Panel 13: Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary China

Chair: Xian Wang, University of Notre Dame

Panelists

Zoey Siyuan Liu, Duke University, “Candies for Ladies: Emerging Discourses Surrounding Female Sex Toys on Weibo in Chinese Cyberspace”

Since the 1970s, sex toys designed for female pleasure have become a major part of the sex toy industry. Radical feminists in the Western world interpret these vibrators and dildos as a new possibility that could navigate women all over the world out of the long-established oppressional patriarchal myth based on vaginal orgasm achieved through penis penetration and monogamy. Nevertheless, limited academic attention has been paid to the sex toy industry in East Asia, especially in China. In this paper, I place a specific focus on one of the leading brands in the market of female sex toys in contemporary China, named ‚“Darentang‚”. Before launching its first retail shop in Shenzhen in 2023, the company’s business was almost solely operated online through e-commerce platforms, and China’s powerful logistics network. In order to open up its market, Darentang collaborates with influencers on Weibo, the most densely populated cyberspace in Mainland China, and the influencers write promotional posts for the brand’s products. I conduct discourse analysis on these promotional posts, and link them with previous studies on female sex toys, as well as women and sexuality in contemporary China. Through a comprehensive and critical reading of the primary sources, I argue that promotional posts for ‚“Darentang‚” illustrate and advocate an ideal way for women to enjoy sexual pleasure: by masturbation with the assistance of the products designed for their bodies and spiritual needs. This enjoyment is seen as wholly private and individual, and is arguably more desirable than conventional heterosexual intercourse. This narrative of female sexual pleasure poses a challenge to the current official discourse and prevalent social convention regarding women’s bodies and sexuality in China, by separating sexual enjoyment from heterosexual marriage, and female pleasure from the male’s body.

David Marchionni, Michigan State University, “Dancing against Disease: Queer APIDA/A Nightlife amid the HIV/AIDS Crisis”

For more than forty years, a spectre has haunted the world’s marginalized. An increasingly invisible epidemic, AIDS, hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles. It thrives in spaces where overlapping taboos and stigmas surrounding an HIV+ diagnosis incentivize cultures of silence and ignorance. While all marginalized groups face this set of challenges to some extent, it has proven particularly salient within the global Asian diaspora. This helps explain, in part, why some have come to characterize APIDA/A People With AIDS (PWAs) as an invisible minority within an already invisible minority. This trend likewise extends to the history of APIDA/A AIDS activism; their work lost within a homogenizing activist mass. This paper seeks to do its own small part in combating these endemic silences through an excavation of queer APIDA/A nightlife-turned-activism amid New York City’s ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis. The project is titled “Dancing Against Disease” because it takes place amid the dimly-lit and slightly-sticky dance floors of The Web nightclub (formerly Club 58). Its cramped interior was where the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), in concert with numerous other APIDA/A organizations operating across the Tri-State area (most notably the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS, or APICHA) held their legendary DynasTEA fundraisers. In effect, New York’s APIDA/A AIDS work was financed by fierce displays of pageantry, joy, and, quite literally, dancing. As the epidemic shows few signs of abating, I hope to restore this missing piece to the grand mosaic of global Asian AIDS activism.