Thursday, March 10, 2016
4 p.m.
McKinney Conference Room
Based on ethnographic research on self-identified gay men in Northeast China, this talk addresses the ways in which these men worked in collaboration with, rather than against, the state. Deploying and appropriating the state-endorsed AIDS cause, they drew on the dominant moral order as a legitimate resource to attempt to infuse gay activism while still seeking legitimacy in the mainstream culture. They believed that by declaring that elimination of homophobia was essential to curb AIDS transmission, they used AIDS activism to provide legitimacy for their gay activism.
Tiantian Zheng is a professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Cortland
The format of the China Initiative research seminar is an hour and a half long discussion of a pre-circulated working paper. There is no presentation but an informal discussion of the paper. Attendees will include graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty who share an interest in the China Initiatives broad areas of interdisciplinary scholarship (http://watson.brown.edu/china/)