Platformized production of homonationalism: An ethnography of queer media production in China

Abstract

Queer media production research, almost exclusively conducted in the western context, predominantly focuses on the queer-capital interplay and overlooks the role of the state in contexts where the state remains the dominant force in limiting LGBTQ rights. In bridging queer media production with homonationalism, this paper presents an ethnographic account of Danlan, the longest-lasting commercial queer media in China. We demonstrate that Danlan is experimenting with a nationalism-infused, non-confrontational, and de-westernized approach to LGBTQ visibility that requires it to align with the Chinese authority and distance from the framework of LGBTQ advocacy deemed western. Situated in the context of platformization, homonationalism also functions as a template for workers at Danlan to facilitate everyday production while minimizing political risks and increasing traffic, which further complicates its social-political implications. We understand this form of homonationalism as a quotidian platform practice that relies on intentional self-depoliticization and alignment with the state to sustain itself.

Keywords

Homonationalism platformization queer media production China positive energy pragmatic resistance

Introduction

On the evening of July 6, 2021, without prior warning, China’s biggest platform WeChat suddenly deleted dozens of accounts run by university LGBTQ organizations under the overarching accusation of violating public information service regulations (Yiu, 2021). When it happened, the first author was conducting fieldwork at Danlan, the longest-lasting queer media¹ in China. Despite our shock and concern over its potential impact on our work, our supervisor Kevin reassured us that “Danlan will be safe. If Danlan is at risk of being shut down one day, then there will be no room for any sexual minorities-related content all over China.” Indeed, despite the increasing censorship, Danlan has been safe and existed for over two decades. How does Danlan, China’s largest queer media, sustain itself in a hetero-patriarchal authoritarian regime that constantly censors LGBTQ content? What implications does it bring to advance or re-evaluate our knowledge of the interplay between queer sexualities and the state?

Founded in 2000, Danlan is the predecessor of Blued, China’s largest gay social app company. Over the two decades, Danlan has transformed from a community-rooted blogging website to commercially driven media that disseminate content on social media platforms like WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok). Its nature as a commercial company distinguishes Danlan from most queer media in China run by NGOs or grassroots activists, which gives it more incentives to comply with censorship. Hence, this paper investigates the quotidian platform production of Danlan and how, in this process, it appropriates the mainstream values of nationalism to navigate and survive the authoritarian regime.

This study is situated in the emerging scholarship of queer media production, which attends to the production mechanism of LGBTQ content and the lived experiences of queer media workers (Martin, 2018a). This body of work sheds light on the implications of mainstream and independent queer media to LGBTQ culture and activism (Ng, 2021). However, primarily focusing on the American and western European context, previous research omits the role of the state in queer media production in contexts where it remains the primary force impacting the living situation of sexual minorities. This paper speaks to the literature by studying the largest queer media company in China, Danlan. Engaging with the concept of homonationalism, which describes the incorporation of the nation-state into homonormativity, we illuminate the business-politics interplay within queer media production in the non-western context.

Drawing on a five-month ethnography, we argue that Danlan is experimenting with an approach to LGBTQ visibility under the nationalism framework, which requires it to align with the Chinese authority and distance itself from the western model of queer activism. Specifically, to align with the state, Danlan tends to (a) reiterate the government’s (even slightly) positive statement about homosexuality and avoids accusations against the system or structure and (b) only promote a “positive energy (zheng nengliang)” image of queers, even at the cost of reinforcing the gay men-centric hierarchization. Moreover, Danlan strives to de-westernize queer issues by distancing itself from not just the foreign or overseas actors (e.g., foreign embassy, foundation, NGOs) but also what is deemed the western framework of LGBTQ rights and advocacy.

In what follows, we first survey research on queer media production and point out how the predominantly US-European-based scholarship in this field neglects the role of the state in queer production. Then, we introduce literature on homonationalism, with close attention to those addressing the queer-state alignment in the global South. After the method section, we present our analysis of Danlan’s homonationalist production strategies in terms of how it aligns with the Chinese authority and distances from the approach to LGBTQ visibility that is deemed western. The following section situates the production in the platformized condition and examines the experiences and perceptions of workers at Danlan. Finally, we conclude by discussing the implications of Danlan’s homonationalist production and positioning it as a quotidian platform practice that is deliberately depoliticized to make itself sustainable.

Queer media production and the neglected role of the state

As a response to the primary focus on textual content in media studies, production studies have shifted focus to “take the lived realities of people involved in media production as the subjects for theorizing production as culture” (Mayer et al., 2009: 4). Following this, queer media production studies particularly consider “the production of LGBTQ imagery, the ways queers produce their own media both within and outside the ‘mainstream’ culture industries, and the ways queers work as oppositional readers of texts and paratexts” (Martin, 2018a: 7). Ng (2021) summarizes the emerging field of queer production studies in terms of commercial media (US), independent media (US), public media (western Europe), fandom production, and the transnational perspective, acknowledging that queer production studies are almost exclusively conducted in the US-European contexts. As we will demonstrate, factors enabling and/or constraining queer visibility vary vastly across different geographic contexts. Consequently, the primary focus on western LGBTQ-friendly countries in queer media production studies results in the enduring debate over queer-capital relations and neglects the role of the state that is equally or more powerful elsewhere.

