Making Queer Life Workable: Disidentificatory Spatial Strategies in the Nightlife of Chengdu, China

• In Event: LGBTQIA2S+ Studies in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

Research on queer nightlife has generated rich insights into how sexual identities and relationships are performed, negotiated, and contested in urban spaces, yet it remains disproportionately anchored in the Global North where sexual diversity is more likely to be treated as ordinary. When cities in the Global South are examined, queer subjects are often rendered through a homogenising optic of repression that frames nightlife as either absent or merely surviving in the shadows. Mobilising Muñoz’s notion of “disidentification,” this article asks how queer nightlife spaces in a Southern city survive, adapt, and potentially transform under shifting regulatory, commercial, and social constraints. Drawing on 21 walking interviews with queer participants who mapped and photographed queer-exclusive and queer-friendly clubs in Chengdu, China, I reconstruct place-based narratives of how venues open, relocate and disappear, and how these shifts are interpreted as responses to structural forces. Findings show that queer sociality is made workable through three techniques: gatekeeping (thresholds, discretion, and restricted circulation), reframing (translating queer desire into politically safer, commercially viable idioms such as gender and feminism), and temporalizing (timing queer visibility to surface intermittently as performance and atmosphere). Yet this workability does not simply expand freedom. It unevenly remakes nightlife infrastructure, redistributing safety and belonging across participants. By extending disidentification beyond a primarily performative practice to a spatial strategy, this article contributes to feminist geography, challenging Global South narratives that cast queer spaces solely as victims of repression, and advancing debates that theorize nightlife as a micropolitical infrastructure where livability is produced alongside inequality rather than simply as “fun work.”

Author

• Ziqi Yin, University of Cambridge