“非正常”的文化标签下“同志”社会空间的生产——以广州市X公园“同志渔场”为例

性少数群体对于城市空间的利用是城市研究中的新兴话题。这类研究主要探讨"非主流"的社会身份如何通过对特定的社会空间的利用,引发空间意义的生产及社会关系的建构。本文以广州市X公园的"同志渔场"为案例,研究男同性恋者对于城市公共空间的利用与体验。研究认为,X公园的"同志渔场"不仅给性少数群体提供了性身份暂时解放的空间,亦是其不断体验自身"非正常"的身份标签的空间。同志的空间实践体现的不是对于主流的社会规范的抵抗。相反,他们的空间实践是明显地处在"非正常"这一身份标签的作用之下的。

CONSTRUCTED ABNORMALITY AND THE PRODUCTIONOF GAY'S SOCIAL SPACE: A CASE STUDY OFGUANGZHOU'S GAY “FISHING GROUND”

Sexual minorities' use and appropriation of urban public space has received increasing attention in the research of social space. This line of research examines how sexual minorities practice particular urban space and how it is related to the production of meanings and the reconstruction of social relations. In the extant studies, it is commonly argued that sexual minorities' use of urban public spaces challenges the private/public divide in sexual norms and thus incubate emancipatory potentials. While this paper agrees with this point, it argues in the same time that the production sexual minorities' social space can also be constrained and conditioned by the entrenched structure of hetero-normativity as well as the socially constructed stigma of abnormality attached to sexual minorities. In particular, this paper pays attention to the fact that socially constructed stigma of abnormality can be internalized into sexual minorities' construction of self and subjectivity. Therefore, abnormality must be seen as a discursive construct which sexual minorities must constantly negotiate. This paper employs a case study of the gay cruising space in Park X, Guangzhou, in order to investigate gay men's participation in and experience of urban public space. It suggests that gay men's cruising space is saturated with rich social and cultural meanings. On the one hand, gay men's concentration in the cruising space and their various spatial practices are the outcomes of the established social and cultural structures which reify the rhetoric of the abnormality of homosexual identity. Thus gay men's appropriation of the cruising space in the park transgresses on the normative divide between the private and the public.