Denial of homosexual citizenship in China: media governance through censorship and misrepresentation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article theorises the denial of homosexual citizenship in China by examining how a feedback loop between censorship and misrepresentation sustains symbolic exclusion under authoritarian media governance. Drawing on the framework of cultural homosexual citizenship, it argues that homosexual visibility is not merely legally absent but actively managed through regulatory ambiguity, Confucian-nationalist ideologies, and delegated enforcement. Combining critical policy discourse analysis with digital ethnography, the study shows how state agencies and commercial platforms co-construct homosexuality as deviant, quasi-criminal, and un-Chinese. The 2018 Weibo incident is analysed as a key case in which digital resistance – though momentarily effective – was swiftly absorbed through blame deflection and symbolic containment. The article further examines two user practices: tactical visibility, which negotiates conditional inclusion via normative aesthetics, and the politics of opacity, which resists legibility and recognition on state terms. Together, these practices unsettle liberal assumptions that visibility ensures empowerment under authoritarian rule.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".