From Discourse Representation To Identity Contention:a Study Of The Interaction Between Mass Media And The Chinese Gay Community

In recent years, no matter offline or online media, mainstream people or sexual minorities, people have experienced a proliferation of gay discourse in media. This research explores the discourse representation since the early years of Republic of China in the mass media including newspapers, magazines, professional journals, books, and pamphlets etc. and moreover to scrutinize the interaction between new media such as the Internet and the gay community in mainland China from the perspective of media discourse and contentious space, especially the online activism of the contention of subcultural identity. Through discourse analysis and an ethnographic approach, the author hope to expose the historical change of the representation of the Chinese gay people, as sexual minorities, in the mass media discourse, which is an epitome of the evolution of the notion of homosexuality held by the whole Chinese society. And at the same time, this research also tries to show, in the era of the Internet, the abundance and diversity of the community life and contentious practice of the Chinese gay people, including the conflict between tradition, modern and postmodern, the tension between the global and the local, the interaction between the online virtual reality and the offline physical world, and the agency of the individual and the community therein.The author found that in the past a hundred years since the foundation of Republic of China, the gay discourse in mass media has been the matrix of a superimposing mechanism, in which different discursive systems such as perversion, moral decay, counter-revolution, vice of capitalism, social morbidity, and AIDS were superimposed. As sexual minorities, they were always rendered as the scapegoat of some severe social problems. Gay people in mainland China were plunged into imparity by the mainstream heterosexual society and this was realized mainly through the establishment of a productive mechanism of discursive imparity rather than the power of legislation or law enforcement. Before the 1990s, more and more new discursive systems joined a discursive league of stigmatization against the gay people and since the middle 1990s, one of the focus of the gay contentious activism has been disintegrating this league by challenging and eliminating those negative discourses in the league. At the same time, the activists from gay community and their allies has been trying to combine different positive discourses to create a league of liberalism for the gay people. Delightedly, in recent years, more and more mainstream media has improved their discourse representation of the gay people since the consciousness-raising of the political correctness.The discursive strategy, which as a counter-discourse technology including the strategic interpretation of the media texts and the online collective personal narratives, has always been a way of contention for the gay people and their allies while encountering a discursive oppression inflicted by the mainstream society. That the Chinese gay people employ the Internet to facilitate their subcultural activism of the contention of their identity is a significant part of the contemporary Chinese gay movement as well as a necessary foundation of the development of that movement. The Internet enables a virtual contentious performance, which outdoes the traditional way of contentious performance that calling for a collective existence of the body. The normal online individual symbolic contentious repertoires for the gay community members are forwarding, replying, following, and personal narrative etc. and online gay alternative media is an important collective contentious practice for the gay people. However, on the one hand, the pursuit of eyeball economy by the online commercial mainstream media may contribute to the reinforcement of the stereotype of gay people via entertaining discourse, on the other hand, the counter-gay discourses employing the conservative resource from religion, medicine and tradition, are expanding their influence via the Internet. So we must avoid immersing ourselves in the exhilaration rising from the utopianism of the Internet.Finally, although this research explores the relationship between the media and the gay community from a perspective of discourse representation and contention of identity, the author is more willing to see this relationship as a continuous changing interaction rather than representing and being represented, or a contentious subject and a contentious tool. This interaction has been basing on a "long revolution" of the Chinese society, which has been a structural transition, since more than a hundred years ago.