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Cassidy, Elija & Wang, Wilfred Yang(2016)LINE use in the gay Chinese diasporic community of Australia. InCrossroads 2016: Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2016, 2016-12-14 -2016-12-17. (Unpublished)

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LINE use in the gay Chinese diasporic community of

Australia Elija Cassidy & Wilfred Yang Wang

Digital Media Research Center, QUT

em.cassidy@qut.edu.au

wilfred.wang@connect.qut.edu.au

This project• Aims to investigate gay Chinese

diaspora’s digital media use and culture in Australia;

• Platform observations and interviews;

• This presentation: reporting on some preliminary findings and thoughts from the observations –how these guide the interviews;

Why - backgrounds• Contextual: increasing number of Chinese immigrants to

Australia over the past decades;

• Permanent migrations; • Overseas students; • Working holidays

Background - scholarly

Gay men’s digital culture research:

• Anglo-Saxon focus;

• English-language-based dating apps & websites;

• Middle-class, urban, consumption-based lifestyles;

Not enough:

• Non-English speaking platforms;

• Non-western cultural/ethnic groups;

• Everyday, non-dating specific platforms.

BUT…

• Beijing based Kunlun Tech, a game developing company bought a controlling 60% of Grindr’s share in early 2016.

• Opens up new questions and perspective about gay digital culture and media and the western-centric approach.

LINE• an instant text and voice

messenger application freely available on smartphones, tablets and personal computers;

• First launched in Japan in 2011;

• About 700million registered user in 2015;

• Users based in 13 different countries (outside of Japan) with HK, TW and SE Asia top the list;

• Share location, voice audio, emojis& stickers, timelines, games, online payments, LINE taxi … (merchandise)

• For us: a Japanese apps used by Chinese gay community in Australia – transnationality.

Methods

• Me: reads both simplified and traditional Chinese;

• From Nov 2015 – March 2016;

(currently doing BLUED)

• Looking into the very online conversations and practices in the LINE group: Australia-NZ Common Happy Group 澳紐同樂會;

• The form of communication: textual, visual, audio, and URLs;

• LINE and other platforms: WeChat, TT1069 (website), Grindr and Jackd;

• The role of LINE in understanding the desires and wishes of gay Chinese men in Australia.

Observations

1. Informational seeking: about work, study, leisure and entertainment, and local culture and festivals (especially those LGBT community related) in Australia;2. ‘Prince Charming’ discussions – where members share photos of men they have taken and other materials that contain what they perceive as the ‘ideal man’ - the majority of these are white, Caucasian men;3. Networking: organizing offline meetings; finding nearby members to meet-up; discussing how to expand personal (gay) networks –friend/boyfriend search; 4. Media ecology: other social media and web-based platforms (such as Grindr, WeChat).

Information and navigating Australia

• Learning about Australian ways of life, work and culture;

• Coping with the (perceived) new life experiences;

• A form of social imaginary (Leung 2014) in that the perception of Australia was loosely but continuously reproduced through individuals’ acts and practices on LINE and their attempts to make sense of them.

• The social imaginary of Australia and negotiating the transnational experience.

Prince Charming

• A form of in-group communication ritual;

• Part of the social imaginary of Australia that the sexual desire of non-Asian men often trigger navigations of the cultural others;

• Not just a discussion of men’s body, sex and masculinity, but also extended to the imagination of the local culture;

• Topics: why Caucasian men are so masculine, what do they eat, do they all go to gym, are they open to relationship (romance and sexual) …

Beyond LINE

• LINE is used as an intermediary of and between other (gay-)media platforms;

• LINE is both the place to be and a stepping stone;

This sums everything up

• Inter-media, informational, inter-cultural communication

LINE

• Calls for transnational and inter-cultural analysis;

• LINE is not just a communication tool but a cultural product that reconfigures and is being redefined by users’ transnational and cross-cultural experience;

• Highly visualised communication and practices that carries significant social imaginary and cultural practices in constructing the gay Chinese diasporic identity in Australia

Next stage:

• Interviews and focus-groups;

• The roles of other non-English speaking apps: BLUED and ZANK;

• Why LINE or BLUE or other platforms? – seems to some country specific elements: BLUE (new/temp migrants from the PRC), LINE (temp/working holidays from TW and HK);

• In what way do these platforms operate together despite the apparent competition between them and their respective individuality.

Thank you!

Elija em.cassidy@qut.edu.au

Wilfred wilfred.wang@connect.qut.edu.au