Queer presence/absence on the periphery: Insights from Hainan

It is widely recognised that queer research has historically favoured major metropolitan centres. This has led to now well-established literatures on queer lives in smaller cities, towns and rural areas in Western contexts. However, there remains a lack of research on such peripheral settings elsewhere in the world. In response, this article explores the lives, identities, spaces and practices of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As an economically less developed region and one with limited queer community infrastructures, Hainan can be considered a sexual periphery within the PRC vis-à-vis those cities that have been the focus of most existing research – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, which have relatively developed and long-established commercial and activist queer scenes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I show how gay lives in Hainan are lived through an array of tensions, between visibility/invisibility, knowability/unknowability, connection/isolation and more, that I collectively describe as queer presence/absence. These tensions contrast with conclusions draw from research in the PRC’s major urban centres, which have foregrounded the emergence of relatively stable and visible gay identities. Understanding queer presence/absence in Hainan, as an example of queer lives in peripheralised settings, expands not only the empirical and geographic horizons of queer research but also contributes to conceptual debates on the ontological status of sexual identity and being.