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Abstract: "Culture/Community/Race" is an ethnographic account of the development of gay identities and correlative collective practices among a group of Chinese men in Toronto in the 1980s. The cultural and racial politics of these identities/practices are explored through an examination of the role of Chinese "culture" in their development and through a discussion of the sexual politics of race among gay men. This latter material addresses the sexual meanings of racial difference and the politicization of these meanings among Chinese gay men.
Resume: Cet article est une description ethnographique du developpement des identites gaies dans un groupe de Chinois a Toronto pendant les annees 1980 et des pratiques collectives qui y ont ete associees. Les dimensions politiques des aspects culturels et sociaux de ces identites/pratiques sont explorees au moyen de l'examen du ro1e de la <<culture>> chinoise dans leur developpement et de l'analyse de certaines dimensions raciales des politiques sexuelles chez les gais. Ce dernier aspect approfondit les significations sexuelles des differences raciales et la politisation de ces significations chez les gais chinois.
Contemporary interest in the cultural construction of gender and sexuality has in recent years produced a growing, largely anthropological literature on the historical emergence and globalization of gay male identities (Herdt, 1997; Lancaster, 1997; Manalansan IV, 1997; Parker, 1985; Weston, 1993). In his discussion of emergent gay identities in Asia, Altman (1997: 423) argues that such definitions of the self and the correlative development of discourses of group identity -- a gay peoplehood -- are recent historical developments within Asian countries, products of "modernity." These modern subjectivities, of personhood defined through a sexual orientation and involvement in homogender relationships, may coexist with or define themselves in opposition to older, indigenous organizations of same-sex sexuality (where these exist). Such older forms are usually organized through alternative constructions of gender and various forms of gender-crossing behaviours.
Co-existing with an identification with a global gay "peoplehood" is the simultaneous process of asserting localized, culturally specific forms of identity (Friedman, 1990: 311), a process Appadurai (1990: 295) describes as the "indigenization of modernity." In Altman's work (1997), this is expressed by his Asian informants' desire to assert a specifically Asian gay identity in contrast to Western constructs and meanings. Attention to such differentiations is paralleled in...