​​My current book project explores why, despite the rise of queer resources and visibility in China, many queer individuals feel increasingly alienated and excluded. It analyzes how emerging LGBTQ media, technologies, and businesses—the backbone of the so-called pink economy—have shaped queer desires, interactions, and self-perceptions in contemporary China. This study is grounded in years of ethnographic research conducted in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chinese digital spaces from 2017 to 2024. It demonstrates that new queer infrastructures, which provide queer individuals with increased opportunities for sexual encounters and socializing, have fostered diverse modes of being queer in the past decade in China. Yet these infrastructures also, I argue, propel the evolution of new sexual norms that elevate certain queer men as the embodiments of desirable homomasculinity. Consequently, rather than feeling empowered by increasing queer resources, many Chinese queer men experience alienation due to their inability to meet homomasculine ideals of identity, appearance, and sexuality within the circle. Their ongoing struggle to conform to these standards leads to what I term “queer exhaustion,” resulting in a desire to leave the circle.

 

The project critically assesses the impact of queer technologies and businesses, highlighting how they reinforce or create new forms of sexual inequality. It also transcends the cultural understanding of Chinese homosexuality represented by tongzhi (comrade) and unpacks how the ideal Chinese homomasculinity contest white masculinity in a global context. By elucidating the sexual hierarchies that emerge, the book offers new directions for future queer politics and worldmaking in the Global South.