On “old-young love”: age, class and male homosexuality in post-Maoist China

Abstract

The same-sex version of « old-young love » (laoshaolian) in post-Maoist China, characterized by an age difference between male same-sex partners, which infringes both age conventions and gendered prescriptions pertaining to eroticism, differs greatly from the forms of gay culture prevalent in the city centres frequented by the new Chinese middle and upper classes. Such liaisons, formed as a result of the sexual and affective ties established in the wider context between old « locals » and young migrant workers, and having their origins in the ordinary forms and spaces of a predominantly masculine, popular and intergenerational sociability, appear above all to be rooted in the context of post-Mao reform and the opening up of China, in which reconfigurings of discursive space, economic organization and social structure play a major part.