One summer a few years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to attend an LGBTQ+ youth camp in a city in southern China, where I made many friends. After each day of classes, we hung out in the sweaty heat, chatting and laughing, discussing politics and society, and going to underground bars to watch our trans friends perform. One day, the police broke into the meeting room during our workshop under the pretext of Covid control and took away the one older member of our group who was in charge. At the time, we were just a group of wide-eyed youths with little experience of the ‘real world’ beyond the university. Though some of us tried—or pretended—to stay calm to prevent the panic from spreading, we did not know what to do. We sat on the floor in one of the hotel ro…
One summer a few years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to attend an LGBTQ+ youth camp in a city in southern China, where I made many friends. After each day of classes, we hung out in the sweaty heat, chatting and laughing, discussing politics and society, and going to underground bars to watch our trans friends perform. One day, the police broke into the meeting room during our workshop under the pretext of Covid control and took away the one older member of our group who was in charge. At the time, we were just a group of wide-eyed youths with little experience of the ‘real world’ beyond the university. Though some of us tried—or pretended—to stay calm to prevent the panic from spreading, we did not know what to do. We sat on the floor in one of the hotel rooms, snuggling together and singing the Internationale in a whisper. That night, one of us wrote: ‘We had so many utopian moments and they smashed them all’ (我们有那么多的乌托邦时刻, 而他们一个一个将它击碎). This quote has since become an adage I carry with me. The words reappear in my mind in moments of struggle. I picture holding the sentence in my hands and unwrapping it like a message from a fortune cookie, as I imagine where the next utopian moment might arise, and under what circumstances it will be crushed into dust.
I was very young at the time. I had just entered university and was full of curiosity and enthusiasm for the world, completely unaware of its cruelty. I found a community of queer youth, made queer friends, and became involved in a space where I could explore both myself and society at large. We created one ‘utopian moment’ after another: screening gender-related films on a variety of themes, downloaded from obscure websites and often without state screening licences. We convinced secondary schoolteachers to incorporate lessons on gender diversity (多元性别, a more localised term than ‘LGBTQ+’) and anti-bullying in their classrooms, and we almost always received anonymous feedback from students filled with words of gratitude at the end of each class. We advocated for universities to set up menstrual product boxes on campus and provide free pads through peer mutual aid, and we also worked to develop anti–sexual harassment systems on campus. Although some of our efforts ended in failure, as I look back on those moments, I realise that, despite the frustrations and unforgiving reality, we were happy and full of hope within our community and believed strongly in the power of action to create change and shape the future.
Unfolding the idealised imagination and memory of the ‘utopian moment’ reveals it as a spatially fluid and temporary heterotopia suspended or detached from ordinary life. It creates space for play, cultural contestation, creativity, and potential subversion, and is constructed through topology, emotional bonds, and a shared sense of community and belonging (De Cauter and Dehaene 2008). Although the concept of heterotopia has been criticised for its ambiguity and inherent flaws since Michel Foucault (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986) first proposed it, I borrow the term here because it extends our understanding of activism and helps us examine it as an alternative space outside mainstream society. This essay is not an academic journal article intended to engage in theoretical debates about specific concepts; rather, it serves as a doorway to infinite possibilities and imaginations, a collage comprising interviews I conducted in 2023, field notes, diary entries, sentiments, and reflections. As such, it inevitably indulges, much like the concept of ‘heterotopia’ itself, in a reality constructed through subjectivity and an idealised past.
Here, I aim to present a life that has long been obscured by dominant narratives on Western queer culture and activism and suppressed by an authoritarian state. The life is illuminated through the actions of young queer students in China as they explore themselves and imagine a future of their own making. This essay begins with a brief introduction to LGBTQ+ student activism in China. While the examples are drawn from autoethnographic reflections and a small-sample study, I acknowledge the multidimensionality and diversity within the LGBTQ+ student movement. The article does not seek to generalise my feelings or opinions. Rather, it aims to bring a lived perspective rooted in queer politics under authoritarianism into conversation with the concept of heterotopia. It advocates for viewing the movement as a space of mutual learning, creation, and experimentation that challenges the normalisation of authoritarianism and heteronormativity, instead of reducing it to a simplified framework of oppression and resistance.
An Experiment of Queer Heterotopia
For Foucault, heterotopia refers to institutions and spaces that disrupt the apparent continuity and normality of everyday life (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008). In this sense, what defines a heterotopia is not a fixed boundary, but its difference from the mainstream. Here, I use ‘queer’ as an inclusive umbrella term to suggest a state of ongoing self-exploration against or beyond conventions. Although the term is often associated with gender and sexual cultures or practices, it more broadly signifies a challenge to heteronormativity and offers a fluid view of identity, opening alternative possibilities for fantasy and liberation (Betsky 1995; Murphy 2009). In this context, queer heterotopia refers to a temporary counter-site created by LGBTQ+ students within the cracks of a dominant order—an order that imposes strict gender norms and is highly sensitive to dissent.
