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Elena Rebaudengo

matricola 819678
Cultural Studies

Issues of identity

Being a lesbian in contemporary urban China

Cosmopolitan modern metropolis in China, as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou


and Shenzhen, nowadays have a growing queer scene: with numerous bars,
discussion groups that usually hold events such as parties and weekly meetings,
telephone helplines, community newsletters, organizations, and also, on a
national level, lots of websites.
The appearance of these kinds of networks in China is still very new, just in
recent years the possibility to socialize and find other people “like them” for
gays and lesbians is changed from low and somehow scattered to a everyday
potential.
There is no governal law that prohibits homosexuality per se, but during the
maoist regime, homoerotic sex was condemned as immoral or antisocial and
was labelled together with a large range of other actions as liumangzui 流氓
罪 “hooliganism” .
Only in 1997, the Chinese criminal code was revisited to eliminate the vague
crime of “hooliganism”, an act considered by most to be a decriminalization of
homosexuality.
Since then, the Chinese gay community has rapidly expanded, and these kinds
of circles are more and more public, but this does not mean that they are
always safe or welcome. The police intervention forced some of them to close
after cultural festival events invoking “public morality” (as it happened for
example in 2001 during a film festival in Beijing and in 2009 during the first
gay pride in Shanghai).
Anyway, it is helpfull to keep in mind that these kinds of “accidents” are not a
chinese prerogative, they can still take place all over the world, including the
United States or Europe.
Internet with the possibility of being anonymous, in recent years has become
the main field where to find friends, knoledge and support, or even a possible
lover, also because it does not expose to the risk of being found out by parents,
work collegues or friends.
Internet also gave the possibilities to chinese gay people to chat with other gays
from all over the world; this obviously created a transnational scene that was
reinforced by the fact that in this major cities nowadays lives an increasing
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number of people from other countries, and obviuosly some of them are gay
men and lesbian women.
As it appears the articulation of Chinese gay and lesbian identities are steadily
decentred from local Chinese traditions, but are progressively allied with the
global and diasporic same-sex communities.
The chinese women who call themselves lesbians in these cosmopolitan cities
have different origins, both rural and urban, diverse occupations and
educational background.
There is a wide range of words that they use to label themselves: the most
neutral are tongxinglian 同性恋 ot tongzhi 同志, that denote homesexual
in general, so it can commonly carry the prefix nan 男 for man or nu 女 for
female. The first one is composed of the words “same”, “sex” and “love” and
was originally a loanword from the Japanese that translated the english word in
the early twentieth century, when intelletuals started to translate European
sexuology, as Havelock Ellis’s and Kraft-Ebing’s work.
Since some of these imported theories pathologized homosexuality, also the
name tongxinglian carries connotation of medical abnormality.
For this reason quite recently lesbian and gay activists in Hong Kong begin to
use the word tongzhi that means “comrade” as the common denomination for
people whose sexual preference is for those of the same sex, and the term
slowly gained recognition among young gays in Taiwan before and in mainland
China after.
It is used also because it arouse the idea that there is a political activism in the
sexual identity.
Entering the specific lesbian world there are other particular words, born in the
early 1990s, that create a set of new cultural categories; these are based mainly
on the binary opposition between T and P, where T stands for tomboy and P is
short for laopo 老婆, wife.
Between these lie a scale ranging from pure T (chun 纯 T) to pure P (chun
纯 P) that are similar to the terms butch and lipstick lesbian, but it also exists
the concept of bu fen 不 分 that means “not separate” and is equal to the
english word versatile.
Even though this terms can have a different meaning according to every
individual woman, they are usually related to appearance and body posture, in
addition to sexual behaviour, exactly like the english words.
These terms, in fact, can be easily traced in their origins to western movies,
magazines or television series.
Obviuosly not all women are satisfied with these words that are such strictly
label and rigidly separate masculine and feminine categories.
Moreover the use of these specific terms are strongly related to the socio-
economic and cultural realities they live in.
One of the biggest problem for lesbian women in China is the marriage issue.
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Even though Mainland China underwent a moderning developing in almost all
aspects from life to economic and opened new spaces for indipendence and
individualism, the tradition about filial piety is still very much present, which is
to say that marriage is usually seen as compulsory and an obbligation.
The pressure lesbians experience from their family to what is seen as a natural
evolution of a woman who should turn into a wife and a mother, pushes them to
find various strategies to deal with this problem.
Very few refuse completly to marry and just come out to their parents.
Young ones delay the problem until they are past 30 years old by blaming their
career commitment or not finding the right partner.
Many decide to arrange a false marriage with friends, especially with gay men
but even more can not help but give in to the pressure and get heterosexual
marriage.
Obviously some of them will keep having lesbian affaires even after their
marriage or will divorce aiming to return to their previous way of life.
The expectation of marriage is a tremendous not only familiar but most
significantly social inevitable pressure, as married life is the only way seen as
normal and respectable.
In addition of being a social outcast, there is also the guilt feeling of not being a
