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Individualism and Gay and Lesbian Subjectivity in Urban China
William Schroeder
In: American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting; 17 Nov 2010-21 Nov 2010; New Orleans, LA, USA. 2010.
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Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between individualistic notions of self and the production of gay and lesbian community and identity in Beijing. Though self-cultivation has long been a primary goal in Chinese moral philosophy, satisfying the self above others seems only recently to have made it so broadly into the public discourse. For gays and lesbians, the challenge remains how to integrate the pressures of a group-loyal and community-oriented queer social life, alongside corporate demands from others, with a growing sense that one cannot rely on anyone else to provide the tangible and spiritual necessities of a successful life. The widespread existence of individualist concepts of selfhood in contemporary Beijing challenges taken-for-granted assumptions about the relational nature of the Chinese person. Such concepts importantly convey how mental and physical spaces in which gays and lesbians establish community and imagine their future have been configured. Despite the emphasis gays and lesbians in Beijing continue to place on parental relations especially, they believe that this and other relationships begin with an understanding of the self as an individual and that the character of such relationships is based on choice. Whereas this understanding of choice has roots in neoliberalism, I argue that self-focused thinking is not an import -- a simple effect of globalization -- but a reformulation of long-standing ideas to which commercialization and consumerism have added various nuances.