Paper short abstract:

Although rainbow flags are made in China, until recently Chinese queer activists were largely unable to obtain these global symbols of queer identity and pride in their own country. This paper examines the flow of rainbow flags in and out of China as an allegory of the globalization of sexuality.

Paper long abstract:

The first rainbow flag representing LGBTQ pride and identity was hand made by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978. Now a global symbol and commodity, rainbow flags are made in China and exported for consumption abroad. However, until recently, rainbow flags were not widely available for purchase inside China.

This paper examines the circulation, meanings, and uses of rainbow flags in China, where they are a coveted commodity among many Chinese queers that is at once foreign and domestic, transnationally circulated yet often locally unavailable. Chinese queer activists use a variety of means to acquire rainbow flags, including smuggling them into China in the suitcases of travelers or making their own flags out of locally available materials, recalling Baker's original hand-made flag. Even as Chinese queers use rainbow flags to index their membership and belonging in an imagined global queer community, they also imbue the symbol with new meanings as it is reworked to express and enact Chinese forms of queer affect and activism.

Intervening in the anthropological literatures on globalization and sexuality, I contend that the case of rainbow flags in China suggests new ways of thinking about the globalization of sexuality and queerness that emphasize simultaneity and imbrication rather than similitude and alterity. Complicating depictions of Chinese queer activism as nonconfrontational, silent, and invisible, I show how Chinese queer activists exploit the relative anonymity of rainbow flags in China to enact a "politics of semi-visibility" while at the same time participating in transnational forms of queer activism.