Gay urban space in Chengdu : liminality and identity making amidst a heteronormative society

Abstract

This dissertation examines the social life and identity-making of gay males in gay urban space through a case study in Chengdu, China. It focuses on embodiment, cultural practices, and the everyday experiences of the local gay community. Arguing that gay urban space is highly scripted by codes of conduct, this dissertation employs a bodily approach and focuses on the production of public space narrated from the individual sentiments, emotions, and sensations by experiencing, and also participating in the transformation of material urban visions. In particular, I interrogate the complex phenomena of the increasing visibility of the gay community and culture in the modern city, ascertained through evidence described in the gay index put forward by Florida. Within a specific Chinese context, I delineate how gay urban space can be imagined, produced, and reorganised by gay males as a space of encountering, visiting, and experiencing compatible with the vernacular lifestyle. Empirical analyses of gay space in Chengdu attempt to unravel the relations, interactions, and contestations between several parallel aspects in the lives of urban gay men, namely, the gay body, gay urban space, the city, and the wider society. More specifically, I articulate how gay space facilitates sexual performance and culture formation as a material site that serves alternative, transgressive, and experimental sexual identity and performance, yet at the same time, a closeted experience embedded in the totality of a heteronormative society. I suggest that although gay males have a chance to subvert certain heteronormative doctrines on temporal and spatial life courses, sexual subjectivity, identity, and cultural performance are consistently disciplined in a civilised form through the governance, surveillance, and education of the hegemonic heterosexual world. This work attempts to enrich understandings of the complex dynamics of the spatial scripts of public space by exploring sexual practices with a specific focus on the gay body.