The mutual-shaping relation between the civil rights movement and the commercially driven media is the main drive for the LGBTQ appearance in US mainstream media (Himberg, 2014; Martin, 2018b; Ng, 2013; Sender, 2004). In her study of gay marketing in the United States, Sender (2004), on the one hand, argues for the inseparable relation between LGBTQ activism and business to oppose the simplistic view of gay marketing as inevitably assimilating, but on the other, acknowledge the fact that market segmentation constructs the myth of LGBTQ people as a model sexual minority that is distinct from but not threatening to heterosexuals. Likewise, in his research on casting for gay roles in U.S. television, Martin (2018b) finds that casting directors appropriate “best actor” discourses to defend their hegemonic practices that cast gay actors only for the stereotypically flamboyant gay roles and leave the more masculine gay characters to heterosexual actors. The post-gay rhetoric conceals the still prevalent structural inequality in the industry.

As a critical response to the capitalist domination of queer visibility, American scholars have discussed the political potential of independent, limited-budget and community-based queer production (Christian, 2018; Coon, 2018; Henderson, 2008; Nault, 2018). Through studying a small, independent LGBTQ film-making company called Mythgarden and its well-received film Save Me that critically engages in the Christian ex-gay debate, Coon (2018) details the strengths of independent production to surpass comedic entertainment and generate in-depth dialogue at the intersection of sexuality and religion. Similarly, Nault (2018) examines the Austin-based indie film group called Three Dollar Cinema, which he argues offers a do-it-yourself and anti-capitalist approach to queer production. Nevertheless, both studies indicate the common and continual challenges faced by independent production regarding financial sustainability and mainstream co-optation.

Platformization constitutes a nascent force at play in queer media production, which is conceptualized as the penetration of digital platforms into the cultural industries in terms of market, infrastructure, governance, and cultural practices (Poell et al., 2022). Platforms indeed offer new opportunities for indie producers to cope with the barriers, including online crowdfunding, networked distribution, and fandom participation. Christian (2018) argues that web distribution, or what he terms “open TV,” fostered innovative ways of producing and marketing by unfettering mass distribution to those historically excluded from legacy TV production. Despite the openness, however, platforms are found to be effective in spreading intersectional narratives only when the language used is clearly articulated and readily comprehensible to algorithms and users (Christian et al., 2020). Moreover, content moderation on platforms like YouTube often follows normative gender ideologies and renders indie queer films inappropriate or less worthy of recommendation (Nault, 2018).

These studies offer valuable insight into the queer-capital interplay in the western context, in which mainstream media exposure risks monetizing LGBTQ visibility and constructing homonormative ideals that further disadvantage the multiply marginalized, while independent media with the potential to produce intersectional narratives and empower marginalized communities struggle to sustain. However, it remains understudied how this business-politics convolution of queer media production looks like in non-western countries, especially where the state plays a dominant role in limiting LGBTQ rights. This study contributes by factoring the often-neglected role of the state in queer media production. Moreover, not only is there too little research on queer media in the global South, but, in contrast to the US-European scholarship, it primarily focuses on community-based grassroots media (Bao, 2021; Bosch, 2007; Szulc, 2018) and queer fandom reading and (re)creation of industrial texts (Lavin et al., 2017). The almost exclusive focus on non-commercial media both stems from and reinforces the notion that LGBTQ identities are not yet widely accepted to be commodified and mainstreamed in the global South. Instead, this study explores how queer commercial media act as an intermediary within the queer-state-capital triangle in the authoritarian and heteronormative governance of China.

Despite the decriminalization and depathologization of homosexuality over two decades ago, the Chinese authority’s attitude towards queer issue remains highly ambiguous and LGBTQ media content still face precarious and stringent censorship often under the name of “abnormal aesthetic” or “abnormal sexual relations and behaviors” (Li and Zhang, 2017; Shepherd, 2018). In his prominent work on queer community and activist media in China, Bao (2021: 181) contends that they “involve emerging democratic practices and harbour new social formations.” With the increasing Internet control and censorship in the recent years, however, grassroots activists and NGOs have gone through a severe crackdown.

For the gay social apps company Blued, it not only complies with censorship but actively seeks cooperation and symbiosis with the state to survive (Miao et al., 2022). At the time of the fieldwork, Danlan was run by the Branding & Public Relation department of Blued. Supported by the company, Danlan was yet to generate revenue by itself. We understand it as commercial media because Danlan was under the pressure of commercialization and had long been operating in a commercial logic such as complying with regulation and pursuing traffic. Moreover, as the face of Blued, it functioned to build a positive corporate image and closely worked with and assisted other profit-generating departments. The unique position of Danlan enables an approach to the queer-capital-nation entanglement that is different from that of grassroots media in China and commercial media in western countries.

