Queer Negotiations of Structure and Agency: Historical Contingency and Spatial Politics in Contemporary Shanghai

Yiou Yang, University of Southern California

In contemporary China, rapid urban transformation and authoritarianism shape marginalized lives. This paper investigates how Shanghai’s urban renewal and population management since the early 2000s have impacted queer communities, using theory and empirical analysis of state governance and grassroots agency. Giddens’s structuration theory (1984) highlights mutual influences between institutional structures and individual actions, suggesting Shanghai’s governance and queer community responses shape each other. Foucault’s governmentality (1994) addresses subtle strategies guiding populations through urban regulations and normative controls, while Butler’s performativity (1990) emphasizes identities constituted by repeated social actions, such as public gatherings challenging dominant norms. State capitalism and authoritarian urban governance frame China's context. Huang (2008) and Bremmer (2009) characterize China’s political economy as urban-biased, state-led capitalism using markets for political ends. Ong (2011) notes Asian megacities combine neoliberal urbanism and authoritarian governance, enabling rapid capitalist growth through top-down controls. Thus, Shanghai employs capitalist methods and coercive mechanisms directing urban redevelopment. From the early 2000s, Shanghai pursued aggressive urban renewal, demolishing historic neighborhoods for modern developments and events like the 2010 World Expo. This process, noted by Zhang (2015, 2023), involved disciplinary mechanisms blending neoliberalism and authoritarianism, marginalizing informal queer spaces. Concurrently, intensified population management introduced quotas favoring skilled migrants, constructing a hierarchical population and reinforcing state control. Despite official progress, queer spaces remained precarious. Crackdowns like the 2011 Q Bar raid exemplified indirect state regulation under public-order campaigns. Queer communities adapted by shifting to informal or private venues, demonstrating spatial performativity and infrapolitics by Scott (2012), subverting heteronormativity and enhancing resilience. Shanghai complicates conventional understandings of neoliberal globalization: its queer performative practices navigate collective values and state scrutiny distinct from Western experiences yet remain agentic. The narrative of queer Shanghai thus exemplifies agency-structure interplay under authoritarianism, providing insights relevant to urban contexts across East Asia.

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 Presented in Session 145. Political Activism, Environment and Art