Sexuality in Conflict: How Transnational Bisexuals Negotiate Collective Identity

• In Event: Celebrating Fifty Years of Queer Scholarship at APSA Mini-Conference: Negotiating Queerness in Policy and Politics

Abstract

In 21st Century China, LGBTQ became more visible thanks to the success of transnational LGBTQ movement. Internationally, gay and lesbian movement is making strides in marriage, rights, and recognition. At the same time, authoritarian suppression of LGBTQ political activism from the state heightened as part of the crackdown for cilvil society. China's society is going through urban and modern transformations that bring transnational ideas and traditional culture into conflict. Paradoxically, LGBTQ as an analytic category consists of many subcategories that are lumped together for convenience but are different in their history, politics, or culture (Mucciaroni 2011; Murib and Brettschneider 2017; Smith 2011). Does everyone within the category of LGBTQ support each other happily under the rainbow?
My paper is motivated by the following questions. How do categories of sexualities conceptualize difference, build solidarity, or create division? Social movement studies have revealed how the construction of collective identities in social movement often advocate for particular ideals (Ghaziani and Baldassarri 2011; Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016; Snow, Soule, and Kriesi 2004), but little do we know about the intra-movement dynamics that shape the fight for those ideals. Recently, scholars started to study internal conflict inside LGBTQ ((Pfeffer 2014; Sutherland 2021; Valentine 2007; Ward 2008), and my work extends their effort by studying the experience of bisexuals and revealing larger political dynamics in contemporary China.
For the case of LGBTQ movement, Gamson (1997) shows how the creation of collective identity in gay and lesbian politics simultaneously lead to exclusion despite proclaimed goal of inclusion. As a result, queer sociologists have started to advocate for a post-gay study to critically examine homonormativity and relations within and between sexuality categories through collective identity (Ghaziani 2011; Proctor 2022).
Vast gender and sexuality research is done in liberal democracies (Bao 2018; Chan 2021; Jung 2021; Liu 2010), so my focus on transnational China in the 21st Century incorporates the distinct dilemma between authoritarian control and the public sphere (Engebretsen, Schroeder, and Bao 2015; Lei 2018; Long 2018) that complicate conventional understanding of queer politics. On a social level, tightened authoritarian control and push for heterosexual reproduction clash with the fresh emergence of commercial economy, urbanization, transnational cultural exchange, and cilvil society (Chiang 2018; Hildebrandt 2012; Ho et al. 2018; Kam 2013; Liu 2020; Sun and Guo 2014) .
In this project, I address the gap in how intra-movement tension emerge, decline, and transform through the case of LGBTQ movement to understand how internal conflict across category members impact solidarity and division in identity politics. Naturally, my case could be extended to other identity-based categories and the micro-politics of everyday life (Brubaker 2004, 2016a, 2016b). My paper contributes to methodological approaches in the study of gender and sexuality by highlighting that gender-and sexuality-based inequalities cannot be properly understood apart from the collective process of gender and sexuality category boundary and identity making. My work also examines how the Chinese society respond to the fast-changing authoritarian landscape that governs individual freedom through a transnational methodological framework that considers processes of globalization and transnational knowledge production.
To address these gaps, I examine how collective identity emerge, collide, and contest among categories of gender and sexuality. To do so, I analyze the everyday experience of bisexuals from China, especially how transnational Chinese bisexuals negotiate moral boundaries and collective identity during contentious sexual division between multiple categories. The case of bisexuality represents an ambiguous position in LGBTQ categories, because it is often lumped with LGBTQ, challenges heteronormativity, yet faces rejection from both heterosexual and queer communities (Egan 2012; Hayfield 2021; Murib and Brettschneider 2017; Ochs 1996). I operationalize bisexuality as self-identification that one can be romantically or sexually attracted to more than one gender. I ask: How do bisexuals perceive, construct, and contest sexual boundaries and collective identity?
To answer these questions, I conduct semi-structured in-depth interviews. In data collection, I found rich data that I organized through different boundary processes—perceiving moral boundaries, negotiating symbolic difference, and constructing collective identity. My work carries important implications for larger questions, including the the politics of difference, transferability of universal ideals of rights-based activism, and methodologies for the study of sexuality and politics.

Author

• Ann Jiang, University of Chicago