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An ethnography of everyday queer world-making in mainland China

PhD Defense Haiyan Huang

On Wednesday, April 30, 2025, Haiyan Huang’s public defense took place at Auditorium Vandenhove at Ghent University.

Haiyan completed her doctoral research ‘Between revolution and capitulation: an ethnography of everyday queer world-making in mainland China’ under supervision of Katrien De Graeve, Katrien Jacobs and Ellen Van Praet at Ghent University’s Centre for Research on Culture and Gender.

In this dissertation Haiyan finds that on the one hand, the past decade has witnessed a massively growing interest in Chinese LGBTQ studies from queer feminists, artists as well as scholars. While on the other hand, despite the fervent academic research, queer feminist movements in the 2020s era are evolving into various forms and adopting new tactics in the face of growing authoritarianism, tightening socio-economic censorship, and a new generation of feminist activism in both China and around the world.

She focused in this project on queer communities in a second-tier city H. Using ethnographic fieldwork approach. Haiyan wanted to understand the following questions: 1) what and how physical spaces are used? 2) what and how activities are organized in the ever-narrowing social spaces allowed in mainland China? And 3) what affects are at play in Chinese queer feminist communities?

You can find her publication very soon: …

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