Policing PRC Universities, Ku’er Autoethnography as Resistance

• In Event: 40820 - Section on Sociology of Sex and Gender Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Politics and Gender

Abstract

Since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, universities in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been treated as battlegrounds for “ideology education” by the Chinese Communist Party. Policing in PRC universities has operationalized the “microphysics of power” to dismantle student activism and discipline campuses into panoptic sites of surveillance. Over the last decade, queer students and student-led queer communities have become primary targets of this surveillance, particularly since July 2021, when the state imposed a widespread ban on most queer student groups on social media. Despite this repression, queer students in PRC universities have persisted in their community-making efforts, fostering alliances with other activist groups, including feminist, labor rights, and ethnic minority advocates. As community-based scholars, we have experienced intensified policing in recent years and developed various strategies of resistance. This paper assembles our related experiences as queer community organizers currently residing in, or previously enrolled at, PRC universities during periods of intensified repression. The perspectives offered by the four authors are interconnected yet heterogeneous, echoing and complementing one another, which leads us to our ambitious assertion of “ku’er autoethnography as resistance.” Autoethnography, as genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural, has facilitated a valuable standpoint methodology that challenges epistemic injustices embedded in ethnography as a colonial, elitist, and cis-heteropatriarchal construction. Under Ku’er Autoethnography, we present personal narratives in which each author reflects on their experiences as a queer student and community organizer. This collective framing demonstrates how queer autoethnography functions as an activist endeavor and presents a viable challenge to the intensifying policing of PRC universities. Through ku’er autoethnography, this paper brings creativity, reflexivity, and subjectivity into ethnomethodology and concludes with autoethnography’s insurgent capacity as the resistance against political violence and epistemic injustice.

Authors

• Heng Simone Wang, The University of British Columbia

• Zihan Lin, Peking University

• Zhuang Xu, Xiaowusheng

• Yuning Huang, Tsinghua University