Paper Title
Transnational Queer Labor: The “Circuits of Desire” of Money Boys in China
Keywords
- transnational queer labor
- money boys
- rural-to-urban migration
- postsocialist china
- queer migrants
- sex work
- male sex workers
- scattered hegemonies
- transnational sexualities
- neoliberalism
- sexuality and labor
- masculinity
- desire
- fantasy
- queer subjectivity
- market economy
- heteronormativity
- globalization
- migrant queer identity
- sexual politics
- resistance
- cosmopolitanism
- sexual economy
- intersectionality
- class and sexuality
- queer china
- circuits of desire
- queer capitalism
- queer
- sex
Journal
Research Impact Tools
Publication Info
Volume: 49 | Issue: 1 | Pages: 139–144
Published On
March, 2011
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Abstract
f you go to a gay bar in any big Mainland Chinese city like Beijing, Shanghai, or Shen- zhen, you will find a lot of young men with fashionable haircuts, form-fitting T-shirts, and tight denim jeans combined with other accessories to conspicuously show off their fit bodies. You may be warned to watch out as some of them may be "money boys" — the local parlance for men who sell sex to other men. If you browse any gay websites, you will eas- ily be distracted by the display of semi- or completely naked advertised male bodies, who may look like a boy next door, a pretty young fellow, a muscular stud, a sportsman, or even a "bear" that fulfills all your fantasies. Who are these money boys and how do we understand this postsocialist labor in the con- text of China's tremendous transformations over the past few decades since the reform era?: How do we understand these transient queer subjects under the thesis of transnation- alism when China has become the world's factory and increasingly of importance in the global political economy? Money boys are rural-to-urban migrants born in the reform era. They bear three stigmatized identities- rural migrant, sex worker, and men who have sex with other men—and are caught in the web of domination under the new reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and the market economy since the reform era. Money boys illustrate the contradictions in the process of liberalization, modernization, and cos- mopolitanism in globalizing China. Transnationalism captures the asymmetries of the globalization process, which is a highly uneven and spatially differential process? that reproduces powerful inclusions, exclusions, and even "inclusive exclusions"' of the seemingly multiple interconnected worlds. Trans- national sexuality studies examines "scattered hegemonies," the notion of multiple, fluid, and interlocking structures of domination-e.g., capitalism, nationalism, racism, sexism. patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc. -which are embedded in the complicated process of globalization. Transnational sexualities thus looks at new patterns of inequalities and con- temporary resistance along the lines of class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, work, locali- ty, etc., within and outside the nation-state. The money boy is a figure embodying multiple intersections of "scattered hegemonies" such as the reconfiguration of socialist ideology with neoliberalism, which produces a massive flow of rural-to-urban migrants but deprives them of status and benefits if they live in cities; the promotion of the market economy.
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