Queering the nation in the global South

Nationalism, or the nation-state, has long been perceived as an exclusionary force that endorses, if not enforces, heteronormativity. Recent scholarship has shifted attention to the alignment of queer sexualities and the state, namely, homonationalism, which Jasbir Puar (2017: 226–227) defines as “the use of ‘acceptance’ and ‘tolerance’ for gay and lesbian subjects as the barometer by which the legitimacy of and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated.” Puar’s original formulation of homonationalism is rooted in the political context of the post-9/11 United States when gay rights discourse is instrumentalized by the state to gloss over islamophobic policies, while the racialized others are disqualified and demonized as homophobes. The concept has been proved useful in explaining phenomena ranging from media representation (Jungar and Peltonen, 2017; Yildiz, 2017) to sexual orientation-based asylum (Llewellyn, 2017; Raboin, 2017). However, despite its extensive application (Schotten, 2016), homonationalism remains primarily articulated in the Euro-US context, and much less is known regarding the alignment of queerness and nationalism in the non-western contexts. If, as articulated by Puar (2013: 336), “like modernity, homonationalism can be resisted and re-signified, but not opted out of: we are all conditioned by it and through it,” then how do both queer subjects and the state in the non-western contexts respond to the condition of homonationalism that first emerged in the west?

The assimilative incorporation of non-normative sexual subjects into the hegemonic national framework has not been available in most non-western countries where anti-LGBTQ discrimination is endorsed by the state. However, homonationalism can be appropriated as a self-inclusion performance striving for an alternative framework of nationalism (Kulpa, 2014; Szulc, 2016). In studying why Polish homosexuals mourned a homophobic president, Kulpa (2014: 791) reads this performance of grief as an act of ‘queering the nation,’ which he refers to as “performing subversive and wilful acts of identifications that destabilize the (hegemonic) framework of nation.” Through identifications with their political enemy, queers in Poland bypass the fixed identity and include themselves into the national community that historically excludes them. Advancing this approach in digital spaces, Szulc (2016) conceptualizes the practice of ‘domesticating the nation online’ by LGBTQ websites in Poland and Turkey, which is accomplished through banal mediation of nationhood (e.g., country-code domains, national languages) and explicit coupling with national symbolism. This form of queering the nation via digital technology, Szulc (2016: 318) suggests, is unable to challenge hegemonic national discourse but serves to make “queers too feel minimally at home within this overarching narrative.” Moreover, queering the nation or homonationalism can also become a pragmatic strategy to survive and navigate the repressive political environment (Jung, 2021; Lazar, 2017). A prominent example is the Pink Dot movement, which, as an annual LGBTQ-inclusive public event in Singapore, develops a pathway that aligns with the nation-state discourses by emphasizing “nationalism, social harmony, normative family-orientedness, consensus-building and forging alliances with the heterosexual mainstream” (Lazar, 2017: 439). Hence, Lazar argues that homonationalism in the global South can be seen as “a discursive strategy employed by a queer subaltern constituency in ‘doing’ a politics of pragmatic resistance in an illiberal city-state” (Lazar, 2017: 420).

Counterintuitively, the homonationalist strategy can also be used by the nation-states conventionally considered homophobic. For example, some scholars have addressed homonationalism with “Chinese characteristics” (Kong, 2023; Ng and Li, 2023; Ye, 2023). According to what Kong (2023: 147) terms as pragmatic homonationalism, the Chinese government tolerates queer subject that “aligns with its nation-building discourse stressing family values and patriotic responsibility in a harmonious and HIV/AIDS-free society.” Pragmatic homonationalism is particularly manifest in the long existence of gay social app Blued, which has embedded itself into the state’s public health agenda, and PFLAG China/Trueself, which reworks the Confucian discourses of parental love and care rather than demanding human rights. Similarly, the CCP-owned English-language newspaper Global Times extolled the “Hit adaptation of Chinese ‘boys’ love’ novel debut[ed.] on Netflix” (Leng and Xu, 2019). Drawing on Alan Williams’ (2015) theorization of Boys’ Love (BL) culture as brand homonationalism—the incorporation of yaoi/danmei into the national soft power building—Ye (2023) and Ng and Li (2023) explicate the ways BL-adapted web dramas The Untamed and Word of Honor rebrand Chinese nationalism with the soft masculinity constructed in BL and reclaim traditional Chinese aesthetics for national branding while downplaying the texts’ homoerotic facets. Furthermore, Liu and Zhang (2022) trouble the single nation-bounded model and deploy the concept of homotransnationalism to complicate the queer-nation entanglement with the shifting geopolitics and intra-regional dynamics between mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

Thus, different from Puar’s initial observation of homonationalism in the US as enacted by the state and media, homonationalism in the global South often functions as a bottom-up act of queering the nation used by individuals (Kulpa, 2014) and NGOs (Lazar, 2017) to make themselves feel included or “homely” within the exclusionary national hegemony and survive the authoritarian regime that surveils homosexuality. We concur with this point and extend it to an understudied actor of homonationalism in the global South: commercial queer media. We offer an ethnographic account of how Danlan mediates and constructs the queer-nation alignment through its content production and address its implications for discussing homonationalism in China.