This theoretical concept offers a lens through which to examine LGBTQ+ student activism—activism that may be seen as emerging ‘in the “wrong” place, moving in the “wrong” way, or involving the “wrong” connections, affinities, or organisations’ from the perspective of the university or the state, as it challenges, disrupts, or breaks the normal routines of politics (Beckett et al. 2017: 169). This approach shifts the focus away from individual actors towards the practices and rationalities of protest that work to construct identities and subjectivities (Death 2010). In this section, I draw on themes developed through thematic analysis of interviews and field notes from previous research (Huang 2024), as well as my own experience to substantiate how the LGBTQ+ student groups and their communities may be another kind of heterotopia—one that is threatening to the order of things and enlarges the possibilities for self-determination. Most importantly, the heterotopia facilitates and organises resistance practice, and imagines and rehearses a new order for the future (Beckett et al. 2017).
Most LGBTQ+ student groups active during my data collection period (2023) were established between 2012 and 2015. This was largely due to a relatively open political environment as a legacy of the previous leadership at the start of Xi Jinping’s presidency, which enabled the flourishing of LGBTQ+ nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and other civil society groups. These NGOs organised summer camps or volunteer training with university students as the main activities for participants, which fostered LGBTQ+ student activism in China and helped give birth to campus groups. In this sense, the development of the movement offers another perspective on contemporary China and the world from the margins, as the course of the student activism is closely linked to the rise of authoritarianism in China after 2012, the global recession and related tensions, and the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. These student groups have operated during a period of expanding state power and shrinking civil society, where more and more crackdowns occur, including the mass arrests of activists, lawyers, and social workers (Deane 2021).
In the LGBTQ+ student movement, there is a significant power imbalance between the university and the students, with the university holding the resources that matter most to young adults: their academic and behaviour records, which affect their future studies and careers, as well as their eligibility for scholarships and awards. Since the Tiananmen massacre, the Chinese State has rarely resorted to such harsh tactics against student activism. Instead, softer approaches such as threatening to withhold diplomas or outing LGBTQ+ students to their families have been widely used to pressure them into retreating from public life. However, as Foucault (1978) illuminated, the body is not only a docile target of power, but also a medium through which resistance is produced (Beckett et al. 2017). In such circumstances, for LGBTQ+ student activists and their groups, existence itself constitutes a form of resistance. Although all my participants stated that community support was the most essential part of their activities, most were politically conscious and used the term ‘movement’—either ‘social movement’ (社会运动/社运) or ‘LGBTQ+ movement’ (同志运动/同运)—frequently throughout our interviews.
Word choices reflect the diffusion and localisation of gender and sexuality ideologies in China, as well as the broader development of the LGBTQ+ movement since the 1990s. For instance, the term ‘comrade’ (同志 tongzhi), a localised alternative to ‘homosexual’ influenced by socialism, conveys a sense of revolution and social change (Bao 2024). This is echoed in the well-known phrase, ‘The revolution has not yet succeeded; comrades, you must continue the struggle’ (革命尚未成功, 同志仍需努力). Most of the student groups and activities examined in my research are strongly motivated by the desire to create change, such as raising awareness of gender equality and challenging discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals on campus. Many have even received training or volunteered with LGBTQ+ NGOs, where the impact of their activism could reach beyond campus to realise broader social transformation.
Despite shrinking civic space and expanding state power, student LGBTQ+ groups sprouted and grew rapidly after 2012 and, according to some estimates, their number rose from 10 to 50 between 2013 and 2018 (China SOGIE Youth Network 2019). Most of these groups were initiated by a handful of active students on campus and operated in a unregistered informal flat structure. The organisational form is therefore very fluid. The groups do not boast a leader and rely on democratic self-governance. As one of my interview participants described it: ‘A typical scenario involved an individual taking the initiative and others who share an interest subsequently offering their support.’
The groups’ unregistered and informal status is the result of a combination of active choices and passive factors. On the one hand, in 2018, several students and workers were arrested or disappeared following an incident in which students from several universities mobilised in solidarity with the Jasic workers’ strike (Zhang 2018). As a result, all student societies were placed under the administration of the Chinese Communist Youth League (CYL), making it more difficult for self-organised student groups to register at universities (Chen 2022). This means that, to register, student groups must now censor or limit themselves and their activities—for example, by avoiding ‘politically sensitive topics’ and securing a university faculty or staff member as a supervisor. These requirements have made it nearly impossible for LGBTQ+ groups to register successfully. Of the groups to whom I have spoken, only one has attempted to register by changing its name, but it still failed, while others gave up.
