Discourse and Queer Sinophone Male Identities

This Element analyses the sociolinguistic navigation of cultural and ideological influence among queer male-identified individuals in Chengdu and Taipei. By analysing how queer and ethnically Chinese-identified individuals navigate ideological influences, it investigates some of the complexities of culture and identity and their dependence on semiotics and situated communication. Thus, the social affordances and constraints relevant to specific individuals in these contexts are described not only in terms of influences like ‘Chinese culture’ or ‘Western ideology’, but also in terms of the ongoing communicative processes through which they orient themselves to diverse structural influences. As such, this Element engages with the diversity typically subsumed into common identity categories. In turn, through its qualified deconstructionist approach to identity, it sheds novel light on the ideological complexity that tends to underlie queer individuals’ performance of ‘who they are’, in Sinophone contexts and elsewhere.