Rooted Stereotypical Thinking on Gender and Sex—Discussion on Notions Against Homosexuality in Chinese Sociocultural Context

Research Article
Open access

Rooted Stereotypical Thinking on Gender and Sex—Discussion on Notions Against Homosexuality in Chinese Sociocultural Context

Ruochen Fan 1*
  • 1 Hailiang International College, China    
  • *corresponding author 3486834855@qq.com
Published on 1 March 2023 | https://doi.org/10.54254/2753-7048/2/2022411
LNEP Vol.2
ISSN (Print): 2753-7056
ISSN (Online): 2753-7048
ISBN (Print): 978-1-915371-07-2
ISBN (Online): 978-1-915371-08-9

Abstract

The rooted paradigms of dichotomic thinking in modern societies have greatly limited human cognition and self-identification of gender identification and sexual inclination. It is against these biased yet prevalent pattern of dualistic tradition, a great number of scholars have contributed to the formation of non-dualistic theoretical stances, accentuating that the cognition of gender should based on the emphasis of gender fluidity. Michel Foucault’s power-knowledge theory has been long taken by the concerned academia as the fundamental theory embedding the non-dichotomic thinking paradigm. On the premise of applying dichotomous cognition to the analysis of the human gender cognition, this paper will firstly include an ethnographic analysis of the differences in people's cognition and definition of gender in modern society and particular small-scaled societies. This paper will also discuss the influence of the rigid impression of dichotomous cognition on the setting of control variables in many medical and psychological scientific researches. The concurrent scientific studies into sexual orientation and gender identification have largely neglected the influence of gender spectrum on human’s concerned cognition and self-recognition. The author would also include discussion of eth-nographic data from Chinese sociocultural context. In Chinese society, LGBT communities and homosexuality face various discrimination and inequality depends on people’s dualistic thinking and traditional Chinese social cultures so that LGBT people have to live in shadows. Through this study, a solid theoretical foundation can be established for relevant researchers to determine the theoretical framework of future empirical and experimental data.

Keywords:

Gender and sexuality, China, LGBT, Homosexuality, Sex orientation

Fan,R. (2023). Rooted Stereotypical Thinking on Gender and Sex—Discussion on Notions Against Homosexuality in Chinese Sociocultural Context. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,2,207-217.
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1. Introduction

A variety of scholars have embarked on their inquiry towards the essence and mechanism of human cognition and self-identification on sexuality and gender. The theoretical debate of factions accentuating on the physiological factors that determine the individual gender and sexual identification against factions that emphasis the influence of sociocultural context on relevant behaviours of individuals.

Gender and sexuality have never been a wholly isolated topic immune from the implication of sociocultural elements twisted under the web of sociality. The two cognizant notions share close connections with contemporaneous discursive political-economic structures under which individuals are situated and tamed to adopt and embrace. These connections, wherein the mechanism of power relations lies. For those who believe human gender and sexuality are extrinsically created, various kinds of social power, including the political, economic and discursive ones, work as imperatives in their study [1, 2]. This dissertation will focus on the scholarship arguing on the natural essence. People view society in terms of dualism rather than the nature of things. There are two different factions that differing in views of the gender identification. In fact, some people think that sexual orientation is predetermined on a biological or neurological level, while others think that sexual orientation is predetermined by contextual factors such as social factors, environmental factors or family factors. But it seems to me that both of these cognitive genres are based on dichotomic stances of thinking, the faction of which treat the world of existence as comprised of opposite pairs. Homosexuality, in opposite to heterosexuality, has long been taken as the symbol of marginalised population. It is prohibited, or taken as the unnamable trait of people. The structuralist treatment of the theoretisation upon sexuality is flawed for its inability to cover the fluid nature of gender performance and inclination of sexuality [1].

The structuralist tradition of social scientific inquiry, following Emile Durkheim, views non-dualistic gender performances as sourced from the problematic inspection over societal situation [3]. The dualistic standpoint withheld by Durkheim and his followers has been echoed in Normality of Crime where the French sociologist and philosopher illustrated the constant existence of social deviance as a sort of mirrored existences against the norms of society [4]. Non-dualistic gender self-identification and performances, seen by Durkheim and Durkheimian followers, are arbitrarily treated as the deviant behaviours in contrast to the normalized individual actions, case in point, the heterosexual set of behaviours. Durkheim’s argument on feminism, which was later inherited and developed, discombobulates the understanding of concerned human reality. The spaces, and human actions that cannot cater the poles of opposite sexes and genders cannot be fully addressed and have been neglected by strcuturalist theories [3]. It is towards the blank left out by structuralist stances, theorists accentuating on the non-dualistic turn of intellectual thinking point to the causes and effects of stereotypical cognition established upon the basis of heterosexual hegemony [1].