Method

This paper draws on an ethnography conducted from March to July in 2021. During this time, the first author worked as both an intern and a researcher in the Branding & Public Relation department of Danlan for 5 days per week, with their dual identity disclosed to most co-workers. Their job responsibilities included composing WeChat articles and Weibo posts, participating in filming for Douyin short videos, as well as assisting in PR campaigns. The direct and deep engagement in production work enabled them to better familiarize with the process of social media content creation. Moreover, the first author also befriended with the co-workers, joining their gatherings, and hanging out with them beyond the workplace and working hours.

The data informing our analysis mainly come from the field notes of the first author’s encounters and observation while working at Danlan, as well as the ethnographic interviews conducted with 11 employees in the department. Ethnographic interviewing requires that “researchers have established respectful, on-going relationships with their interviewees, including enough rapport for there to be a genuine exchange of views and enough time and openness in the interviews for the interviewees to explore purposefully with the researcher the meanings they place on events in their worlds” (Heyl, 2001: 379). In this study, ethnographic interviews were conducted as contextual conversations emerging out of the immediate interaction (e.g., discussing work or taking a coffee break) in an unstructured manner where questions asked were to address participants’ immediate interpretations or feelings in the moment. Specifically, the following two sections that presents Danlan’s production strategies draws from the first author’s first-hand working experience and work-related conversations with Owen (Danlan’s WeChat account editor) and Kevin (department head who oversaw the content creation team). The last part of analysis mostly draws on ethnographic interviews with the co-workers revolving around their meaning-making about their jobs. The analysis consists of two main phases: (a) initial coding to closely stick to the data and name the segments or incidents and, (b) focused coding to compare and synthesize different categories (Charmaz, 2006). Pseudonyms are used throughout the article.

Our analysis unfolds in three sections. The first two sections present Danlan’s homonationalist production practices and strategies in terms of how it (a) aligns with the Chinese authority in representing domestic incidents and (b) distances from the western actors and discourses of LGBTQ visibility. The third section then situates the production in the platformized condition to examine the experiences and perceptions of workers at Danlan, which we argue is necessary to further understand the implication of the homonationalist production. For convenience, in the following sections, the first-person singular “I” is used in narrating the fieldwork stories from the perspective of the first author.

Spreading queer “positive energy,” making the gay People’s Daily

This section focuses on how Danlan mediates and constructs the close alignment between queers and the state. We elaborate this homonationalist construction with three categories identified in Danlan’s production strategies, including acknowledging the authority, avoiding systematic accusation, and promoting queer “positive energy.” The strategies characterize Danlan’s vernacular imaginary of homonationalism as the gay “People’s Daily” in China. The People’s Daily is the highest state-owned newspaper that serves as the party-state’s major mouthpiece known for its blatant propaganda and one-sidedly positive representation. We contend that the positioning of Danlan as the gay People’s Daily characterizes its attempt to seek a politically safe presence for LGBTQ issues in China that is non-confrontational and aligned with national ideologies.

Acknowledging the authority

To align with the state, Danlan seeks and creates opportunities to praise the authority for its supportive stance on LGBTQ issues, which is not easy given the very few positive statements by the Chinese government. As an example, I once proposed to interview university LGBTQ organizations in Beijing and asked Owen and Kevin for approval. Owen did not object, but Kevin asked me to first find out whether they are officially registered organizations. I contacted the two biggest LGBTQ student organizations in Beijing and neither of them were “officially registered” in their schools. Kevin hence responded, “Then they do not stand for the official actions, but grassroots and oppositional (zaiye) groups. There are many [groups] like this. For example, there is a huge difference between ByteDance embracing diversity and some employees in ByteDance embracing diversity. If they are officially registered LGBTQ student organizations, then we can endorse the institution; if they are grassroots, then we will be endorsing the grassroots action.”

The proposal was turned down. With the strict regulation of student organizations in China’s universities, student groups need the endorsement from a department or institution to be officially registered, which in effects excluded politically sensitive groups such as a LGBTQ one. In another word, covering officially registered LGBTQ student groups serves to acknowledge the authority’s inclusive stance on LGBTQ issues. Conversely, writing about unregistered or grassroots groups risks being associated with the alternative camp potentially oppositional to the authority. For Danlan, the (non-)representation of (non-)registered queer student organizations is indicative of its efforts to recognize the rules set by the official institutions and to acknowledge the authority by observing the rules.

