GEXcel Gender Talks Series (i samarbete med Sociologi)

Dr Weiyi Hu, Sydney University, Australia.

"Reflections on Chinese Sexuality" 

How is sexuality experienced in contemporary China? This seminar notes that most of the seminal writings on sexuality are produced in the West, and that the definition of sexuality is largely theorised by Western scholars. Contemporary studies of Chinese sexuality rarely problematise the Western theorising of sexuality. Chinese sexuality is perceived either as the Other or as a mere appendage of the existing Western discussion of sexuality. The connections and tensions between China and the West in producing knowledges of sexuality is often unexplored.

The aim of this seminar is to sketch an alternative approach that questions the unreflective reliance on Western understanding of sexuality, and to cut through a cluster of dualisms, such as East and West, in theorising Chinese sexuality. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of field and habitus, sexuality is analysed as a disposition, as contingent bodily experiences that include, but are not confined to, the conventions of sexual intercourse or erotic desire. Sexuality, it is argued, encompasses a much broader range of experiences in everyday life, some of which are seemingly non-sexual, such as familial codes of honour and shame.

In this seminar, I also combine Xiaomei Chen’s concept of the Chinese Occidentalism discourse and Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital to elucidate the connections and tensions between China and the West. Drawing on fieldwork, I argue that within contemporary Chinese culture the meaning of sexuality experienced in everyday life is charged with tensions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. A key source of the intension is that the Occident is regularly deployed by social agents as symbolic capital to critique and challenge the official government and orthodox interpretation of Chinese identity, family, and sexuality. The Occident symbolic capital offers social agents in contemporary China alternative ways of perceiving and experiencing sexuality.

Weiyi Hu is a sessional facilitator at the University of Sydney, where she recently completed her doctorate in the social sciences. She is interested in the sociology of everyday life, sexuality, feminism, and familial relations in contemporary China. Born in Shanghai, she is fascinated by the complex ways that the Occident (West) is perceived, imagined, narrated, and experienced by Chinese peoples.