Michel Foucault devoted his academic career to the study of modern capitalist state power including the police, courts, prisons, doctors and psychiatrists. His goal is to understand how power works, and then use Marxist anarchism to create a utopian society. When Foucault was young, he read Nietzsche's book ‘Reflections on The Wrong Time,’ which includes an essay called ‘The Use and Abuse of The History of Life,’ in which Nietzsche discusses how academia can poison the public's reading and understanding of history. Let people seem to be sure to use a certain academic is not interesting perspective on the history, but Nietzsche expressed in playful anger against, not to their own classes to understand the past, the only reason is that should study the past, the past those views, ideas and examples, can help us in our time had better life, this essay liberated the Foucauldian idea very well. As far as we can see, there are two ways of thinking about controlling people in their homes: one is to lock everyone up and make them do certain things every day and recite corresponding theories and methods; The other is to add all the theories and methods into the teaching materials, and educate everyone from an early age, so that everyone can learn. One point of Foucault's theory of power knowledge is that national leaders never pursue to change people's minds through some tough or coercive means. Instead, they believe that only soft power and power knowledge can fundamentally change people's minds. The redeeability of power knowledge is that it can reflect what is controlling people, the difference in knowledge and information, the difference in cognitive form and dimension, so as to produce the ruler and the governed in the society. The best application of Foucault's theory is a study of female workers in China by Yi Pan, a professor of sociology at the University of Hong Kong. In China's live-in factories, in fact, the constraints on workers do not lie in the internal regulations of production such as the distance between workers and tables, the number of parts to be assembled per minute and the height of the head and so on. These regulations are not the focus of factory control in accommodation. The focus and purpose of their control is for workers to be obedient, so they should permeate all aspects of workers. So what does it mean to infiltrate all aspects of workers? It is factory tell what time you get up, what time to eat, what time to sleep and tell you what is the mode of social after work you and ect. These methods of control are to involve every worker's private space then let the workers of the private space and the boundary of the work has been blurred, as this boundary control can be in factory hands, which means these Chinese female workers are really controlled by private factory owners. And this is the best embodiment of power knowledge theory. The control of power knowledge described by Foucault is to erase the boundary between private and public, and then integrate all the needs to control your purpose into all the details of your life. An individual’s whole system of knowledge is following me, and next I have the starting point of your under-standing of the world part of you to control you. Now the power knowledge system is formed. Power is knowledge, and knowledge also can represent power.

What the deconstruction of sex-gender conception would cause in terms of our self-identification process [1]. In modern society, most people treat their encountered issues based on dichotomous cognition. Such a style of cognition, according to Kovacic, is coded into the personal action and consequent understanding of encountered phenomena. People's judgments of sexuality and gender will be affected by many of the official propaganda and media, so that form the stereotyped image and the idea of solidification is produced. As either China or western countries, the advertisement or the media propaganda there will always be one or more of the typical masculine men and typical feminine women to become fixed impression of women and men. As a result, gender will be compared with stereotyped image which lead to issues of discrimination and inequality.

The value of this research lies in unveiling the gap generated out of people's dualistic cognition on gender and sex. Currently, people rely on dualistic cognition to distinguish or define gender and sexuality, thus giving a limited definition of gender and sexuality. But in fact, a lot of societies, unlike modern societies, do not use dualistic cognition to define gender and sexuality, they use ternary or even multivariate cognition.

It is undeniable that people use dualistic cognition in terms of the sexuality and gender, which means modern society has restrictive definitions. The sexuality represents the person’s biological features which determines the biological sexuality of each person from a biological point of view. Moreover, the gender represents one person’s performances in daily life. Hence, people who show different biological features with their performance are called ‘partible persons’. The sexuality contains bodily features which is genetically determined at birth and then modulated by sex hormones, which means it can influence everyone’s gestures and it will accompany people throughout their lives. By contrast, the gender is just an expression or performance of people, it's all external things, it cannot be affected by biological features and it has nothing to do with natural essences. In that, people’s way of talking, personal identification, people’s attire, and outfit, even the people’s group belonging and act. All of these things can be included in features of gender. Moreover, one people does not always show his or her gender alone [1].

However, this gender binary is problamatised in regard to ethnographic cases collected by anthropological research in non-modernised societies. According to Cecilia Busby, gender identification process of the Hijra community in India is not conducted against a binary separation of genders. She explains that the Hijra community think of themselves outside of this binary [5]. They also categorize themselves as not ‘men’ based on their inability to reproduce matter, then their sexual anatomy. For them, these inabilities to either carry a baby like a woman or impregnate a woman with a problem makes the third gender. This marginalise them in society but at the same time, gives them special privilege to bless others for fertility. Though this example we can understand the difficulty of using a binary category of gender as a cross-cultural analytical concept.

In accordance to the cases from Mount Hagen society, which is the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. According to the existing literatures, it is proposed by Andrew Strathern that the male-female ‘axis’ of relations. People give a ‘axis’ as a range of gender rather than give the extreme standards define female and male, which means the masculine is not only for male, also feminine is not only for female [6]. In the Mount Hagen, it's not about biological features that determine everyone's gender but it's about how they behave and what their performance like. For example, the people who always go out for hunting or making money in order to support the family can be defined as ‘male’. Also, people who always stay at home to take care of babies or old people and cook at home and do housework would like to be defined as ‘female’.