Avoiding systematic accusation

When it comes to negative incidents, Danlan usually performs selective representation and employs an individualistic framing to avoid the even slight accusation against the government or system. The juxtaposition of the production process of two articles perfectly illustrates this point. In March 2021, a student from a Beijing’s vocational school was reported to be bullied for his effeminacy and diagnosed with depression, which quickly gained traction in the LGBTQ community. I got in touch with and was about to interview an NGO that had formed a team of lawyer and social worker to help the student to sue the school for negligence. However, I was soon told by Owen that “sources from NGOs cannot appear in our articles. We cannot be seen as having a connection with them.” The final version of the article ended up merely describing what happened and then discussing an academic book about homophobic languages in U.S. high schools. The emphasis on the abstract mechanism of homophobia and the equivalence in a foreign country was approved and valorized by Kevin because “it is safe” compared with demanding accountability from the school or any official institution. Weeks later, with the NGO’s support, the student decided to sue the school. I asked Kevin again how to report incidents like this. He said, “This is something we won’t follow up with. When he is already out of the state of being hurt but still wants to expand its impact and make it a social event, there are already very complex forces behind. This is when we must withdraw.” I asked if he were referring to NGOs by “complex forces,” and Kevin said yes. In another incident in May, a zoo in Guangzhou refused a lesbian couple to use the couple ticket, and the couple exposed it on social media and was preparing to sue the zoo. In this article, I was able to interview the person involved and two legal scholars to discuss whether it violated same-sex couples’ rights. I also asked Kevin later why this incident was worthy of reporting. “First, the zoo is terribly wrong this time,” Kevin said, “Second, the zoo is a commercial company. There is little political risk for us to criticize it.”

Danlan’s different ways of dealing with the anti-LGBTQ violence/discrimination incidents involving public and commercial institutions manifest its intricate strategy in constructing queer-state alignment. Danlan has to speak up and respond to homophobic incidents in order to live up to the reputation as a prominent queer media and strengthen its connection with the community. But meanwhile, it is also imperative for Danlan to carefully negotiate the limit and boundary of criticism to maintain its non-confrontational and cooperative position to the authority. Both criticizing public institutions (e.g., schools) and working with grassroots NGOs are common approaches of LGBTQ advocacy and make perfect sense under the framework of visibility politics prevalent in the western countries. But in China, they bear the political risks of being perceived as expressing dissatisfaction or distrust towards the authority. A zoo, on the other hand, is a commercial entity that is not risky to denounce. By voicing for LGBTQ issues while toing the line, Danlan practices an alternative approach to queer visibility.

Spreading queer “positive energy”

Finally, Danlan strives to mainstream queer narratives by promoting the “positive energy” in relation to LGBTQ people. In so doing, Danlan constructs its vernacular imaginary of homonationalism as the gay “People’s Daily” in China. Initially popularized as a grassroots internet catchphrase, “positive energy (zheng nengliang)” has been appropriated by the Chinese party-state since 2012 as a hegemonic intervention into online public discourse and refers to “attitudes or emotions that are aligned with the ideological or value systems of the party-state, or any discourses that promote such an alignment” (Yang and Tang, 2018: 2). This study extends the discussion of positive energy to queer-state alignment.

The article I worked on about gay men with visual impairment can best illustrate this point. The first draft of the piece told the story of a visually impaired gay man who was unemployed and ditched by his partner after losing his sight. This draft was initially approved by Owen but rejected by Kevin in the last minute for reason that the story was “too personal and inappropriate to represent the overall situation of the population of gay with disability.” By personal, he meant miserable. Because his revision suggestion was to “add more positive content and some background information about visually impaired gay people on a macro level, and then talk more about metaphysical stuff at the end to encourage readers to pursue a better life.” I tried to argue that gay people with disabilities were indeed facing multiple discrimination and if we cannot directly touch on the structural issues, the least we can do was to tell the “personal” story of sufferings. Later, Owen told me stories like this would be acceptable on GaySpot (a well-known grassroots gay e-magazine in China), but not on Danlan. Frustrated, I said to him half-jokingly, “we [Danlan] only spread the ‘positive energy’ in the gay circle.” Owen reciprocated the joke, “we are like the gay People’s Daily.”

The positive energy discourse is employed by the state as an ideological project to both mobilize and limit public expression by interpellating self-disciplined subjects who internalize the state’s interests (Chen and Wang, 2019). How can sexual non-normativity be incorporated into the state’s discourse of positive energy? The queer positive energy that Danlan mobilizes indicates the positive sentiment about the living situation of LGBTQ people in China, which is purposefully prompted to align with the party-state’s ideological project of a stable and harmonious society. Stories of queer positive energy are typically those of romance and figures who have overcome the difficulties as LGBTQ people in China and managed to achieve a content life or mind state, as shown by the case above. Danlan endeavors to invoke such sentiment in its production to construct an alignment between queers and the state. Interestingly, Owen positions Danlan as the gay People’s Daily, which shows Danlan’s aspiration to manufacture and promote the queer positive energy. We thus contend that the gay People’s Daily marks a vernacular imaginary of homonationalism in China.

