Communicating ‘Race’ in A Digitized Gay China

This essay examines the racial politics of gay online-dating in China, focusing on how online communication (re)shapes gay men’s ideas about race, sexuality, and identity. By looking into the ways of the white ‘other’ in China communicating same-sex desires, practices, and subjectivities, it illuminates how the Chinese gay man becomes ‘the other’ in his own country. The essay first provides a critical context that allows for a better understanding of how Chinese (gay) masculinity has been framed in the white West, paying particular attention to the feminization of gay Chinese (and other Asian) men in the Western gay imagination. It then offers a short account of the everyday experiences of gay white foreigners in urban China and how they enjoy upward sexual mobility. Drawing upon a range of theoretical perspectives, including Lee’s ‘racial mapping’, Chou’s view of Chinese-Caucasian gay sexualities, and Rofel’s qualities of gay desire, the essay goes on to interrogate how white men in China negotiate their gayness and claim their racialized sexual capital on three gay dating apps, namely Blued, Grindr, and Jack’d. It considers whiteness as historical, contextual, unfixed, unstable, negotiated, while at the same time gaining new meanings in everyday communicative practices, thereby ‘making whiteness strange’ in order to destabilize it, see its contradictions and limitedness, as well as challenge its invisibility and power. Finally, this essay argues that the experiences, narratives, and performances of white Western men and their Chinese gay audience on Chinese gay online-dating sites display various transcultural articulations that are not simply about race and nation, but also what it means to be gay in today’s China, pointing to the need for a transcultural and intersectional understanding of Chinese gay sexualities.