The dichotomy is dominant in modern society. People treat with the sexuality and gender based on dichotomous cognition, innate knowledge or acquired knowledge. There are only small percentages of people step out of their pre-perceived stereotype. Therefore, the research is dedicated to breaking dichotomous cognition, so as to take a diverse perspective on society, on sexuality and on gender.

2. Discussion

2.1. Non-dichotomic thinking paradigm

Foucault’s understanding of how power works was largely built upon Marxist anarchism. Referencing Nietzsche's ‘The Use and Abuse of The History of Life’, Foucault discussed how academia can affect the public's reading and understanding of history, thus rendering the one-sided translation the embedding position of human sociocultural context. The ascertaining of archived history documenting people’s perspectives was not the focus of Nietzsche or Foucault. Nietzsche expressed in playful anger against, not to their own classes to understand the past, but that scholars should study the past, the past where those views arose. Foucault, following this stance, extended his studies on the point that people’s views of the surrounding are given rather than gained. As far as we can see, there are two ways of thinking about controlling people: one is through coercion –– forcibly push people to adhere to rules and do certain things on a regular basis and punish the people conducting otherwise things; The other is to softly wire people into the pattern of action by per-suasion and suggestion –– seemingly offering people the ‘freedom’ to choose out of given options in the way the authorities suppose them to do. One point of Foucault's theory of power-knowledge is that national leaders never pursue to change people's minds through some tough or coercive means. Instead, it is through ‘soft power’ and the “moulding through power-knowledge” are people's minds changed (ibid.). The redeemability of power knowledge is that it can reflect what is controlling people, the difference in knowledge and information, the difference in cognitive form and dimension, so as to produce the ruler and the governed in the society. The best application of Foucault's theory is the study of female factory workers in southern China by Ngai Pun. In China's live-in factories, the constraints on workers do not lie in ‘the internal regulations of production such as the distance between workers and tables, the number of parts to be assembled per minute and the height of the head’ and so on. These regulations are not the focus of factories’ rules of control. The core purpose of their control is to make the workers become obedient. The disciplining lines of words and actions are intangible and permeate into permeate all aspects of workers’ lives (ibid.). So, what does it mean to infiltrate all aspects of workers? It is factory stipulating what time the workers get up, what time to eat, what time to sleep and over-watching the mode of social life after work. These methods of control are to involve every worker's private space to part of the discipline. The boundary between private space and work has been blurred, as the power of interpretation falls into the hands of the factory. which means these Chinese female workers are really controlled by private factory owners. And this is the best embodiment of power knowledge theory. The control of power-knowledge described by Foucault is to erase the boundary between private and public, and then integrate all the needs to control your purpose into all the details of your life. Foucault accentuated on the superiority of knowledge system controlled by the intangible socio-cultural context pre-imposed on the individuals dwelling in the common context. The knowledge system, ‘inherited’ across generations, transcends the understanding by individuals and let the ones engaged within it ‘seemingly’ internalize the ‘traditions’ as ‘the ordinary’ and ‘the usual’. Power is knowledge, and knowledge also can represent power.

In combination with Foucault's power-knowledge, the dualistic gender classification withheld by the majority of people is an inherited view from the long-held tradition and culture of different societies. At the beginning, the purpose may simply be a division for production and basic survival, but now people have carried out a series of various social divisions. The original classification is obviously not suitable for modern society, while people still use this classification method to conduct scientific research, whether it is neuropsychology or social psychology. At the same time, Foucault's theory can also explain well that in most societies, people are instilled with extreme cognition or dichotomous cognition since childhood. People are taught, instructed, hinted, and made used view the world in a dualistic way through their interaction with the rest of the world and their own internalized so-call facts.

The reason why we have been cultivated to embrace dichotomous cognition also has a lot to do with the essences argued by Foucauldian power-knowledge theory. People are inclined to divide things into black and white (‘black’ means the fault and ‘white’ means the truth), and to associate concrete things with reference to dualistic setting [6]. For example, when people are homo-phobic, people will say that homosexuality will cause serious infectious diseases, and that homosexuality is not good for the development of society because it cannot reproduce children. As a counter-intuitive fact, some of the behavioural expressions of homosexuals are seriously inconsistent with the stereotypical impression that we are accustomed to. As the introduction section argues, a lot of people have stereotypes that are formed in a polarized way. Some previous research on gender and sexuality has been done on the basis of binary cognition. Problems arise with this basis of research as the framework of analysis may be tainted by the inaccurate presumption coming out of dualistic pattern of cognition. It is against this point of arbitrary essence, researches have been done in favour of non-dichotomic thinking paradigm. The theoretical debate with one faction sup-porting that gender and sexuality are determined by the natural essence and physiological factors against the other faction rendering gender and sexual identification as influenced by the sociocultural context on relevant behaviours of human has been going on. The essence of dichotomic thinking embedding scientific research following trait theories or biological arguments lies on the presumption that people of certain homosexual orientation are inclined to act in a pattern opposite to their biological sex. People tend to think that boys who are homosexual will perform just like girls, or girls who are homosexual tend to perform like boys, which means people would like to think that homosexual’ be-haviour and actions are the opposite of normal people or straight people. The idea indicates homosexuals’ sexual behaviour and sexual orientation are the opposite of the general population's, rather than that somebody’s behaviour that is different from normal behaviour is homosexual, this is very much taken out of context. Dichotomous cognition cannot only have an impact on various social phenomena, but also affect some scientific research on people's inherent impression of gender cognition, causing scientifically solidified bias.