De-westernizing queer visibility

Chinese nationalism has long been formulated through the construction of foreign enemies. In the recent years, the party-state has frequently utilized terms like “foreign (hostile) forces” to target domestic opponents with allegations of foreign collusion (Chen, 2021). With little surprise, LGBTQ people are often vilified as “foreign forces” that promote western gender ideologies to, for example, curtail fertility rate and impede economy (The Economist, 2021). This is also what my interlocutors believed a primary reason why the Chinese government is so vigilant of LGBTQ rights. Thus, it is a strict rule of Danlan to show no association with foreign or overseas actors, including foreign embassy, foundation, and more broadly NGOs. For example, during my fieldwork, Danlan rejected the request from British embassy in Beijing to promote their pride month events.

For an article during the pride month, I once interviewed a Chinese gay studies scholar and, in the initial draft, cited his opinion about sexual minorities’ future in China and its entanglement with geopolitics. He said:

“Our tongzhi (a Chinese vernacular term for gay people) issue is highly interwoven with geopolitics…historically articulated with the west and with the United States. But now, with a rising and more confident China, we also want to have our own voice on tongzhi issue. It is an important issue during China’s ongoing transformation. Theoretically speaking, with an increasingly confident China, tongzhi people will have more and more opportunities as well.”

Despite being positive towards the state, however, this part was also removed. Kevin explained, “Don’t mention geopolitics and relations with the United States. Don’t associate LGBTQ issue with the west. His opinion is that China should have its own attitude towards sexual minorities. It is our own issue. Why do we have to mention other people?” Kevin’s words mark Danlan’s attempts to eliminate the entrenched LGBTQ-west link by minimizing the appearance of terms like “the west” and “the US” all together.

Besides the western actors, Danlan also strategically distances itself from the values that are deemed “western,” which include the human rights framework and advocacy model of visibility politics. When planning for the Pride Month campaign, the coordinator Eric told me, “Don’t mention ‘pride’ too much because it is a western value. What we want to convey is that we can provide such a platform where you can be yourself.” Kevin also cautioned that what we wanted was “returning back to the community, and not going to marriage, legislation, and rights.”

As Liu and Zhang (2022: 38) suggest, the automatic equation between queer liberation and the west is itself an effect of homonationalism. Danlan’s strategic alignment with the national discourse can be viewed as a response to the transnational condition of homonationalism. Against this backdrop, Danlan endeavors to distance from the western actors and values and seek an alternative mode for LGBTQ representation disassociated with the established framing of individual freedom and rights. It shares similarities with the Pink Dot movement in Singapore, whose organizers frame it as “an authentic Singaporean practice” that is distinctive from Western-style pride parades and appeals to traditional values of family, friendship, and love (Jung, 2021: 1235). This study also echoes Jung’s (2021: 1232) contention that the employment of national identity by marginalized groups cannot be simplified as assimilationist but instead a strategy of “pragmatic resistance” in authoritarian contexts. For Danlan, the non-confrontational and law-abiding practice is the practical way to effect changes under the authoritarian regime.

However, the desire to disassociate with “the western values” is shaped by and further reinforces the existing inequalities within LGBTQ community that privileges middle-class gay men and disadvantages others, especially trans people. In a weekly meeting, a co-worker Jason proposed campaigns for the upcoming International Transgender Day of Visibility. In response, Kevin reminded us to avoid the advocacy-oriented events:

“Because transgender people are the more invisible group within LGBT, it can easily become advocacy-oriented if we talk too much about them. This is what we want to avoid.”

Danlan brands itself as LGBTQ media but has historically been gay men-centered with its affiliation in a gay dating app company and predominantly gay men employees. Gay men-centricism, in this context, is tied to not only the hierarchy of visibility within LGBTQ communities but also the perceived political safety of visibility. In Danlan’s production logic, the more invisible one’s identity is, the more likely it will be associated with the visibility politics or human rights discourse that is conventionally deemed western, and hence the more politically risky it will be. In another word, the pragmatic resistance of homonationalist production ensures Danlan’s safety at the cost of precluding the visibility of those multiply marginalized.

Platformized production of homonationalism

In this section, we situate the homonationalist production in the conditions of platformization with a particular focus on the experiences and perception of content producers at Danlan under the impacts of social media platforms, or what Duffy et al. (2019: 2) term as platform practices—“strategies, routines, experiences, and expressions of creativity, labor, and citizenship that shape cultural production through platforms.” The fast pace and exploitative nature of platform production made them suspend the progressive ideas and strategically succumb to mainstream nationalism in the laborious and exhausting work setting. It is our contention that homonationalism serves as a template for workers at Danlan to facilitate everyday platform production while minimizing political risks and increasing traffic.

Although they do not have a spatial or temporal news hole to fill, commercially driven social media creators have a strong incentive to gain and retain their followers, which requires them to release new content frequently. In other words, social media workers are under the constant pressure to fill the “digital hole.” During my fieldwork, Danlan was expected to publish five WeChat articles each week and 4-5 Weibo posts per day. Besides the regular workload expectation, they also needed to take charge of campaigns for important dates or events. For most of my participants, working at Danlan is a laborious and underpaid job, and oftentimes a temporary one.

