Being Chinese: contested experiences of sexuality in contemporary China

Abstract

There have been many previous scholarly works on Chinese kinship, family, marriage, and interpersonal relationships. Studies of Chinese sexuality, however, are both limited in number and scope, and often conceptually inadequate. These enquiries tend to interpret sexuality as what social agents do, and as constructed by traditional cultural norms and governmental policies. When theorising Chinese sexuality, they fail to cut through a cluster of dualisms between objectivity and subjectivity, the abstract and the concrete, structure and agency, as well as East and West. Chinese sexuality is routinely analysed as pure and Othered: uncontaminated by Western sexuality. This thesis instead uses an alternative approach to examine the everyday experience of Chinese men, women, and their sexuality in the current globalised context. It investigates how such experience is shaped by distinct social institutions, primarily the family. In contrast to previous studies of Chinese sexuality, in this thesis, sexuality is theorised as contested bodily experiences. These bodily experiences are demonstrative of both what social agents do and who social agents are. By situating the investigation in the contingent relationship between China and the West, the dissertation aims to reveal the effect of such relational contingency in producing the reality of sexuality that Chinese people experience in the contemporary context. The study employs a feminist appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework of field and habitus to investigate the dynamics between structure, dispositions, and agency. It combines Xiaomei Chen’s concept of the Chinese Occidentalism discourse and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital to highlight the significance of the West (Occident) in the everyday interpretation and formation of Chinese sexuality. The research embraces a qualitative approach: the empirical data was collected via in-depth interviews with more than thirty informants, and six months of occasional field-observations in Shanghai, China. The main finding is that within contemporary Chinese culture the meaning of sexuality experienced in everyday life is charged with tension between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The analysis of the qualitative data is written in three parts. The first section analyses the informants’ perception of family, identity, and sexuality. It highlights the way the Occident is deployed by social agents as symbolic capital, to critique and challenge the official and orthodox interpretation of family, identity, and sexuality. The Occident symbolic capital enables social agents to define their own version of what they do and who they are. The second part follows the informants’ definition of the Chinese family and uses Bourdieu’s notion of field to sketch the family field as revealed by the narratives. It probes the structural positions, and the relational dynamics amongst these positions within the family field. It shows that the family field structurally shapes and curbs the social rhythms of a Chinese person’s life, and thus is indispensable in producing the orthodox experience of sexuality. Yet, such orthodoxy is contested by social agents in different ways for different reasons. The final part examines the everyday experiences of sexuality by demonstrating the structuring of sexuality within the family field. It shows that sexuality, considered as a disposition and an embodied habitus, is ‘predictably novel’: an effect of the dialectical interplay between structure and agency. This ‘predictable novelty’ marks the way that sexuality is experienced as both what social agents do and who social agents are, and that sexuality is not ahistorical, unambiguous, or a universally valid experience.