Amy Hanser

This dissertation examines how the economic institutions of the pink economy have emerged in China since the early 2010s, how gendered sociality has influenced the way the lesbian and gay male consumer markets are organized, and how Chinese mainstream companies have marketed to lesbians and gay men by mobilizing repertoires of subcultural codes, sociocultural norms, and cultural trends in contemporary China. This dissertation draws on interviews, ethnographic data, media data, and social semiotic analysis of gay advertisements to address these different yet inextricably linked questions. This study contributes to the existing literature on the sociology of markets that demonstrates how the state, gender, and sociocultural norms shape market economies. It also fills a crucial gap in the sociological study of markets: understanding how sexual identity shapes market development and organizations. My research findings can be summarized as follows. First, unmet consumer demand forms the basis of the pink economy sector, and the state set the scene for the nascent pink sector to emerge: government policies triggered a surge in funding resources and technology infrastructure upgrades that laid the material foundations for pink entrepreneurship. Pink companies have strategically leveraged government policies to negotiate their legitimacy with the authorities. Second, this study indicates that certain types of commerce existing in the gay male consumer market do not dovetail with lesbians’ preferred ways of socializing characterized by security and privacy. Opportunities for the lesbian and gay male markets exist in different types of trade and business. Third, Chinese mainstream companies have capitalized on public ignorance of LGBTQ culture by employing gay subcultural codes in their marketing practices. In patrilineal China, gay marketing is influenced by different cultural perceptions of same-sex intimacy between men and women, resulting in distinct portrayals of gay men and lesbians. Some advertisements featuring gay men and lesbians have enjoyed popularity on the coattails of the thriving danmei culture and the China-Chic economy. Gay marketing is embedded in the social realities of contemporary China: the dynamics among state power, sociocultural norms, cultural trends, and multiple subcultural groups that mainstream marketing has attempted to pull in.

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In the face of a growing housing crisis, since the early 2000s cities throughout North America have created various policies to encourage urban developers to build affordable housing in exchange for extra density. This phenomenon has produced novel public-private arrangements and prompted some developers to take on a dual identity of luxury condominium builders and partners in solving the housing crisis. Considering this significant shift in the responsibilities of the private sector, how can we understand the new role of developers in providing affordable housing through density? What are the motivations and justification of actors in the industry, government, non-profit, and public sphere in supporting or challenging these arrangements? My dissertation draws on 100 qualitative interviews with politicians, developers, and other actors in the field of urban development in Toronto and Vancouver, two years of ethnographic observation, and frame analysis of over 500 newspaper articles, to address these questions through three standalone yet interrelated papers. Drawing from work in cultural sociology, geography, and anthropology, which emphasizes the role of meaning, symbolism, and different forms of non-market exchange in the economy, I advance an urban cultural economy approach for the study of urban development. First, I argue that the exchange of density between the private sector and the state takes the form of gift-giving and reciprocity and this has a consequential impact on land-use decisions. This finding adds nuance to debates on urban neoliberalization. Second, I argue that giving back through density agreements allows developers to accumulate symbolic capital, which is simultaneously altruistic and profit-oriented. This finding advances understandings of non-economic capital in the field of urban development. Finally, through an analysis of Canadian news media, I show how exchanging density for rental housing relies on cultural understandings of housing tenure and fictional expectations of the future of housing markets. This finding contributes to recent work on the role of narratives and storytelling within the capitalist economy. In addition to advancing theoretical conversations in urban, cultural, and economic sociology, my dissertation also provides suggestions for how to improve urban development policy in Canadian cities.

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This dissertation explores how local labour markets and labour migration are constructed within in the Pearl River delta region in Guangdong province, south China. The Pearl River delta region has become one of the most industrialized and prosperous regions in China since economic reform began in 1979. Industrial growth has occurred in areas that were primarily agricultural, yet the trajectory of growth has been uneven. Uneven development has generated two distinct economic structures and economic activities within the delta region. The core area is highly industrialized, and partially urbanized, while the periphery is less industrialized and by Pearl River delta standards marginally developed.The data for this study were derived primarily from a survey conducted in five formerly rural communities in the Pearl River delta. Over 400 labour migrants were interviewed. Ethnographic observation and secondary documentary analysis complemented the survey data. I argue, firstly, that rural industrialization created large scale labour migration in and around village settlements rather than urban areas. Labour market formation in Chinese rural contexts offers a sharp contrast to current migration studies and labour market formation. Secondly, the hukou system and other policies of residence management have major consequences for labour migration in China. Labour migration occurs in a domestic context and despite some distinctions occurs within a single cultural system. Chinese labour migrants cross administrative boundaries and face cultural adjustment such as language and industrial work. They can be seen as analogous to foreign workers as described in international migration studies. Yet institutional arrangements create unequal access to the benefits of citizenship and distinctive living arrangements. They generate contested identities in the places where migrants seek employment. The social networks of migrants have become facilitating factors in obtaining jobs and initial settlement, yet they may also hinder social integration into highly solidary host communities. This study has implications beyond labour market formation and identity change. Given the large population of labour migrants in China and the patterns of labour migration under specific institutional context and local social characteristics, it casts light on the profound social transformation in China as a whole.

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This study uses the China case to revisit some of the central assumptions of the literature on citizenship, showing how citizens and states are formed in and through the local places where citizenship is practiced. It suggests that the location of the political and of citizens have been an understudied aspect of citizenship orders, not just in relation to the growing impact of global and transnational forces, but also in sub-state entities.Through fine-grained examination of the daily interactions between citizens and state agents, this study shows how citizenship in China is embedded in local relationships of belonging, participation and entitlement anchored in institutions that organize people in workplaces, urban neighborhoods and rural villages. Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in four communities in Tianjin, China, the study examines how two such institutions, the villager and residents committees, act as a nexus for participation and formal rights, while also providing social welfare to the needy. The practices of these institutions bind citizens to the state through a face-to-face politics that acts both as a mechanism of control and a channel for claims-making and pressure from below, a mode of rule I call “socialized governance.” Both enabling and constraining, this exists in tension with bureaucratic-rational forms of governance, such as the current Chinese leadership’s objective of “ruling in accordance with law.” While the frameworks for citizenship are set at the national level, its local, cellular character means great variation among places in both form and practice. My model of local citizenship helps explain patterns of economic and social inequality and of contentious politics in contemporary China. While the unsettling of the congruence between the national and citizenship has been widely noted, this study points to how local, national and global institutionalized dimensions of citizenship have consistently been mediated through or exercised in sub-state entities. The narrative of the nation-state has so dominated the literature on citizenship that it has generally made invisible the actual techniques and processes through which citizenship orders are made, re-made and contested. As a unitary state with a strong national project, the China case provides intriguing material for rethinking how the local shapes citizenship.

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