ABSTRACT
Engaging the gaze in the gay community I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it.
(Vertov, cited in Berger 1972, p. 17)1
As a fi eldworker researching the articulation of same-sex identity in Beijing, I entered the fi eld with an anthropological gaze and with assumptions, or possibly misconceptions, about the Other. Admittedly, I was gazing, with voyeuristic pleasure, at the same-sex community in Beijing that had typically been cast as a marginalised group. This community was, to some extent, aware of my anthropological gaze. At times, I too was being observed. This was the ‘gazer being gazed at’, where the role/power relationship between the two parties was reversed. Mutual gaze was defi nitely crucial to the everyday social experience of my fi eldwork, as this chapter will explain.
