Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Using two post-pandemic LGBTQ+ advocacy cases in mainland China, this paper examines how marginalized issues become measurable and comparable under authoritarian constraint. Drawing on ANT and STS, it treats quantification as a contested technopolitical practice.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on actor-network theory (ANT) and STS work on quantification, translation, and commensuration to examine how LGBTQ+ policy advocacy in mainland China turns dispersed, heterogeneous, politically risky data into comparable evidence. Focusing on two post-pandemic advocacy cases, it asks how LGBTQ+ issues are rendered measurable across conflicting governance settings.

LGBTQ+ communities in mainland China exist between two competing quantification scripts. State governance relies on targets, performance metrics, project-based administration, and digital management that privilege traceability, assessment, and control. International human rights and NGO advocacy networks, by contrast, mobilize quantification through visibility, recognition, rights claims, evidence for advocacy, and comparability across contexts. For a population long marginalized and sometimes publicly denied as “nonexistent,” quantification is both a risk and a strategic resource.

Empirically, the paper analyzes two advocacy-oriented cases: the strategic reuse of mainstream Chinese survey data on public attitudes toward homosexuality and a research report on marriage equality and reproductive rights advocacy. It examines how categories are treated as equivalent across contexts, when proxies substitute for direct measures, and how local conditions are flattened in the making of comparable evidence.

The paper argues that, under authoritarian constraint, quantification is neither emancipatory nor disciplinary. It is a contested technopolitical practice through which marginalized groups seek visibility and argumentative force while confronting exclusions produced by standardization, proxy-making, and the uneven construction of comparability. In this sense, LGBTQ+ policy advocacy in mainland China offers a revealing case for thinking about data politics under authoritarian rule.