Moral Pathways of Mixed-Orientation Marriage Attitudes: A Three-City Comparison among Gay Men in China

• In Event: Frontiers in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

Scholarship on gay men’s intimate and family lives in China has largely focused on major metropolitan centers, leaving everyday family negotiations in other urban contexts comparatively underexamined. Drawing on one year-long multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and in-depth interviews with unmarried gay men across three non-metropolitan cities in Sichuan and Henan provinces, this article examines how attitudes toward entering mixed-orientation marriage are shaped through family moral norms and everyday interaction. Across field sites, the study identifies a counterintuitive regional pattern: two structurally comparable cities located in different provinces diverge sharply in their marriage attitudes, while two cities within the same province, despite marked differences in size and development, exhibit striking convergence. To account for this pattern, the analysis traces three recurrent moral mechanisms: how marriage is linked to reproduction, how filial responsibility is interpreted, and how family expectations are managed in interaction. These mechanisms combine in patterned ways that generate two dominant pathways, resistance to and compliance with entering mixed-orientation marriage, alongside a more fluid ambivalent pattern. By demonstrating how these moral dynamics become interactionally sustainable in some settings but morally difficult to articulate in others, the article advances a relational-moral perspective on marriage negotiation under heteronormative family regimes in contemporary China.

Author

• Houyuan WEI, The Chinese University of Hong Kong