Lesbian identity and community projects in Beijing: notes from the field on studying and theorising same-sex cultures in the age of globalisation

Abstract

"This paper is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork for my PhD in Anthropology, and is a research project that investigates same-sex desire and cultures among women in Mainland urban China, mainly in Beijing and on the Internet. The ambitions with this project are for one to contribute knowledge about the variations and similarities in human sexuality and culture, by way of studying a rarely prioritised category of people (lesbian-identified women) in a relatively seldom studied locale (urban China). And second, I hope to connect ideologies about sexual identity to wider social and cultural economies of change and inter-exchange in this particular moment in history often referred to as an age of ‘globalisation’."