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I fantasized that there would be a place where homosexuals can converse and interact freely. I fantasized having a lover. But fantasy is not real. In reality, homosexuals do not automatically love all other homosexuals. They choose their partners just like heterosexuals. But where can I find them? In this wide world, all homosexuals hide their true identity. It is so much more difficult for a homosexual to find his ideal partner than a heterosexual. I sometimes was tempted to openly seek a homosexual friend. But how can I? I do not think a homosexual person will do any harm to the country and other people. But why can’t we openly discuss homosexuality? We should provide ways for exclusive homosexuals to contact one another. I sincerely wish that our country and related governmental agencies could openly show their concern about our problems. (Letter 8) (Ruan 1991, p. 128) This is quoted from one of the fifty-six letters that Ruan Fangfu, a medical expert in China, received from readers who responded to his article “Homosexuality: An Unsolved Puzzle” (Tongxinglian: yige weijiezhimi), published in 1985 in one of the country’s popular health magazines, To Your Good Health. In the letter, the gay respondent yearns for a space where homosexuals in China can get in touch with each other freely. To him, it is an unattainable fantasy. Twenty years later, the fantasy has almost turned into reality. Since the economic reform period, many formerly condemned sexual practices have started to surface in public discussions. New terminology, implying new ways of understanding, are being used to relocate non-normative sexual practices to a conceptually neutral position. Terms such as “tongxingai” (homosexual love), “tongxinglian” (homosexual love or people), “duoxinghuoban” (multiple sexual partners), “hunwailian” (extramarital love), “yiyeqing” (onenight stand) have become some of the fast adopted expressions in everyday as well as formal contexts. This public naming has had the effect of introducing the formerly “private” beings or practices or those that had been confined to the invisible, private spaces into public discussion and regulation; as a result of which, new sexual subject positions are inaugurated by new ways of conceptualization . Harriet Evans (1997) analyses how dominant discourses in Chapter 2 Public Discussions 40 Shanghai Lalas communist China interact with the changing subject positions of gender and sexuality, . . . texts are effective not through their “message”, their “content”, but through the explicit and implicit, conscious and unconscious, positions they make available. The “gaps and silences” are as important in shaping the interpretative possibilities as the explicit terms of the narrative . . . So, with particular reference to China, whether in the constrained ideological atmosphere of the 1950s to the early 1970s, or in the more consumeroriented context of the last ten years, the dominant discourses and the practices they inform have established the broad parameters within which women and men become gendered and sexualized subjects. Whether or not individual persons consciously acknowledged the dominant gender categories of these discourses, they also participate in reproducing them by making representations and self-representations—both consciously and unconsciously—with reference to them. (Evans 1997, p. 19) Public discourses regulate the visible (and invisible) boundaries onto which one can project possible forms of life and where one locates oneself in the changing contours of social acceptability. The changing official representation of sexual subjects also implies changing forms of social control over sexuality . The new public attention accorded to homosexuals is a direct result of the drastic changes that have taken place in the social, cultural and economic aspects in China in the past two decades. The newly acquired geographical mobility, economic freedom and information technology have created a material reality that enables the practice of alternative lifestyles and the formation of new sexual communities. For the first time, homosexuality can appear in the dominantly heterosexual public space as an independent category of people. Lesbians and gay men have even succeeded in creating a public space of their own on the Internet and later in the offline world. In the following part, I will map out a few major discursive sites where the public discussion and representation of homosexuality are carried out in contemporary China. From Patients to Subjects of Public Health Experts from different domains have long been major producers of sexual discourses in China. Among them, experts from the medical, academic and legal disciplines are the most significant sources of knowledge production on homosexuality and sexuality in general. During the reform period, there arose a state-directed interest in...

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