ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a historical overview of the emergence of homosexuality in China’s postsocialist era. It assembles historical materials, including academic publications, legal documents and media reports to trace the emergence of gay identity in the 1980s and 1990s. Using a Foucauldian discursive approach, this chapter suggests that a multiplicity of discourses in this period, primarily medical, sociological and media discourses, constructed homosexuality as a medical category and gays and lesbians as a distinct group of people. This chapter also argues that the emergence of gay identity in China can be understood as part of China’s imagination of modernity in the postsocialist era, and such an imagination is fraught with tensions with China’s socialist past.
