MACMILLAN The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan: Sociality, Space and Time (Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences)

Review “With its rich ethnography and nuanced analysis, Cummings’ book vividly documents the everyday lives and self-understanding of gay men in Hainan. Not only is it a timely intervention into the metrocentric focus of LGBTQ studies in mainland China, but also a further reminder of the importance of immediate, interactional and spatial contexts within which being non-heterosexual becomes possible.”―Wei Wei, Professor of Sociology, East China Normal University, China “This is a welcome addition to the literature on queer lives in China. Where most prior research has focused on the major cities of Eastern China, this study takes us to a quite different location: the island of Hainan. It offers a sensitive and often moving account of the everyday pleasures and challenges of finding spaces of belonging and negotiating the constraints of a highly heteronormative social environment.” ―Stevi Jackson, Professor of Women’s Studies, University of York, UK Product Description “This book explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. It explores what it means for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’, how internet and mobile technologies figure in their everyday processes of sexual categorisation and how these men negotiate orientations and disorientations towards the future in relation to dominant heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction. This book offers vital insights into the production and restriction of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings, while addressing universal questions of how certain ways of living are enabled and curtailed in living together with others through powerful conditions of uncertainty and precarity. This book will be of interest to scholars in LGBTQ studies, particularly those with a focus on same-sex intimacies and identities in China.” From the Back Cover “This book explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. It explores what it means for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’, how internet and mobile technologies figure in their everyday processes of sexual categorisation and how these men negotiate orientations and disorientations towards the future in relation to dominant heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction. This book offers vital insights into the production and restriction of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings, while addressing universal questions of how certain ways of living are enabled and curtailed in living together with others through powerful conditions of uncertainty and precarity. This book will be of interest to scholars in LGBTQ studies, particularly those with a focus on same-sex intimacies and identities in China.”James Cummings is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of York, UK.  About the Author James Cummings is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of York, UK.