Culture/Community/Race: Chinese Gay Men and the Politics of Identity

Abstract

Abstract: Culture/Community/Race is an ethnographic account of the development of identities and correlative collective practices among a group of Chinese men in Toronto in the 1980s. The cultural and racial politics of these identities/practices are explored through an examination of the role of Chinese culture in their development and through a discussion of the sexual politics of race among men. This latter material addresses the sexual meanings of racial difference and the politicization of these meanings among Chinese men.Resume: Cet article est une description ethnographique du developpement des identites gaies dans un groupe de Chinois a Toronto pendant les annees 1980 et des pratiques collectives qui y ont ete associees. Les dimensions politiques des aspects culturels et sociaux de ces identites/pratiques sont explorees au moyen de l'examen du ro1e de la > chinoise dans leur developpement et de l'analyse de certaines dimensions raciales des politiques sexuelles chez les gais. Ce dernier aspect approfondit les significations sexuelles des differences raciales et la politisation de ces significations chez les gais chinois.Contemporary interest in the cultural construction of gender and sexuality has in recent years produced a growing, largely anthropological literature on the historical emergence and globalization of male identities (Herdt, 1997; Lancaster, 1997; Manalansan IV, 1997; Parker, 1985; Weston, 1993). In his discussion of emergent identities in Asia, Altman (1997: 423) argues that such definitions of the self and the correlative development of discourses of group identity -- a -- are recent historical developments within countries, products of These modern subjectivities, of personhood defined through a sexual orientation and involvement in homogender relationships, may coexist with or define themselves in opposition to older, indigenous organizations of same-sex sexuality (where these exist). Such older forms are usually organized through alternative constructions of gender and various forms of gender-crossing behaviours.Co-existing with an identification with a global peoplehood is the simultaneous process of asserting localized, culturally specific forms of identity (Friedman, 1990: 311), a process Appadurai (1990: 295) describes as the indigenization of modernity. In Altman's work (1997), this is expressed by his informants' desire to assert a specifically identity in contrast to Western constructs and meanings. Attention to such differentiations is paralleled in recent deconstructions of the unitary homosexual subject, to analyses of the multiplicity of same-sex sexualities and ways of being gay. This article explores some of these processes among a group of Chinese men.The global emergence of a Chinese male social movement dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s. One measure of its development is the expansion in the number of Chinese groups or organizations both in Asia and throughout the Chinese diaspora from that period to the present. In 1981 there were a total of four predominantly Chinese organizations, one in Hong Kong and three in North America. By 1995, there were approximately 35 such groups distributed through eastern Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. These groups vary in their objectives and activities and are linked in a number of ways, particularly through the transnational movement of individuals and through the development of a now global Chinese media. In Europe, Australia and North America, these groups commonly identify themselves as gay Asian organizations. Gay Asian has come to be a widespread label of self-identification for men from a diversity of eastern national and ethnic origins although men of Chinese descent numerically dominate this category.I conducted ethnographic field work with one such organization and its constituent networks of Chinese men in Toronto, Canada in the mid-1980s. …