Queering the world factory : the study of gay migrant workers in a south China industrial zone

Abstract

China’s entry into global capitalism over the past three decades has opened up new spaces for non-normative sexual expressions and desires. Middle-class gay men’s experiences and lifestyles have become increasingly visible and accepted as the model of gayness. The vast majority of queer scholarship and activism in China has predominantly been occupied with urban middle-class sensibilities. Marginalized from the urban consumerist queer culture, working-class queers are believed to be closeted and unable to provoke social change. Drawing on a 12-month participant observation in an industrial zone on the outlier of a South China metropolis, this study aims to challenge metro/homo-normative tendencies in queer studies and heteronormative bias of labor studies by foregrounding the experience of working-class queer subjects. This study focuses on the rural-urban migrant men who self-identify with or practice all sorts of same-sex behavior and relations. By adopting a queer materialist perspective that interrogates the processes through which class shapes the sexual and gender formation of queer subjects in capitalist political economies, this study understands queer subjects as a process of sexual formation shaped and reconfigured in different regimes of capitalist accumulation. The queer materialist framework puts social reproduction in the center of analysis to understand how the organization of sexuality is constituted through divisions of labor and differentiated processes of dispossession in capitalism. Under the condition of precarious/informal employment and intensive labor control, rural migrant gay men have developed non-normative sexual identities, interactions, social relations, and temporalities out of their needs for survival and social reproduction. Instead of working continuously under strict labor discipline for minimum wage, gay migrant workers prefer unemployment as an alternative lifestyle of autonomy and freedom, enabling them to develop various kinds of same-sex relationships and communities. Contrary to the public belief that working-class gay men are all closeted and marrying women via “marriage fraud”, poor rural migrant men can hardly achieve heteronormativity, which requires men to contribute enormous savings for a marriage. Excluded from the heterosexist mode of reproduction and urban gay consumer space, gay migrant workers have to invent alternative means of reproduction and social support systems by carving out queer spaces of their own, including cruising parks, family clubs, and shared apartments with queer friends. Within these spaces, gay migrant workers creatively use sissyness as collective empowerment and resistance to heterosexist and alienating working conditions in the factory. As factory management tries to discipline male laborers by shaming them for not being masculine enough, gay migrant workers perform sissyness to rebel gendered labor disciplines on the shop floor. This research contributes to queer studies and LGBT activism by illuminating class as the essential force constituting queer subjects and community formation. Gay migrant workers have created sexual culture and communities of sisterhood and mutual aid and invented contested politics that challenge heterosexism and class exploitation. Bridging the gaps of queer studies and labor studies, their practices inspire us to develop new strategies of sexual politics that unite the communities of working-class people in the changing landscape of hetero-patriarchal capitalism.