Abstract
This chapter takes up the theme of spatiality and explores the central importance of internet technologies in the self-understanding and everyday lives of gay men in Hainan. I begin by looking at narratives in which the arrival of the internet was seen as a ‘sexual watershed’ after which other gay men became visible and accessible online. I go on to explore the ways in which senses of belonging to a particular sexual category emerged, for many men, after searching the internet for the ‘meanings’ of their desires for men. In both instances, the internet appears associated with concepts of ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’; these are analysed in more detail in the third section. The fourth and fifth sections specifically focus on the mobile, locative gay social networking app Blued and respectively explore the production of gay space and the embodiment of sexual categories in relation to Blued.
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Notes
- 1.
A minority of interview participants regularly visited gay bars (seven men) and parks (five men). All 31 participants discussed their use of the internet to find other men with whom to socialise and have sex and the majority also recounted the formative role they saw the internet to have played in their arrival at understandings of themselves as gay, homosexual and/or tongzhi and in their processes of coming into the scene.
- 2.
Renren was the PRC’s earliest widely used social media website, comparable to Facebook. It is no longer widely used.
- 3.
QQ is a social networking website and mobile app. It is used to maintain contact with individuals as well as to partake in common-interest chat groups.
- 4.
Baidu is the most popular search engine in the PRC.
- 5.
Yang Ge and Mitao were men in their late forties who Xiao Pang and Ah Gang knew in Wuzhishan.
- 6.
While I do not have space to elaborate the point, it is worth noting that metaphors of ‘dark’ and ‘light’ were a recurrent theme across interviews and everyday conversations and experiences in Hainan. The term ‘mingbai’ (‘to understand’) used above by Xiao Qiao, and by many other participants, literally means ‘bright/clear white’. This is relevant to appreciating the ways in which some participants discussed ‘self-awareness’ and an assumed ‘lack of self-awareness’ through metaphors of ‘light’ and ‘dark’. This is evident in the discussion of anchang in the previous chapter, as well as later in this chapter, where anchang were seen to inhabit ‘dark places’ (‘an’ also means ‘dark’). This is also relevant to associations made by some participants between ‘visibility’ and ‘self-acceptance’. These are discussed later in this chapter.
- 7.
Blued boasts twenty-seven million users, making it not only the PRC’s but the world’s most popular gay dating and social networking app. Eighty percent of Blued accounts are registered in the PRC (Blued, 2016). The app maintains amicable relations with government censors by framing itself as contributing to AIDS awareness and prevention (Lopez, 2014). The app has a feature that can be used to locate the nearest HIV test centre.
- 8.
The only participants who did not discusses such fears of ‘exposure’ were Lu Ge and Ah Ben, who, as will be seen in the following chapter, were vehement advocates of ‘self-acceptance’ and practices of ‘living a gay life’.
- 9.
The total is thirty, here, due to the fact that Gao Ge was not a regular Blued user.
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Cummings, J. (2022). Being On-and-Off-line. In: The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92253-5_4
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