good filial daughter that is espected to give her parents a grandchild, a male if
possible, to continue the lineage.
There is really just a weak stream that is in favour of fighting against this
tradition and proclaim that is only coming out publicly that is possible to
improve gay life in China, following the Harvey Milk’s way of protest.
It is very interesting to notice how this self-censorship is mainly practiced at an
individual level, more than at a state level, probably because, as chinese
tradition describes, family ties and social harmony should not be prevailed by
anything, and not certainly by the sexual preferences.
Overall though it is impossible not to consider that lesbian activist discourse is
ineluctably indebted to contemporary Western feminist and lesbian/gay theory,
activism and art.
Modernization, from the introduction of homophobia to the borrowing of its
counteract on a large scale, seems to have reach a full circle.
But the extent to which it has assimilated Westernized cultural forms is
probably proportionate to the extent to which it is integrated into the global
capitalist system.
It is now worldly visible that discourses first developed in Western capitalist
societies - and we can also inscribe within these feminism, gay and lesbian
activism - are reproducing themselves everywhere, including China.
And is not just a concern about discourse but even about how they are evolving
and integrating with one another, what happened between feminist and lesbian
discourse, for example, is repeating also in the whole Chinese area.
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Which is to say, in actual political practice, even feminists in the most radical
women’s organizations have questioned the legitimacy of lesbian agendas in the
women’s movements.
The feminists feel the pressure to set up boundaries between their cause and
lesbianism, arguing that feminist associations may play at best only a
secondary, supporting role.
It is still in question if, after all, lesbian and feminism can be overlaped so
easily.
The fracture of these movements unfortunatly is not only emblematic of the
vitality of these factions but it also means that although since the late 1990s
there have begun to appear some groups of discussions, including academic
ones, of female same sex issues, the absence of formal channels in China has
dictated that they should adopt an apolitical stance and moderate rhetoric.
However these manifestations should not be reduced to a representation of a
modern, Westernised gay and lesbian identity, but may be interpreted as the
appearance of a fragmented identity.
And it is not helped by what the media produce in present day, that is often
dictated by commercial interests, not certainly by political or social
commitments.
Actually, expecially in Taiwan, they seem to have taken an almost
schizophrenic approach to gay and lesbian issue.
On the one hand, newspapers and television stations appear friendly toward
lesbian and gay activism, carrying many programs devoted to sharing
experiences and problems and many translated reports from the West.
Indeed, it looks as if the mass media are really interested in promoting social
changes.
On the other hand, they continue to reproduce the stereotype of homosexuality
as abnormal and gender inversion.
And is common knowledge that is through the media rather than medical or
psychiatric treaties that the public learns about outdated sexological ideas.
Furthermore, the media often associate homosexuality with the criminal
underworld.
Since the beginning of the 1990s in fact, the media (always with an eye toward
profit) have been intent on turning the homosexual subject into an erotic-exotic
object for the popular gaze, giving queer sexualities problematic visibility.
Sensational tabloid magazines, for instance, have turned out story after story
about lesbian or gay promiscuity, cruising parks and bars, crimes, murders and
suicides.
Some of these reports are just voyeuristic, many plainly fantastic.
It is really not helpfull for the lesbian and gay comunity to be represented as
alien creatures whose secrets the reportes can reveal to satisfy the curiosity of
the general public, which is to say the “normal people”.
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This is especially prominent in the case of lesbians.
Probably because the lesbian community was very little known to the public
until the late 1980s, and actually it still is.
For example movies representing positive lesbian characters are still few and
they definitely did not receive wide screening, even though in Taiwan and Hong
Kong this reality is changing faster than in the continent.
In fact, despite having made such progress, hower, mainland Chinese lesbians
still held back from following the lead of Taiwanese, who ten years earlier had
already declared their collective existance publicly, through the mainstream
media.
Given the tight control of the media exercised by the mainland government the
activists felt that is was impossible at that time to engage in similar tactics.
The atmosphere seems more relaxed in recent years, as much as in 2000 it
permitted a show on the Hunan Satellite Television where Shi Tou (a well
known artist and lesbian activist who also starred in the first ever Chinese film
that depicted female same sex lover, called Fish and Elephant 今年夏天)
and Cui Zi’en (a famous director and associate professor at the Beijing Film
Accademy) came out publicly.
The conversation was very positive, for forty-five minuts they talked with the
audience and with a sociologist about same sex love.
Apart from all these very encouraging developments, same-sex population in
China still faces an uncertain future, despite Chinese society’s increasing
openness to same-sex experience.
The main two reasons are because the state will not allow any activities that
threaten its moral leadership in shaping a ‘healthy’ society and because gender
or sexuality is still not commonly understood as an individual’s identity.
In conclusion, being lesbian in urban china is a rapidly changing notion that is
constituted and transformed in a continuum.
The most relevant definition that has been stated is probably that “the
articulation of same-sex identity in urban China is paradoxical: open and
decentred, but at the same time, nationalist and conforming to state control.”

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