Zihao (Joseph) Zhou, a PhD student in the Department of Sociology, recently published a new article titled “Performing (Homo)Sexual Citizenship Under Authoritarian Rule: Gay Couple Vlogs and Everyday Intimacy in China” in the Journal of Homosexuality. Drawing on digital ethnography and reflexive thematic analysis, the article explores how Chinese gay male couples with their audience perform (homo)sexual citizenship through vlogs (known as “夫夫/fufu vlogs”) under conditions of state censorship, algorithmic surveillance, and legal marginality. Rather than seeking legal recognition, these couples enact what Zhou terms “Chinese authoritarian (homo)sexual citizenship”—a form of civic negotiation grounded in everyday intimacy, Confucian family scripts, bureaucratic mimicry, and symbolic belonging.
The article introduces the concept of “performative acts of citizenship” to theorize how everyday performances of intimacy—often hesitant, failed, or quietly coded—become tentative modes of civic presence under censorship. Rather than direct claims to rights, these acts negotiate visibility, belonging, and recognition through affective gestures that oscillate between compliance and resistance. In so doing, the article highlights how (homo)sexual citizenship is not merely asserted or denied, but continually refigured through ambivalent performances shaped by authoritarian governance. Zhou’s work contributes to digital sociology, queer studies, and citizenship theory by highlighting how mediated intimacy operates as a site of political meaning and cultural citizenship in contemporary China.
You can read this work via the following link:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00918369.2025.2529364