China’s heterosexual politics: between ambiguities of governance and everyday injustices
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- RB01
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
Sexuality may seem a marginal to the analysis of Chinese society; we maintain that it is not.
In our forthcoming book, The Gendered Politics of Sexuality in China, we argue that both the governance and lived experience of sexual life are central to understanding Chinese society today.
We see sex as political in two senses. First, in terms of politics writ large, we are interested in how sexual relations figure in government policy and propaganda but also how aspects of everyday sexual life have implications for party-state rule and national aspirations. Secondly, in the spirit of the personal being political, we attend to the gendered and classed micropolitics of interpersonal interactions and relationships in both private and public spheres.
A key element of our analysis, and the focus of our talk, is a critical stance on the institutionalisation and practice of heterosexuality in China. Heteronormativity, of course, has been subject to intensive analysis, mainly by queer scholars – in China as elsewhere – but there is more to heterosexuality than its normativity and, indeed, more to it than its sexual (erotic) elements. Critiques of heterosexuality in the wider sense have come almost exclusively from western scholars, yet heterosexuality does not take a single invariant form at all times and in all places; it is affected by cultural and historical legacies as well as by local politics and socio-economic conditions.
The most obvious loci of heterosexuality’s institutionalisation and practice, especially in China, are marital and family relationships, yet it extends beyond them, including into the gendered structure and practices of the labour market. While the interrelationship between familial and workplace gender inequality is widely recognised by feminist scholars in both the West and China, what is less often recognised, though implicitly assumed, is the heterosexual ordering of these interconnections.
In making these explicit we will explore how heterosexuality has been regulated by the party-state and why this matters politically, as well as the ways in which everyday heterosexual practices in families and workplaces are significant for China’s political economy. In developing this argument we will make it clear that this is not some neatly integrated system; regulation, along with the push for economic growth, produces unintended consequences, tensions and contradictions, while heterosexuality itself is multi-faceted and variable in its everyday meanings and practices. Even under authoritarian rule, everyday (hetero)sexual life is not always responsive to the requirements of the state.
Registration
This event is open to the public and free to attend, however registration is required. Please note that this event is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.
Organiser
About the speakers
Stevi Jackson is Professor Emerita in Sociology at the University of York. Her research interests include families and intimate relationships, the sociology of gender and sexuality and feminist sociological theory, fields in which she has published extensively. She is the author or co-author of seven books including Heterosexuality in Question (Sage 1999), Theorizing Sexuality (with Sue Scott, Open University Press, 2010) and Women Doing Intimacy: Gender, Family and Modernity in Hong Kong and Britain (with Petula Sik Ying Ho, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Her five co-edited collections include, with Sue Scott, Gender: A Sociological Reader (Routledge, 2002), and with Jieyu Liu and Juhyun Woo, East Asian Sexualities: Intimacy, Modernity and New Sexual Cultures (Zed Books, 2008). Over the last decade she has focused increasingly on East Asian societies.
Kailing Xie is an Associate Professor in the School of Government at the University of Birmingham. She specialises in gender, intimacy, and everyday politics in China, examining heterosexual governance, nationalism and the social, cultural and political tensions underpinning China’s rise through a gendered lens. Her earlier research focused on the lasting impacts of the One-Child Policy on urban, middle-class, highly educated women, presented in her monograph, Embodying Middle-Class Gender Aspirations: Perspectives from China’s Privileged Young Women.
Chair
This event will be chaired by Jieyu Liu, Professor of Sociology and China Studies, SOAS University of London.
Contact
Email: sci@soas.ac.uk
Image credit: Yiran Ding on Unsplash
