QUEERING SOCIAL REPRODUCTION: PLEASURE AND LABOUR IN URBAN SOUTHERN CHINA
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
How can queer and trans people’s pleasure-making enrich Marxist feminist debates about social reproduction? This dissertation approaches “social reproduction” through the lifeworld of gender and sexual non-normative people in Liaozhou, a pseudo-name for a city in the Pearl River Delta region. In particular, it is based on ethnographies of two scenes in the city: sexual and gender-nonconforming migrant garment factory workers cruising for sex and queer/trans youth participants of Ballroom culture. Using a Marxist, queer, and transnational feminist lens, I explore how socioeconomic structure reconstitutes the embodiment of pleasure in queer and trans people’s daily social reproduction. I move from everyday pleasure (e.g., walking, joking, and touching) to the structure to give a fuller account of the inequalities and intimacies of queer life in China today. I argue that by situating emerging queer socialities such as cruising and ballroom culture within the spatial-material relations of social reproduction, we can see how the global circulation of labour, commodities, and culture shapes non-normative pleasure seeking. The production of pleasure is always about the affective, erotic, and sexual dimensions of social reproduction, structurally connected to modes of production. Instead of treating pleasure as an “innate” urge, I explore the production of pleasure to uncover how the efforts to build underground, ephemeral,or long-lasting relationships and intimacies become forms of labour, complicated by the logic of commodification and economic value. In both the cruising point and the ballroom community, I unpack the instrumental reasons, capitalist aspirations, and patriarchal values that shape my informants’ lives. I suggest that queer pleasure is not inherently emancipatory. The social reproduction of my informants’ lives provides pathways and spaces of community building through pleasure. At the same time, such practices of social reproduction reorganize new norms and inequalities based on class, education, migration, and rural/urban differences.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it