with twenty-one Chinese young gay men to explore how they take advantage of digital platforms and algorithms to creatively and resiliently carve out a space for expressing same-sex desires in a precarious environment. It argues that, although these creative acts of sexual citizenship empower gay men in selfunderstanding and community-building, they are also critically limited by China's intertwining neoliberal and illiberal cultures.

University of Lille, France. 120 p. [Unpublished master's thesis] , 2021

Drawing on seven-month online participant observation and 16 semi-structured interviews, this ethnographic study is conducted to examine the way in which the sexuality and migration processes of gay students from China to France are connected and interrelate with each other in three spacio-temporal contexts (pre-migratory, migratory and post-migratory). First, it aims to investigate how the sexual factors in contemporary China influence their motivation for studying abroad from a queer perspective. Second, this study seeks to uncover the lived experience of Chinese gay students in France and how the (homo)sexuality is shaped in a transnational context, within a systematic analysis of the intersection of sexuality, ‘race’, class and migration. Last, it intends to examine how the potentially transformed sexuality influences their decision-making of post-study projects (return, remain or re-migrate). Findings suggest that Chinese gay students who were generally “well-identified but not disclosed” do not portray their studying abroad as a sexual liberation journey but transnational capital accumulation, although they enjoy more sexual freedom on the move. The West is found out not ‘eldorado’ for gay of colour, who seek difficultly longings and belongings in the diaspora and experience multi-layered discrimination in the diaspora, but the host society potentially transformed their sexuality, which has implications for sexual health. Their post-study projects are filled with the uncertainties caused by career choices and migration policies, and informed by the negotiations between the pursuit of sexual freedom and the fulfilment of familial obligations. International student migration is believed to be not the finality but part of the (social and geographic) mobility of Chinese gay men, who negotiate queer kinship and relocate gayness through intra- or inter- national migrations.

Handbook of Chinese Migration to Europe, 2024

While gender has become a salient category of difference in the scholarly portrayal of new Chinese migrants, the sexuality of Chinese individuals in Europe-let alone the Chinese gay diaspora-remains understudied. Drawing on data collected in two separate research projects on gay Chinese migrants in France and Belgium, this chapter explores the multifaceted lived experiences of young Chinese gay migrant men in Europe through the lens of sexual (re)socialization and inequalities in a transnational context. First, this chapter gives an overview of the current research on queer Chinese migration, including in the European context. Second, it explores the processes of sexual (re)socialization of young Chinese gay migrant men in France and Belgium and the multi-level sources of this process. Finally, the last section highlights the health care and racial inequalities that gay Chinese migrants encounter in European host societies, as well as their agency, and delineates how these inequalities are produced and perpetuated within unequal power relations such as "race," age, class, and migrant status. We conclude with a discussion that bridges studies on queer migration studies and Chinese diaspora studies, calling for more sexuality-inclusive research on Chinese migration to Europe.