2.2. Neurophysiological stance on the correlation between sex and gender (Sub-Heading 2.2)

From a neuropsychological point of view, the amounts of hormones secreted by body directly determines the sexual orientation of people. This argument arises from the precondition in associating the image of homosexuality with a lack of hormones. For example, homo-sexual men who are not producing enough testosterone have certain characteristics like a less dense beard and a less muscular discomfort –– the symbols that are considered as feminine characteristics. When it comes to the description of such males, they are tended to be described as carrying with female characteristics. But once people talk like this, they may have included considerable number of others who are not gay into the scope of homosexuality, the ones who may just be engaged with congenital hormone deficiency (ibid.). For females, the reality can be even harsher. In modern society, there are a lot of plastic surgery, for example photon skin rejuvenation and laser hair removal, which exist precisely because most people are trying to idealize the image of women. The popularization of plastic surgery implies the idealization of fixed female images in the society. ‘Females must have white skin, no body hair or slim figure’, which indicates that people have forcibly indoctrinated the original minority female image into a state of majority existence.

Hence, neurophysiological stance on the correlation between sex and gender, we put attention on the gender bias which is a kind of thinking mode preset for laboratory environment and pure empirical research. In many early medical studies, the cognition of gender was still viewed from the dichotomous perspective of male and female at the beginning, so many scientific studies did not consider the original variables when considering the control variables of laboratory environment due to the shackles of cognition, and the results were affected. There are also many scientific studies based on wrong premises, such as taking many social phenomena as pathological phenomena to discuss. In fact, stereotypes have influenced our scientific research, and a lot of scientific research doesn't take into ac-count people of non-extreme gender, that is, people who tend to be in the middle of the spectrum when they are sampled, or people with different traits when they are sampled normally. So it's very difficult for these subjects to fit the general characteristics of our most idealized extreme male or female, no one can achieve extreme male or female. For instance, in the biological medicine area, in particular, in view of the study on hormone levels, in reality a lot of people are simply not up to the standard of the hormone levels so that researchers need to set a very wide range of hormone levels in advance. Otherwise, the dependent variables in the experiment are heavily influenced by control variables. However, control variables just like hormones are difficult to control in experiments because they are on a large scale and cannot be digitized or specified. Diet drugs can be used as a classic example. A lot of weight-loss drugs are very difficult to make gender-neutral, meaning all-gender. Because men and women's hormone levels have huge differences, almost all weight-loss drugs are specifically designed for women or men only. However, the gender specificity of drugs cannot be clearly stated, so businesses generally make distinctions in advertising and marketing, they try to attract only women to buy or only men to buy. Although, in the female group and the male group, the difference between each female or male hormone is also very large, and the difference between the hormone can directly influence the effect of the drug. For example, a weight-loss drug for men, but the hormone level of the man who eats this drug is low, then the drug is counterproductive for him, which means it will make him fat. Because weight-loss drugs affect metabolism by controlling hormone levels that if itself is the male weight-loss drugs back to reduce male testosterone expression, the male hormone level itself is relatively weak, the result is also inhibited or reduced, it will lead to weight gain. Therefore, this is a problem that the previous diet drug developers didn't take into account, they just treated hormone levels as irrelevant rather than a control variable, and they set other control variables such as dopamine in the brain. When the Us Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began regulating and banning brain-stimulating drugs, weight-loss drugs began to shift to hormone levels as control variables, and most people's hormone levels fell somewhere in the middle.

2.3. Discussion on the Ethnographic data from Chinese sociocultural context

People's inherent impression on gender caused by dual cognition is the main reason why homosexuals and LGBT people suffer discrimination, unfair treatment and even persecution in Chinese society. According to the current study, China has the largest population of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) in the world. Besides, the population of the LGBT people in China was approximately 30 million [7]. In the Chinese version of classification of mental disorders [8], homosexuality is classified as a sexual disorder. Even though the Chinese Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the list of mental diseases in 2001, this decision has not reduced the discrimination and rejection of homosexuality in Chinese society and among Chinese people at all. Additionally, examples of ‘transformation therapy’ (P. 1286) are constantly reported [9, 10]. Discrimination is measured by heterosexual participants' attitudes towards LGBT individuals and the self-perceived discrimination of LGBT participants. Through Pearson Correlation Analysis, this paper discusses the differences between heterosexual participants' attitudes towards LGBT individuals and the self-perceived discrimination of LGBT participants. Linear regression was used to study GDP per capita and discrimination. In Chinese sociocultural context, due to the cultural, political and other factors, the homosexual community will be discriminated against in various aspects. These kinds of discrimination from society can be said to exist in all aspects, as in spouse, family, workplace, media, schools, medical services, social services, religious communities and so on.

