Erototopic fantasies and far-right gender imaginaries among Chinese working-class male migrants in Africa

This article introduces the concept of ‘erototopic fantasies’: a colonial imaginary produced and mobilized within Chinese digital nationalism and platform discourse, which recruits Chinese male labourers by envisioning Africa as a heterotopic space where disenfranchised men can reclaim patriarchal authority and fulfil their dreams of marriage and sexual affirmation. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in East Africa, the study situates this imaginary within the global turn towards conservatism and anti-feminist mobilization and traces its unfolding in the postcolonial landscapes of South–South migration. Juxtaposing online narratives with offline practices, it follows erototopization from visual economies into everyday relations and governance apparatuses, where it reshapes Chinese men’s intimate relationships, reproductive choices, sexual practices and, at times, sexual violence. Integrating gendered racial capitalism, the affective politics of masculinity, corporate biopolitics, and decolonial reproductive justice, the article shows how working-class men perform masculinity through sexual commerce, romantic scams, and marital aspirations. It argues that the erototopic imagination of Africa produces a dystopian, self-destructive loop: it mobilizes men dispossessed amid China’s economic downturn and feminist resurgence, inflicts structural violence on African women and children, and extracts value from its own believers, whose bodies, labour, and desires are sacrificed within the machinery of racial capitalism.