Abstract
This article explores the capacities of digital technologies to disrupt, redefine and multiply urban spaces, creating new ways of seeing and experiencing cities. Based on ethnographic research into the lives of men who desire men in Haikou, People’s Republic of China, and their uses of the location-aware dating app Blued, I show how the city is produced anew as a space imagined and engaged in relation to the perceptible presence of other men who desire men. In a sociopolitical context in which non-heterosexual lives are largely invisible in public spaces, the digitally mediated visibility of Blued users to one another invites a range of social practices through which urban spaces, as well as spatial categories of ‘the urban’ and ‘the rural,’ are reproduced at the intersections of sexuality, space and digital technologies. With its empirical focus on an ‘ordinary’ city in a non-Western context, this article challenges both the Eurocentricity of much digital geographies research and its tendency to focus on global cities.
Highlights
At around 10pm on a typically steamy April evening in Haikou, People’s Republic of China (PRC), myself, my partner Jerry and our friends Xiao Long, Ah Fan and Li Pei sat around a table amongst the mobile food stalls that gather every evening in a street opposite the South Gate of Hainan University
In Haikou, and Hainan more widely, the use of digital technologies by men who desire men is shaping what it means for a space to be seen as ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ and the imagined nature of sexual cultures therein
Operating in an already unfavourable economic and social context, this may threaten the sustainability of such spaces in Haikou; yet, there are instances in which the digital and the ‘traditional’ have emerged as intertwined
Summary
At around 10pm on a typically steamy April evening in Haikou, People’s Republic of China (PRC), myself, my partner Jerry and our friends Xiao Long, Ah Fan and Li Pei sat around a table amongst the mobile food stalls that gather every evening in a street opposite the South Gate of Hainan University. As in the above vignette, social relationships can be established on the basis of proximity in offline spaces and those spaces of proximity can be transformed; a ‘nearby’ swimming pool becomes a meeting place for men who desire men and a crowded night market becomes their hunting ground Such spatial reformulations are facilitated by digital technologies that layer new knowledge onto offline spaces. A total of 30 interviews were conducted with men aged 18–63 across Haikou, Sanya (a city in the south of Hainan) and various smaller cities, towns and rural sites This wider research sought to understand how men who desire men in Hainan negotiate understandings of themselves and their lives in relation to a range of everyday social and material contexts, amongst which digital technologies were key. Both I and my interlocutors use a range of terms to refer to same-sex desires and identities, including ‘non-heterosexual,’ ‘gay,’ ‘tongzhi’ (literally ‘comrade’; see Bao, 2018, pp. 28–32, for discussion) and ‘homosexual.’ I most often use the term ‘men who desire men.’ This is in avoidance of the assumption of stable identities inherent in the terms ‘gay’ and ‘tongzhi,’ the pathologising under-tones of ‘homosexual’ and the reduction of social experience to a sex act embodied in the more common term ‘men who have sex with men.’ These issues of terminology are complex and contested in cross-cultural sexualities research (see Boellstorff, 2007, for discussion)
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