For instance, LGBT (homosexual, bisexual and transgender) is still considered a disgrace to the family (‘lose face’). A homosexual family member might make the family the object of vicious rumors and stigmatize the family. It is reported that in China, the rejection rate of heterosexuals to LGBT family members is 11.1%, and the rejection rate of LGBT personal social relations is 2.1-4.1%. On the basis of the research, heterosexual participants’ acceptance towards the LGBT community can be very high level such as having LGBT friends or colleagues. However, almost heterosexual participants impossible to accept their children to be identified as LGBT or homosexuality. The main reason is that LGBT friends or colleagues may be better able to understand and empathize with other people, making good friends and bringing pleasure to others. Whereas Chinese people have a strong belief in the traditional heterosexual marriage. They believe that marriage is an important event in life and an important aspect of children's obligation to inherit family blood. If a child becomes LGBT or homo-sexual, it might mean giving up their family duty and being unable to have children that will disappoint your parents. Among LGBT individuals, family acceptance is associated with a higher level of self-esteem and positive physical and mental health. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in China are often up against great pressure from their families rather than regain their support. Due to the incomprehension and opposition of most families, we found that less than half (49.4%) of gay male participants disclosed their sexual orientation to family members, the proportion of bisexual, transgender and lesbian participants was 54.1%, 63.8% and 75.1% respectively. For example, Mr. Li, a 75 years old gay man who was arrested three times on the basis of the ‘antihooliganism law,’ talked about a famous ‘gay park’ in Beijing. He said, ‘Anything you could absolutely not communicate with your family, your children, and your friends could be discussed right here’ [11]. From a political point of view, in China, homosexual and LGBT partners are not recognized as legal couples with marriage certificates, which leads to various obstacles in the context of family law (such as inheritance rights, obtaining partner life insurance compensation, etc.). Because LGBT couple’s love and marriage are not guaranteed by law, their love and marriage are always not favored. Furthermore, transgender and gay male participants are more likely to be unemployed because they will also be treated unfairly and discriminated against in the workplace which has extremely negatively consequence for the mental and physical health of employees. Most companies lack protection for LGBT workers, and even have unfriendly or strict policies that limit many rights of LGBT workers and make it more and more difficult for them to be recognized at work. All in all, to a large extent, it should be the discrimination against the identity and social status of homosexuality, which indirectly or directly affects the education, marriage, work, political rights and so on of the homosexual community.

According to the research of Wang et al. [12], the following are the main contents we found. In a survey of 29,125 participants, 2066 (7.1%) were lesbian, 9491 (32.6%) were homosexual, 3441 (11.8%) were bisexual, and 3195 (11.0%) were transgender Among them, 10,932 (37.5%) were heterosexual. Heterosexuals are generally friendly to the LGBT community, with an average score of 21.9 points (SD=2.7, total score=100), and the overall average score of LGBT participants’ self-perceived discrimination is 49.9 points (SD=2.5). Self-perception discrimination from family and social services is particularly serious. We produced a series of provincial choir maps showing the acceptance of the LGBT community by heterosexual participants and the self-perceived discrimination reported by members of the LGBT community. We found that the higher the level of economic development in each province, the less discrimination. We found that for every 100,000 yuan increase in per capita GDP, the incidence of discrimination among heterosexuals will decrease by 6.4% [12]. This time the current research involves investigations in 31 provinces and autonomous regions in the country and it shows the economic development and modernization can increase tolerance to-wards sexual minorities. With the economic growth, people's tolerance for LCBT is becoming more and more positive, and LGBT individuals who live in economically backward regions often face harsher discrimination. But in fact, this result is based on different circumstances for heterosexual participants.

In Chinese society, people discriminate against homosexuals and LGBT communities based on their sexual orientation or their different style of conduct and love. It comes down to people believing that LGBT and homosexual people are physically or psychologically different from themselves. That is why, self-identify as LGBT community members respondents said that when they were discriminated, they were mostly discriminated based on their physiological factors and their growing environment. In Chinese society, the LGBT people still living in the shadows which means these LGBT communities always experience some barriers in their daily life and the members of the LGBT community usually face discrimination about the social, cultural and political. Because of these various of the discrimination, the LGBT people will be marginalised and can have an impact on their mental health and daily lives. In China, members of LGBT groups are discriminated against and marginalized by society. Thereby, most lesbian, bisexual and transgender bisexuals tend to conceal their gender, sexual orientation and minority identity in order to avoid discrimination. AIDS or HIV has become increasingly popular among gay and bisexual men, although it is rarely recognized, but it has also led to challenges faced by homosexuals and their families. These changes make the LGBT population and HIV infected persons and their caregivers face the risk of economic insecurity. These years, China's AIDS and HIV epidemic is at a critical stage. Since 2015, the main mode of HIV and AIDS transmission has shifted to men who have sex with men (MSM), including gay, bisexual and other people who do not openly identify as sexual minorities [13]. The number of MSM infections has continued to increase, from approximately 2.5% in 2006 to more than a quarter in 2014 [13]. Moreover, Liu et al. [7] believes that as a collectivist culture, AIDS and HIV patients in China are stigmatized because their value to the group is belittled [14]. Stigma associated with HIV status was initially spread through misleading propaganda, believing that HIV and AIDS are alien diseases and are un-likely to exist or spread in China [15]. At present, gay men, bisexual men, men who have sex with men and transsexual women have been singled out deliberately. Their identities are falsely linked to the root cause of HIV infections by the public [7]. There was a gay man who lived with the HIV had reported,

