‘The glowing fireflies’: Invisible activism under China’s queer necropolitics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In China, the escalating repression of gender and sexual diversity has given rise to 'queer necropolitics'. 'Queer necropolitics' - a concept we build on - refers to the hegemonic ability to determine who is allowed to suffer, survive, or thrive. We examine China's sustained re-enforcement of traditional gender norms, which has rendered queer communities non-existent from official recognition. In this context, we aim to understand how China's state queer necropolitics has shaped queer organising in the country. From 2021 to 2022, we conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with a diverse cohort of self-identified LGBTIQ+ members and activists across 12 provinces in China. We find that the interplay of legal invisibility and politicised, moralised visibility has placed queer communities under hegemonic governance techniques of suppression. The paper argues that China's queer necropolitics has established invisible activism. The juxtaposition of invisibility with activism denotes the quiet, implicit, and everyday embodied acts of communal care among queer communities as a form of resistance. Building on the metaphor of 'glowing fireflies' shared by a research participant, invisible activism presents a more sustainable approach than conventional rights-based activism. The paper expands our understanding of politically antagonistic practices, acknowledging the diversity and complexity embedded within queer activism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".