‘Now You Can See Who’s Around You’: Negotiating and Regulating Gay Intimacies on Mobile Media in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

This chapter explores relationships between mobile media and social and sexual intimacies for gay men in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I pay particular attention to the location-aware gay dating app Blued and what gay men perceive to be its impacts on their self-understandings and intimate relationships. On one hand, mobile media offer gay men in the PRC pervasive access to one another, engendering feelings of community, belonging, and authenticity. On the other hand, the newfound visibility of gay men online raises fears of being ‘outed’ and the uses to which mobile media are put are the subject of intense debates amongst gay men about ‘in-/appropriate’ forms of social and sexual intimacy. These contradictory dynamics highlight the paradoxical function of mobile media for gay men in the PRC as a space within which intimacies are both negotiated and regulated.