Can China Really Ban Sissies? Locating “Sissiness” between State and Popular Discourses in Trans/national China

Abstract This paper examines China’s recent “sissy ban” by locating discourses of sissiness and sissyphobia in a field of complex and competing discourses amidst rising nationalist sentiments and intensified transnational flows of masculinity cultures. It probes the cases of three celebrities – Zhou Shen, Yuzuru Hanyu, and Hins Cheung (Zhang Jingxuan) – to map a typology of soft and queer masculinity expressions which intersect with nationalism in state, popular, and peripheral discourses and argues that Chinese “sissyphobia” is more than a state-led backlash against effeminacy. This study also contends that “sissyphobia” represents sophisticated technologies of governance that both encourage compliance and self-censorship, and engender creative tactics of negotiation, against the backdrop of growing tensions between the Chinese state’s hegemonic construction of nationalist masculinities and the immense appeal of transnational masculinity ideals. This essay also investigates various forms of sissiness, those which are subject to the regulations of state ideology, as well as those which demonstrate the resilience and vitality of gender diversity in China today.