‘Shanghai Goes West’: A Story of the Development of a Commercial Gay Scene in China

Abstract

From the outset, enquiry into gay political economy has grappled with the ambiguous relationship of capitalism to gay identity and existence (Binnie, 1995; D’Emilio, 1993;Escoffier, 1997;Knopp, 1992, 1995, 1998). After all, what has generally unfolded in the West is capitalism’s birth of conditions for an elite layer of gay men to claim a gay life through the market and for market relations to claim gay life (Evans, 1993). Oswin (2008) claims that early enquiry fails to critique the predominance of commercial gay space as white and male (e.g., at best deploying race as analogous to sexuality); whereas more recent work challenges the dominant narrative of radically colonized queer space by integrating a queer approach with feminist, post-colonial, critical race and materialist theories. Here in this chapter I develop my previous work on gay political economy, which moves beyond an Althusserian notion of gay commercial space as contained ideological incorporation of capitalist hegemony to that of space which exists through fluid and contradictory capitalist relations of capture and escape, constraint and possibility (see Bassi, 2006).