In China, a patient always needs to take a blood test before their surgery. And once the doctor found that I had infected with HIV, they refused to care for me. Refusing a patient is not legal in China, but nowadays almost every hospital is doing the same thing. There are only two hospitals that are willing to conduct surgeries for HIV patients and the cost is very pricey [16].

Those people who live with the AIDS or HIV will continue to be discriminated because of their HIV status. Even in safer homosexual space, the HIV situation will be stigmatized, so it is extremely difficult to disclose [16, 17]. Furthermore, the reason for the discrimination about the HIV status is that in China, due to the lack of education and attention to safe sex [18] and preventive measures for LGBT people, invisibility and stigma related to these human behaviors dominate. Therefore, the identity of homosexuals, bisexuals and transsexuals is placed under the attack of this moral isolation, painted "transboundary" and linked to the AIDS epidemic, which sets additional obstacles to the service of HIV infected homosexuals, bisexuals and transsexuals. On the other hand, although the public stigma of homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuals is aggravated by the AIDS and HIV pandemic, it also provides an important platform for community participation and boycott of life support for people living with HIV and AIDS. As an example, for quantity of LGBT organizations in Chinese mainland, AIDS treatment and education services are still the main way to obtain public funds [19, 20].

When we view the experience of stigma as the essence of history, society, interpretation and morality, we can better assess its impact on inequality in a specific culture [14]. Although China's stigma theory developed largely in the context of mental illness, many of the identical socio-cultural factors are related to the lives of other marginalized groups in China [21], including LGBT communities. The stratification of multiple stigmatized identities, such as double or triple stigmatization caused by sexual orientation, gender expression and identity, makes China's LGBT groups face great trauma, social exclusion, neglect and obstacles to access to social resources. The stigma of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgenders further weakens people's traditional respect and authority in the community. The current discrimination phenomenon is a process of artificial Labelling. The labelling theory itself is a theory from criminology, which means there are some criminals whose behaviour is due to their rational choices and they might think they are bad guy. Once they have given themselves such a label, there is no way they can escape it. Similarly, in the process of being pathologically discriminated against by others around them, many homosexuals and LGBT people will not only pathologically discriminate themselves, but even try to domesticate themselves. That is to say, themselves began to think and believe that they were sick. For example, in 2013 or 2014, the express service in Hong Kong was still underdeveloped and inconvenient. The Hong Kong residents had to take express delivery to the port of Shenzhen. At this time, if homosexuals who wanted to buy HIV testing agents, they had to go to Shenzhen. In fact, many Hong Kong locals may never travel to main-land China, but the proportion of them buying test agents online and going to Shenzhen for delivery is particularly high. So to some extent, they are constantly buying HIV indicators for themselves, and fearing that they are going to get HIV. However, as long as the normal protection, the probability of HIV disease is relatively low. What’s more, the reason why LGBT people often buy testing is be-cause people around them, such as family, friends and colleagues are always telling them to be more protective, so that it's natural for them to test themselves more and more in order to make sure they don't have the disease. This process of labeling has an actual effect on a person's behavior and then it changes, and at this point, the homosexuals have already begun the process of domestication and be-gun to label himself. But at the same time, it is a shameful thing for themselves. As a results, it's really about how LGBT people are labeled and how they try to break away from that rigid label. The label-ling of homosexuals and LGBT people in the process of pathological discrimination or the homosexuals themselves starting to domesticate themselves by using the label is the Labelling theory.

3. Conclusions

With a systematic literature review of existing literatures and concerned experimental researches on the rooted stereotypical thinking on gender and sex with discussion on notions against homosexuality in Chinese sociocultural context. In modern society, whether at the government level or the individual level, most people tend to separate the two genders while they think that it is normal to display behaviours and biological features that are completely consistent with one's own physical characteristics. In fact, there only very few people are able to do this. Most people have more or less both genders, and many people are born with fuzzy gender identity due to the secretion of hormones, so they can easily be treated differently. Hence, this project applies dichotomous cognition to the relational logic of how to analyse human gender and sexuality cognition. The first is to analyse the more com-mon social phenomenon just like people in modern society would like to give a restrict definition of gender and sexuality that people always use the extreme value to identify female and male rather than give an axis. The concept of homosexuality comes into being because of people's dualistic cognition. This kind of phenomenon is the result of people’s dichotomic thinking paradigm. About the reason why people have this dualistic thinking is that according to the Michel Foucault's power knowledge theory, everyone’s mind was determined since childhood, and everyone is taught to view the world in a dualistic way. But there are still societies in which gender is defined by individual behaviour rather than biological characteristics, for example Mount Hagen society and Hijra community in India. Then there are gender biases that are specific to science, and these biases are empirical expressions of rigid perceptions and impressions of gender by scientists. Finally, some examples of China are not only about the solidification of Chinese people's gender expression, but also many social factors that lead to people's rigid definition of gender and sexuality. In such a cross-border society as Hong Kong in China, due to the solidification of people's thoughts and discrimination in the society, LGBT people in Hong Kong will gradually start to self-label and think that they might really be different.

