Research
A gender-neutral bathroom at my field site, where someone drew a feminized half body to make the sign look gender neutral. Yet, the text below continues to say that this is a man's bathroom.
My research examines social institutions in transition—namely, how do institutions adapt to the advent and demands of previously invisible and marginalized populations? Integrating the sociology of gender, sexuality, and medicine, my research examines institutional changes through their interactions with gender and sexual minorities, with a focus on medical institutions and the related state and legal institutions in China.
Transgender People and Medical Institutions
Book Project
In Transition: Politics of Transgender Healthcare in China
Gender-affirming care is a rights-based medical model supported by international experts and organizations. While it has been increasingly adopted by Chinese medical institutions, gender-affirming care is rarely connected to rights-based claims in medical practices. How does this medical model travel transnationally? How does it impact medical practices and the Chinese sex/gender system? Why do we see rights-based claims uncoupled from medical recommendations in local medical practices? My dissertation answers these questions through content analysis, two years of ethnographic research in clinical and professional spaces, and 125 interviews. By tracing community and professional activism around gender-affirming care, my dissertation illuminates how the global medical field shapes local healthcare infrastructure and how this process generates new forms of inequality for the lives it seeks to improve. Ultimately, I argue that medical practices resist changes in the global medical model because they are produced and maintained through social and political processes.
Article
Zhou, Xiaogao. 2024. “Care in Transition: Global Norms,
Transnational Adaptation, and Family-Centered Gender-Affirming
Care in China.” Social Science & Medicine 344:116658.
In this article, I demonstrate that global medical norms are remade through local medical providers, which could both alleviate and reproduce health inequality. I analyzed how and why eliciting family support became a routine component of transgender healthcare health providers. Through interviews and participant observations with clinicians, I argue that family-centered gender-affirming care has emerged in China as providers strive to balance global medical norms with the lack of legal and organizational protection in clinical practices. Facing risks of medical disputes, clinicians gatekeep care based on family members’ input to mitigate their precarity by either denying and delaying care or educating and inviting family to become a component of transgender healthcare.
Sex/Gender/Sexuality System and State Institutions
In a second set of projects that builds on my dissertation research on institutional response to gender minorities, I examine how Chinese state institutions manage and regulate gender nonconformity.
This paper examined how Chinese state institutions resolve disruptions caused by the growing visibility of transgender people and gender-nonconforming practices. Through a content analysis of state newspapers, we argue that news discourse shaped how state institutions understand and govern gender nonconformity. State newspapers attributed gender nonconformity to either biomedical illnesses or social contagion and suggested that gender nonconformity would lead to the dysfunction of state institutions built upon an essentialist sex/gender/sexuality system. In particular, they stress the institutional challenges of regulating gender nonconformity in state surveillance, policing, marriage, and education. In doing so, state newspapers outline divergent pathways to manage and regulate transgender and gender nonconforming people.
Queer People in Heterosexual Marriage
Following my general interest in institutions “in transition,” another strand of my previous research by examining queer people in the institution of heterosexual marriage in China.
In this article, we compare media coverage of mixed-orientation marriage and the marriage of convenience between queer men and women. We argue that news discussions uphold the sanctity of heterosexual marriage by criticizing the lack of “love-sex-marriage” alignment in mixed-orientation marriages and marriages of convenience. Furthermore, they constructed moral hierarchies that favor marriage of convenience to mixed-orientation marriage as practices preventing harm to heterosexual women. This paper contributes to sociology of sexuality by demonstrating the construction of heterosexuality and marriage.