Bingchang Sun

Wolfson College PhD Scholarship

The Sexually Sociological: Gay Masculinity, Intimacy and the (Un)queer State

Supervisor: Dr Christian Sorace (Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge)

Abstract:

My research was one born out of frustration with the confused term, gay masculinity. It implies, on one hand, a naturalised ownership of masculinity by virtue of biological maleness and, on the other hand, a perceived differentiating regime that recognises the disruptions posed to masculinity by homosexuality. If we treat masculinity as a gendered configuration of practices materially and discursively conditioned in socio-political and historico-cultural becomings, and (homo)sexuality as a queering materialisation and potentiality structured around a desire ‘for the same from the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself’, then the unpacking of gay masculinity will reveal the complex dynamics between (homo)sexual politics and gendered subjectivation once subsumed and trivialised under the term, and necessarily complicate concepts and practices of family, kinship, intimacy, identity and subjectivity. Psychoanalysis is used as a mediating and explanatory device in my research that brokers the linkages between feminist epistemology and the sociology of homosexuality, by locating in the male homosexual subject’s psyche his ambivalent identification with, aspiration/attraction to, and repression by that which is masculinist, and his dubious position in the feminist ethics of equality, care, affect and intimacy.

I situate my research in the People’s Republic of China in an effort to contribute to ongoing feminist and LGBTQ+ research in the context of China and in a decolonial attempt that recognises that the queer and the geographical (in this case, the Chinese) bear on each other at all times. Tensions between a neoliberal market logic for individualization, which disembeds individuals from the traditional networks of family, kinship and socialist redistributive systems, and a collectivistic moral code, which demands political and cultural conformity and normativity, further cast queer Chineseness and Chinese queerness as historically diachronic and socio-politically contingent analytics of great relevance to research on masculinities, intimate relationships and family. Such sites of research, I argue, are where the socioeconomics, relations of inequality, cultural and political realities are consolidated, and therefore best problematised and revealed. What better ways to understand a masculinist state than to start with masculinities and its perceived opposition that cannot be named?

Academic Background:

MSc International and Asian History (Distinction), London School of Economics and Political Science

MA (Research Pathway) Gender, Society and Representation (Distinction), University College London

MA (Hons) Sociology and Social and Economic History (First Class), University of Edinburgh

Research Interests:

Sociology, Gender and Sexuality, Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities, Chinese Studies, Feminist epistemology, Intimate relationships, Kinship