Walled cosmopolitanization: how China’s Great Firewall mediates young urban gay men’s lives

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the role of censorship as a communication technology in shaping experiences of cosmopolitanization. Drawing on interviews with urban Chinese gay men who circumvent the country’s Great Firewall, the article studies how censorship shapes people’s media choices, practices, and social outlooks. It presents three findings. First, censorship produces a domesticated media ecology characterized by controlled exchanges with the outside world, constructing the perceived “localness” and “foreignness” of media artifacts. Second, censorship creates an exclusive “cosmopolitan digital class” that establishes a hierarchy of desirability based on people’s media practices. Third, censorship promotes a paradoxical intertwining of cosmopolitanization and encapsulation, popularizing a mindset that is at once open—willing to move across the Wall and access alternative information—and closed: subscribing to territorial understandings of selfhood. Based on these findings, the article proposes the concept of “walled cosmopolitanization” to describe the vulnerability of the cosmopolitan self in censored environments.