Guesthouse: Desiring China's Tongzhi

This study of the production of queer and socialist subject in China explores the material conditions that compel the national/public performance of desire in China under the banner of tongzhi. I did three months of fieldwork with members of Beijing’s queer communities using formal and informal interviews. Through use of locations and material objects as case studies, I work with the landscape of socialism with Chinese characteristics to reconceptualize normatively capitalist gentrification and understand how gentrification in Beijing, under socialism, is possible. I explore an increased circulation of signs and texts that have resulted in uneven material-knowledge conditions the reify the state through tongzhi. These findings have research lead to ways of conceptualizing homonormativity beyond Western queer theory and the production of bodies in society, as well as moving the research programme of gentrification away from capitalism and imagine it as existing under socialism.