Many employees had ambivalent feelings towards working at Danlan. They enjoyed the inclusive environment enabled by Danlan, which had a special allure as the only LGBTQ company in China. But meanwhile, they were disappointed by the exploitative nature of the company. By the time of my fieldwork, Sam had worked at Danlan for over two years as a primary contributor to the WeChat account. He had a strong passion for writing gay-related content, which, however, induced contradictory feelings toward the job: “When I first came here, I was very enthusiastic about writing (for the WeChat account). But now I have better ideas about our department’s development, I am still told to do these tasks. So, I am very dissatisfied.” He called “these tasks” as “filling the account (tianchong gongzhonghao),” saying, “We shouldn’t find a topic this week and find another next week. [It’s] too scattered. All it does is to fill the (WeChat) public account. We should figure out what it can bring to our brand before operating the idea…[and] move forward with projects, which is more organized and effective.” He fought a lot with the editor Owen, for whom the priority was to meet the 5-articles weekly posting and readership expectations. The fast pace of social media production required Sam to write two pieces per week. He had to think of the topics on Monday, finish writing during the weekday, and publish them within the week. The accelerated tempo and heavy workloads made it impossible to practice his idea of program-driven production. Upon complaining about all the working pressures, Sam said, “I actually enjoy writing gay content; after all I’ve been in the (gay) circle for so long. But I wish there was another company…If there was a second LGBT company in China, I’d quit my job.”

Just like Sam, many others had gone through the transformation of mindsets from working for the community to “just a job” after feeling exploited and alienated from the community. I once asked co-workers Louis whether he liked his job. He responded:

“No. Many of us came here because of our identity, hoping to do something for the community. But once I got here, I realize that there is too little that I can change. I think it all benefited Geng Le (the CEO of Danlan). This company objectively changed the lives of gay people, but all Geng Le wanted was to make money.”

Many employees, who came here wanting to contribute to the community, were frustrated by the lucrative nature of the company that compelled them to conform to the authority. To cope with the politics-business tension, they had no choice but to suspend their progressive ideas, treat it as “just a job,” and succumb to mainstream value of nationalism in their daily work routine. This shift of mindsets of workers underlies the way Danlan tackles the queer-nation entanglement.

In this setting, conforming to homonationalism proves to be a feasible and efficient template that can facilitate the production routine. First, certain genres have been stabilized as categories that are safe, marketable, and easy to operate, among which the chief is the gay couple love story. Danlan once planned a “couple vlog contest” around the valentine day. One day during the call for submissions, Kevin excitedly asked all of us into the office to watch a proposal video from a participant, in which he took a daily selfie or short video of himself holding a “Marry Me” sign in front of his partner for 365 days without his partner noticing, and then played the video on the day of the proposal. Kevin was thrilled, “This is exactly the kind of content that we need!” For Kevin, the depoliticized appropriation of gay love stories is the safest and most contagious way to promote LGBTQ “positive energy” narratives because it emphasizes the sameness with heterosexuality and omits their different structural positions.

The genre of gay love story is highly rewarding also because it is easy to operate and can guarantee a decent readership, which made it a good option under the intense workload. Once I saw Owen threw at Sam the task to interview a gay couple and Sam took over the job very passively. So, I asked Sam why he was working on the story, and he replied in an indifferent tone, “I don’t know. I guess it is easy to write and can fill up the account. Fufu (husband-husband) story has traffic as well.”

Besides content, homonationalism as a facilitating production strategy also manifests in the article structure. At the end of each article, there is always a fixed ending paragraph that summarizes the (always positive) values of the whole piece. I noticed quickly after entering the field that the endings of different articles were always very similar. Owen later told me, “We like to ‘act as daddy (zuo baba)’ and teach our users what to do. So, we usually end with our own opinion.” Owen’s framing of “acting as daddy” vividly reveals Danlan’s patriarchal mode of thinking that imposes its hegemonic ideology within the gay community. Moreover, the ending section or “the opinion” of Danlan articles had always been to guide readers to think and live more positively and have faith in the future of LGBTQ people in China. Homonationalism serves to improve production efficiency because it offers a simplified template answer to all the questions, which is aligned with the state ideology of promoting a harmonious society, instead of investing time and energy to dig into the mechanism and solution of the complex realities.

Discussion and conclusion

As is demonstrated in Danlan’s production tactics, the mainstream discourse of nationalism is interwoven into the production of homonormativity to ensure sustainable LGBTQ visibility in China. In another word, Danlan is strategically appropriating the Chinese authority’s discourse and values system and distancing away from the post-stonewall framework of LGBTQ rights advocacy deemed western. The Chinese government has been keen to invoke Confucianism to secure its cultural leadership (Wu, 2014), emphasizing the building of a harmonious and stable society, maintaining familial harmony, and strengthening nationalist education at the individual level. Danlan has been constructing images of LGBTQ people that can be embedded in this dominant narrative (i.e., patriotic and loyal to the party-state, embracing traditional familial values, seeking dialogue rather than fighting for rights) and experimenting with a “positive-energy,” non-confrontational, and de-westernized framework of queer visibility, despite the risk of reproducing and reinforcing the hierarchy within the LGBTQ community. The effort is intended to legitimize the presence of sexual minorities in the Chinese government’s blueprint for a harmonious society that continues to exclude them.

