Wenqing Kang

This project investigates the history of homosexuality in the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to the present, drawing on interviews and library and archival resources. It traces the changes of how homosexuality was experienced, discussed, and treated from the Mao era to the reform period and complicates the simple understanding of repression and liberation. This history contributes to our understanding of the Chinese socialism and the socialist modernity that the Communist government claimed to build, especially as instantiated in the regulation of bodies, pleasures, and sexual behavior.