On the other hand, the choice not to register is a gesture of resistance, aiming to preserve autonomy and reject the intrusion of a bureaucratic management model. By breaking with the university’s regulatory system, the LGBTQ+ student groups are non-existent at an official level. Yet, they exist as a heterotopia for young people’s self-exploration and public participation and an experiment in thinking and existing differently, making possible ‘deviant’ behaviour and the construction of a new everyday order.
This unofficial status has a profound impact on the student groups’ way of being. They cannot access the university’s resources as would an official student society—for instance, by using the university’s platform to recruit new members, openly advertise their events, or book a venue. These constraints force the queer student groups into a state of exiled nomadism (Deleuze 2013), existing in the shadows. They are constantly wandering and become islands of diaspora in the motherland. They help build each other’s heterotopias through mobile aggregations of physically co-present bodies in random classrooms, homes, coffee shops, and bookstores. In these spontaneous spaces, the students screen queer films such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire(2019), which are not permitted for official release in China, and hold salons on topics about which discussion is either strictly forbidden or strongly discouraged, such as sexual violence, trauma, family relationships, and other social issues. Sometimes, the students perform stand-up comedy and make fun of the state, using satire as a weapon. For instance, a friend once shared a story with me. In a WeChat group, people were discussing Simone de Beauvoir. Not long after, someone in the group was taken in for questioning by the police, who asked: ‘Who is this Beauvoir and what is she going to do?’ By sharing stories such as this one, young people recognise the limitations and ignorance of the police despite their surveillance capabilities, momentarily stepping out of the state’s gaze and finding strength, gaining courage by sharing such stories in a humorous way.
The students enter everyday arenas such as university classrooms, which are typically reserved for teaching mainstream ideology, or commercial spaces such as coffee shops, and transform them, at least temporarily, shedding light on the ways actors can resist social structures by creating ‘other spaces’ for resistance, intimacy, and experimentation (Bazin and Naccache 2016). They twist the space to create a heterotopia, turning the classroom into not just a place for teaching from a textbook, but also a laboratory for mutual learning and experimentation, and an affective space for emotions and feelings that have few other avenues for expression (Ahmed 2014). The nomadic nature of these student groups constantly challenges spatial norms and modernised bureaucracies and settlements and, while individual members may come and go, mobile heterotopias persist and flow through the landscape as a physical symbolic challenge to the power relations that seek to control them (Beckett et al. 2017).
Under such repressive circumstances, the stories and feelings shared within these small heterotopias—about family, police harassment, and the distress and confusion caused by ‘abnormal’ sexual desire—allow discourse to become an active force in the social movement, constructing an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006) that connects to a broader network of identities, whether LGBTQ+, feminist, or political dissident. Heterotopias become exploratory spaces that offer alternative pathways for imagining and practising politics. Here, individualised everyday resistance, mobilised without the masses (Fu 2017), creates room for action as it exists outside the state’s imagination of political confrontation, where collective mobilisation is not possible. In such heterotopias, people practise and learn from each other a politics of love and understanding, and extend this experimental practice into non-heterotopic spaces, creating tensions between an authoritarian and heteronormative order and a newly formed order within the community. For example, some LGBTQ+ student activists have used personal life stories to influence and transform their teachers’ opinions on these issues.
Once, my friends and I channelled the energy of having experienced gender-specific school bullying to persuade secondary schoolteachers to let us teach lessons on topics such as gender diversity and anti-bullying. One teacher initially rejected our offer, insisting that such issues did not occur in her classroom. About a year later, however, she reached out to us after receiving an anonymous complaint from a student, reporting that a boy was being bullied for being feminine. Eventually, she invited us to conduct a session on gender diversity and personal experiences in her class, and this led to a long-term collaboration. As this story illustrates, reaching out to authority figures such as teachers may not bring immediate change, but it plants a seed that may grow in the future. In this way, students can push their teachers to become supporters and protectors of youth activism or heterotopia, while passing on more plural and inclusive values and ideology through the older generation. The heterotopia becomes a space of contestation between the new life order established by those included in the community and the so-called mainstream order, carrying the potential to invade and destabilise the mainstream.
Us versus Them: A Heterotopia for Whom?
The notion of heterotopia gives us a certain optimistic image of creation. However, as Foucault (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986) points out in his fifth principle, heterotopias are distanced from mainstream society. Decolonial feminist scholars have criticised this concept for potentially implying a fetishisation of otherness, which risks oversimplifying complex power struggles (Saldanha 2008). On this basis, the heterotopia formed by student groups is not outside the realm of power; on the contrary, it is also a field permeated by power.