This study speaks to the scholarship on queer-nation alignment or homonationalism in the global South. We concur with Lazar’s (2017) intervention to problematize the Northern-centric understanding of homonationalism. Puar’s (2013) initial conceptualization of homonationalism focuses on the discursive power of the (western) state and media in legitimizing their hatred, prejudice and even invasion against the national/ethnic/religious Other with the LGBTQ (non-)inclusion discourses.

In contrast, Lazar centers the viewpoint of grassroot queer organization under authoritarian state, discussing “how an LGBTQ movement yokes together homonormativity and nationalism as a political discursive strategy” (Lazar, 2017: 428). It is in the illiberal political-social environment that queer nationalism becomes what Lazar calls a politics of pragmatic resistance, as it “pragmatically toed the line, while pushing boundaries” and “opened up space for non-normative presence and recognition” while “strategically passing as normative” (Lazar, 2017: 439). This study on Danlan echoes this bottom-up view of homonationalism as pragmatic resistance in an illiberal context. However, what differs from Lazar’s case is that Danlan is a commercial media company, rather than an NGO, which makes its political implication more ambiguous.

What Kevin told me on the first day kept haunting me throughout my fieldwork. He said, “We are not an NGO, but we are also doing things. Among those who are still doing things, the reckless ones have all died. Our priority is to survive.” He made it clear that Danlan’s primary task is to sustain itself, rather than voicing regardless of consequences. Moreover, he positioned Danlan in the same camp as other civil society actors who are “still doing things.” In other words, such survival strategy is intended to be temporary and, when the political opportunities come, Danlan will join the fight. However, apparently, surviving does not automatically translate to contributing to the community. On the opposite, Danlan and Blued have long been criticized for making money out of gay people and only benefiting a small amount of privileged gay men. As a company, Danlan hardly has any ambition left to fight for the community. As is shown earlier, many participants had ambivalent feelings over whether they were strategically seeking survival to eventually contribute to the community or they had already internalized the censorship to continue the lucrative business.

The hybrid and even ambivalent implications of Danlan’s production strategies trouble the dyad of assimilation versus resistance to interpret homonationalism. We understand the form of homonationalism performed by Danlan as a quotidian platform practice that is deliberately depoliticized to make itself sustainable. As argued by Puar (2013), homonationalism is an assemblage of geopolitical forces, neoliberal interests, biopolitical state practices, and affective investments in rights discourses. In the Chinese context, the deliberate choice of associating homosexuality with nationalism has become increasingly common and been perceived as “a Chinese approach” to LGBTQ visibility and advocacy. Its ostensibly successful survival relies on its active self-depoliticization and alignment with the state ideologies.

Through engaging with homonationalism, this study brings the state into the current scholarship on queer media production and extends the discussion of political-business convolution to the non-western context. In the western countries, LGBTQ visibility in mainstream media is mainly driven by social movements and media corporations. Existing research has largely dealt with how commercial and indie media shape LGBTQ representation and hence forward or constrain LGBTQ activism (Ng, 2021). In her study of gay marketing in print media, Sender (2004) argues that business and politics have always been inseparable from each other. Gay marketers she interviewed dignified and politicized their positions as both professionals and activists: “their activism enhanced their professional expertise, and their work advanced the politicized project of GLBT visibility” (Sender, 2004: 76). Despite that, there remains the tendency to maintain the political/commercial binary that equates the commercial with the neoliberal corruption of queer movements (Savcı, 2016). Resonating with Sender’s argument on the mutual-shaping politics-business entanglement, this study also captures Danlan in a messy and contradictory position in terms of its inevitably political position in a state-endorsed heteronormative environment and its profit-seeking nature as a commercial company. Departing from Sender’s study, this study adds another layer of nuance to the queer-capital interaction by explicating the impact of the state in queer production. Rather than politicizing their identities and profession, workers at Danlan intentionally “depoliticize” their identities and content to secure LGBTQ visibility in China. The case of Danlan epitomizes the mundane but nuanced ways of what we discuss as ‘the platformized production of homonationalism,’ which yields a re-evaluation to the political/commercial dyad in queer media production.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jiacheng Liu

Note

Jiacheng Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in Mass Communications and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Their research mobilizes transnational trans and queer of color critique to examine how digital media interact with trans and queer culture and activism in China and Asian diaspora. Their prior works have been published in Information, Communication & Society, Feminist Media Studies, and International Journal of Communication.

Weishan Miao is a researcher from Research Center of Journalism and Social Development, Renmin University of China, and he is also an Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Renmin University of China. His research interests lie in the interplay between technology, culture, and society, especially with a focus on the Global South and a commitment to issues of marginality, inequality, and social justice. His work appeared in journals like Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, among others.

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