Performative authenticity: Chinese transgender people’s digital gender practices

Liu, Songyin (2023) Performative authenticity: Chinese transgender people’s digital gender practices. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

In the post-socialist Chinese context, where the state retreats from private sectors and the families and market intervene in reproducing the gender norms under the gender binary system, transgender people have limited visibility and marginalised social space. Against this backdrop, this study seeks to understand how digital technologies mediate Chinese transgender people’s everyday gender practices and shape online trans communities. To answer how such mediation works, I conducted fieldwork in three Chinese cities for 12 months from 2019 to 2020 including 75 semi-structured interviews and observation online and offline. This study finds that Chinese transgender individuals actively use different digital platforms and applications to articulate transgender terminologies within the online trans communities and negotiate with cis-normative gender regulations on non-conforming gender practices through alternative meaning-making and appropriation of linear temporality and liminal spatiality. Their everyday mediated and lived experience of time and space challenge both the cis-normative truth regime and the queer critiques of everydayness. And yet, trans-normativity emerges within online trans communities in the form of knowledge hierarchy and emotion regulations hierarchising the intelligibility and liveability of transness. In the growing normative online trans community, transgender individuals develop alternative relations with various forms of gender scripts through self-naming, -writing and -visualisation practices. Transgender authenticity is performatively constructed and experienced in the very digital gender practices which develop alternative relations with gender norms dominant in the cisgender society and trans communities. I propose the framework of performative authenticity to understand transgender individuals’ struggles, collective meaning-making and everyday resistance in depth, instead of transgender identity discourses. Hence, this thesis contributes to digital trans studies through complicating the boundary of man/women, materiality/discourse and essentialism/constructivism by centring understudied Chinese transgender people’s experiences against the backdrop of the imagining of an inclusive and progressive landscape of gender and reality.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2023 Songyin Liu
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
Sets:	Departments > Media and Communications
Supervisor:	Helsper, Ellen and Hildebrandt, Timothy
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4608

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