The outbreak of Covid-19 in late 2019 gave the state and university administrations the opportunity to expand their power, from online speech censorship to restricting travel in the name of pandemic control, and student groups struggled to find space to act amid heightened surveillance. How does heterotopia continue to exist? As the state creates a virtual panopticon through elusive red lines of censorship and casual informants, self-censorship and self-limitation become a necessity. In this context, avoiding politically sensitive topics, presenting events in a depoliticised way, and avoiding the university’s attention are survival strategies for the continued existence of such spaces. Direct confrontation could lead to the disappearance of the group, so this tactical retreat becomes a proactive strategy for the powerless. The more pragmatic and actionable agenda, then, is how to continue supporting and serving marginalised groups such as political dissenters, feminists, and LGBTQ+ students within the university under increasingly repressive conditions.
Additionally, there are certain restrictions as to ‘who belongs’ while student groups try to create a dynamic and communal space (Low 2008). To avoid potential informants, some student groups have had to screen those joining the group and participating in activities through questionnaires, which are often very long and seek to place a person on the political spectrum based on their views on social issues. This protective measure reinforces the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as a means of self-preservation. However, it can also strengthen social stability and help maintain existing power structures (Saldanha 2008), as the ideologically selective space creates a stratosphere and to some extent absorbs ‘our’ dissatisfaction with the dominant order, reducing conflict and friction by physically and psychologically isolating those who are different from ‘us’ on the political spectrum, thus to some extent leading to a more stable authoritarian system. Meanwhile, the restrictions on entry along with the practices of self-censorship and self-limitation create a persistent tension between achieving the political ideals of these groups and prioritising the safety of the group members, and such pragmatic approaches may limit student groups’ sustainability and influence.
On the other hand, in the formation of this heterotopia and the symbolic boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, it is important to remain cautious about how internal differences can be temporarily obscured by an apparently shared identity and sense of community. It is also necessary to consider how unspoken rules may systematically exclude some individuals from entering the movement or heterotopic space. As Derrida (2017) asked: Alternative to whom? Utopian from whose perspective? During my interviews, I became aware of a certain privilege that was embedded in the language I and my interviewees used: our language was an academic, formal, clear, rational one that conformed to a certain imagination of modernity, and some of my interviewees could pick up on an academic term and refer to a metaphor from the literature very easily. Our languages construct a reality that can only be accessed and understood by those who share certain life experiences and social capital. Although not all of us come from ‘middle-class’ families, my interviewees and I have studied at elite universities in China and we enjoy the cultural capital with which to unconsciously exclude those who do not. When I was an undergraduate, a boy from a vocational college had to take a two-hour bus ride every week to attend our queer youth volunteer meetings at a LGBTQ+ NGO where most of us were students. At the end of one of the discussions, he told me that he felt students from ‘985 universities’ spoke differently and more intelligently (‘985’ is a category of elite universities in China under the Ministry of Education’s 985 project). He did not come back to our meetings after that. At the time, I did not fully appreciate the meaning behind his remarks, which spoke to a sense of exclusion and were a way to bid farewell.
Imagining Future Queer Heterotopias
As I stepped away from the movement after graduation and re-examined the student groups and their activities as an outsider, I have also rediscovered and gained a deeper understanding of myself in relation to the movement. As I moved between the roles of insider and outsider, I became aware of the privileges afforded to me by my economic and cultural capital—privileges that had shaped me in ways I had previously failed to perceive, such as the language I used and the choices I was determined to make to continue my activism within academia. However, this capital and language also blinded me to the operations of power, the hidden tensions within the movement and queer community, and the elitism embedded in my own obliviousness—even as I revelled in the illusion that I was brave.
My research on the student groups was completed in 2023 and, two years later, how queer young students act in universities to create space for each other remains a topic of interest to me. I have observed some new developments in the past two years, such as the commodification of gender issues in China under the influence of neoliberal ideology. On social media platforms such as Rednote (also known as Xiaohongshu), gender issues have sparked waves of discussions, sometimes presented in a form of ‘pinkwashing’ that is heavily consumption oriented. Popular accounts promote a middle-class lifestyle filled with female-oriented commodities and encourage women to purchase these products as a form of individual empowerment. Critiques of structural inequalities and the role of the state are largely absent from these posts, while commercial cultural symbols are reinforced. In addition, the global rise of anti-gender movements and right-wing politics has led to a growing backlash against LGBTQ+ rights. For example, Donald Trump, as President of the United States, cut diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) funding. More recently, in the United Kingdom, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of an exclusive definition of ‘woman’ based on biological sex.
I wonder whether the space for independent campus groups still exists in this shifting landscape, and whether students are still imagining and acting. Heterotopias do not last forever, but every gathering, every movement of the rebellious body through space, and every shift in discourse is a preview of future possibilities. We need imagination and resilience to give birth to the next ‘utopian moment’.
Featured Image: Heterotopia, 忠武路, 韓國. Source: @cryingkid, Flickr.com (CC)
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