In fact, this project is to set up the research mode of the future theoretical framework and find the specific research direction. For the empirical data acquisition, psychology is based on laboratory environment and tests, while social psychology is based on interviews and very in-depth research. The deeper the field work, the closer it is to sociology and anthropology, and the more inclined it is to collect a large number of data, the more inclined it is to social psychology. In the future, the direction of obtaining empirical data will focus on the reason for the existence of people's dual thinking and the factual manifestations of dual thinking and cognition and in some specific cases in view of gender and sexuality. I would like to find more examples of binary thinking in the future. For example, we think of one thing as being alive and another as being inorganic. In this case, we consider something to be our own, to belong to the human circle, which means it not to be part of a group with high rights. Such researches generally discuss the direction of future social development, such as whether artificial intelligence will develop to a certain level, whether artificial intelligence products should be given the same rights as human beings. Also, there are animals that we think of as pets, while other animals that we think of as animals, they have different rights. I would like to find where the cognitive cut off point for people is. Another way to collect data is to make a judgment based on whether a person's performance is deviant or not. In order to find out the basis for judging them as deviant is also a discussion of binary cognition about whether this thing is abnormal or not and what is normal, also, why do we categorize this way. Moreover, in the case of special phenomena, such as the homosexual community, whether there will be corresponding social rights for this group of people in the future, whether these people can get more legal aid in law, and under what circumstances they need special care and ect. Finally, in view of the majority of people in the society who mark them as deviant, I have plan to research how to do their psychological evaluation, as how to achieve a psychological analysis framework in line with their group characteristics, and what points should be taken into account in this psychological analysis framework. These are all points where you can get empirical data and do research. All of these series of data can be collected in the future.


References

[1]. Butler, J. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 1988, 40(4), p.519.

[2]. Foucault, M. and Hurley, R., 1990. An introduction. New York: Vintage Books.

[3]. Lehmann, H. Legal Concepts in a Natural Language Based Expert System. Ratio Juris, 3(2), 1990, pp.245-253.

[4]. Durkheim, Emile. “The Division of Labour in Society.” The Division of Labour in Society, 1984, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17729-5.

[5]. Busby, Cecilia. “Permeable and Partible Persons: A Comparative Analysis of Gender and Body in South India and Melanesia.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 3, no. 2, June 1997, pp. 261–278., https://doi.org/10.2307/3035019.

[6]. Strathern, Andrew. “Gender, Ideology and Money in Mount Hagen.” Man, vol. 14, no. 3, Sept. 1979, pp. 530–548., https://doi.org/10.2307/2801873.

[7]. United Nations Development Programme China. (2016). Being LGBTI in China: A national survey on social attitudes towards sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/undp-china/docs/undp-ch-peg-being_lgbt_in_china_en.

[8]. Wu, Jing. “From ‘Long Yang’ and ‘Dui Shi’ to Tongzhi: Homosexuality in China.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, vol. 7, no. 1-2, 2003, pp. 117–143., https://doi.org/10.1300/j236v07n01_08.

[9]. Burki T (2017). Health and rights challenges for China’s LGBT community. The Lancet, 389(10076), 1286. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(17)30837-1.

[10]. Cen J (2017, 11 21). Have you considered your parents’ happiness? Conversion therapy against LGBT people in China. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/11/15/have-you-considered-yourparents-happiness/conversion-therapy-against-lgbt-people.

[11]. Chen X (2014, 12 3). A 75-year-old gay man’s life in Beijing. [Pheonix Satellite TV]. Retrieved from http://news.ifeng.com/a/20141203/42630500_0.shtml.

[12]. Wang, Yuanyuan, et al. “Mapping out a Spectrum of the Chinese Public’s Discrimination toward the LGBT Community: Results from a National Survey.” BMC Public Health, vol. 20, no. 1, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08834-y.

[13]. Zheng S (2018). The growing threat of China’s HIV epidemic. The Lancet Public Health, 3(7), e311. doi:10.1016/s2468-2667(18)30098-7 [PubMed: 29976325].

[14]. Yang, L., Kleinman, A., Link, B., Phelan, J., Lee, S. and Good, B., 2007. Culture and stigma: Adding moral experience to stigma theory. Social Science & Medicine, 64(7), pp.1524-1535.

