Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Elisabeth Engebretsen

Ph.D. (Anthropology), Fellow until 2013.

Mailing address:
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
P.O. Box 4
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland

Tel +358-(0)9-191 23501               
Fax +358-(0)9-191 24509
Email  elisabeth.engebretsen(AT)helsinki.fi

Selected publications

Curriculum vitae

Research profile

 

Areas of Expertise:

• China, East Asia
• Queer China: theories, histories, politics, ethnographies
• Transnational theories of gender, sexuality, and kinship
• Critical feminist theories of subject, identity, and difference
• Geographies of belonging and exclusion
  

Research Title and Abstract:

The cultural politics of ‘peripheral’ sexuality and space in metropolitan Beijing

Concerns over the limits of personal freedom, intimate aspirations, and sexual diversity are central to political, media, and activist debates over national identity, social stability and change in the People’s Republic of China. With rural-urban transformations and socio‐economic reforms in the post‐Mao era, alternative visions of identity, lifestyle, and ‘authentic’ culture have emerged. Starting in the early-to-mid 1990s, homosexuality has rapidly expanded from being conceptualized as individual psychiatric condition and immoral affliction in dominant and mainstream discourse, to include tolerant views of ‘queerness’ as a progressive cultural lifestyle, and linked to desirable middle-class consumer lifestyle and urban modern citizenship. ‘Tongzhi’ (“queer”)  communities and social activism are established in numerous cities throughout the country, but continue to experience governmental censorship, crack-down, and social-familial pressure toward conformity.
Against this background, this project explores aspirations for ‘the good life’ on the part of tongzhi individuals, couples and families, and social-political activists. A critical dimension to this study, building on interdisciplinary work on urbanization in China and the rural/urban dynamic, is the exploration of queer life and activism in Beijing’s suburban, outlying, and newly developed districts. From the perspective of sexual and spatial periphery, then, the project asks: what makes for the good life in post‐millennial, metropolitan Beijing, and how do tongzhi conceive of its meaning and contents in symbolic, spatial, and material terms?

The aims of the project are mainly three-fold:

• to develop a ‘queer China’ approach that goes beyond analyzing queer identity and community as a counter-culture to Chinese normativity and ‘the state’, but showing, rather, how the production of sexual normativity and non-normativity in post-millennial China intersects with with gendered, classed, and spatial (rural/urban) subjectivities, which in turn are practiced and conceived within narratives of national modernization vis-a-vis the global arena;
• to contribute a critical ethnographic analysis of China scholarship that seeks to expand the conceptual, cultural, and political meanings away from a homogenous “China,” and toward an inter-regional (the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Chinese diaspora) and transnational dialogues;
• to contribute interventions into dominant (Anglo-US-centric) queer theory that tends to sideline ‘queer China’ unless positioned as cultural, temporal Other.