[15]. Kleinman A, & Guo J (2011). Deep China: The moral life of the person: What anthropology and psychiatry tell us about China today (pp. 237–262). Berkeley: University of California Press.

[16]. Hua B (2016, 9). Voices of LGBT in Shanghai [ebook]. [Douban]. Retrieved from https://read.douban.com/ebook/20661895/.

[17]. Hua B (2017, 8). LGBT research in China as a social movement. Paper presented at the meeting of World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics, San Francisco, CA.

[18]. Xing J, Li YG, Tang W, Guo W, Ding Z, Ding G,… Mahapatra T (2014, 4 3). HIV/AIDS epidemic among older adults in China during 2005–2012: Results from trend and spatial analysis. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/59/2/e53/2895356.

[19]. Cao J, & Guo L (2016). Chinese “Tongzhi” community, civil society, and online activism. Communication and the Public, 1(4), 504–508. doi:10.1177/2057047316683199.

[20]. Yang, L. and Kleinman, A., 2008. ‘Face’ and the embodiment of stigma in China: The cases of schizophrenia and AIDS. Social Science & Medicine, 67(3), pp.398-408.


Cite this article

Fan,R. (2023). Rooted Stereotypical Thinking on Gender and Sex—Discussion on Notions Against Homosexuality in Chinese Sociocultural Context. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,2,207-217.

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References

[1]. Butler, J. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 1988, 40(4), p.519.

[2]. Foucault, M. and Hurley, R., 1990. An introduction. New York: Vintage Books.

[3]. Lehmann, H. Legal Concepts in a Natural Language Based Expert System. Ratio Juris, 3(2), 1990, pp.245-253.

[4]. Durkheim, Emile. “The Division of Labour in Society.” The Division of Labour in Society, 1984, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17729-5.

[5]. Busby, Cecilia. “Permeable and Partible Persons: A Comparative Analysis of Gender and Body in South India and Melanesia.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 3, no. 2, June 1997, pp. 261–278., https://doi.org/10.2307/3035019.

[6]. Strathern, Andrew. “Gender, Ideology and Money in Mount Hagen.” Man, vol. 14, no. 3, Sept. 1979, pp. 530–548., https://doi.org/10.2307/2801873.

[7]. United Nations Development Programme China. (2016). Being LGBTI in China: A national survey on social attitudes towards sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/undp-china/docs/undp-ch-peg-being_lgbt_in_china_en.

[8]. Wu, Jing. “From ‘Long Yang’ and ‘Dui Shi’ to Tongzhi: Homosexuality in China.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, vol. 7, no. 1-2, 2003, pp. 117–143., https://doi.org/10.1300/j236v07n01_08.

[9]. Burki T (2017). Health and rights challenges for China’s LGBT community. The Lancet, 389(10076), 1286. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(17)30837-1.

[10]. Cen J (2017, 11 21). Have you considered your parents’ happiness? Conversion therapy against LGBT people in China. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/11/15/have-you-considered-yourparents-happiness/conversion-therapy-against-lgbt-people.

[11]. Chen X (2014, 12 3). A 75-year-old gay man’s life in Beijing. [Pheonix Satellite TV]. Retrieved from http://news.ifeng.com/a/20141203/42630500_0.shtml.

[12]. Wang, Yuanyuan, et al. “Mapping out a Spectrum of the Chinese Public’s Discrimination toward the LGBT Community: Results from a National Survey.” BMC Public Health, vol. 20, no. 1, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08834-y.

[13]. Zheng S (2018). The growing threat of China’s HIV epidemic. The Lancet Public Health, 3(7), e311. doi:10.1016/s2468-2667(18)30098-7 [PubMed: 29976325].

[14]. Yang, L., Kleinman, A., Link, B., Phelan, J., Lee, S. and Good, B., 2007. Culture and stigma: Adding moral experience to stigma theory. Social Science & Medicine, 64(7), pp.1524-1535.

[15]. Kleinman A, & Guo J (2011). Deep China: The moral life of the person: What anthropology and psychiatry tell us about China today (pp. 237–262). Berkeley: University of California Press.

[16]. Hua B (2016, 9). Voices of LGBT in Shanghai [ebook]. [Douban]. Retrieved from https://read.douban.com/ebook/20661895/.

[17]. Hua B (2017, 8). LGBT research in China as a social movement. Paper presented at the meeting of World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics, San Francisco, CA.

[18]. Xing J, Li YG, Tang W, Guo W, Ding Z, Ding G,… Mahapatra T (2014, 4 3). HIV/AIDS epidemic among older adults in China during 2005–2012: Results from trend and spatial analysis. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/59/2/e53/2895356.

[19]. Cao J, & Guo L (2016). Chinese “Tongzhi” community, civil society, and online activism. Communication and the Public, 1(4), 504–508. doi:10.1177/2057047316683199.

[20]. Yang, L. and Kleinman, A., 2008. ‘Face’ and the embodiment of stigma in China: The cases of schizophrenia and AIDS. Social Science & Medicine, 67(3), pp.398-408.