Doing Research on Sapphic Communities in China 101

Gloria Bao is an Economics and Sociology major in the class of 2027. Gloria is one of our 2025 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. Read Gloria's first blog post from earlier this summer, Things to Worry About When Researching Sapphic Online Slang in China.

So much has happened since my last blog post as my research into the language that sapphic communities use on social media to avoid censorship in China continues. I surpassed 10 interviews. Bowen Yang talked about a running joke within the queer mainland Chinese community, drinking Chinese medicine to be “turned” straight, on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show (R.I.P.). I met with another researcher, and we bemoaned the state of queer research in China. And a sapphic couple made the entertainment headlines on Weibo because their breakup was messyyy.

All in all: research is going amazingly!

In my last blog post, I was worried about not having enough interviews. I have more than I can transcribe now. I was also worried about interviewing in Chinese, which is my mother tongue, but not the primary language of my education. Now, my interviewees have helped me figure out a better translation for ‘community’, 社群, and I have managed to find a balance between being professional and personable in a Chinese interview setting.

Of course, there are still challenges. One of my interviewees told me, halfway through the interview, that they had to go because they hadn’t expected that the interview would go on for more than half an hour. The consent form does include this information, but I have since begun to remind my interviewees of the expected duration of the interviews when I schedule the interview with them, too. Another one of my interviewees spent most of our interview talking about their partner, only to message me two weeks later because they had broken up. The recruitment process has only become more difficult, as I seemed to have reached almost all of the influencers that met my criteria. (And it only took me reaching out to over 300 accounts.)

Now, as the summer comes to an end and I reflect back on the process, I think there are many things that I might have done differently. So here are some tips if you, or any of your loved ones, ever want to do research on the Chinese queer community:

1. Try to get a WeChat account. As I was going through and recruiting influencers, one of the main things that kept coming back to bite at me was not having an official WeChat account from which I could communicate with people. WeChat is the main form of communication used in China, as opposed to WhatsApp or iMessage here in the US, and while I knew that before I began my research, I sort of just… Trusted that I wouldn’t need it. Not my brightest idea. Many of my interviewees and participants wanted to communicate on WeChat, so I often had to tell them that I couldn’t or that we could switch to another messaging platform if they would prefer that. WeChat is much harder to monitor and keep private, so getting access to it might be hard. This is a battle worth fighting IRB for, though, if this is something you’re interested in.
2. Be prepared for a LOT of confusion. No one is really sure. That is the main conclusion I have drawn from all of my interviews. If you ask one person their experience with a social media platform, they might tell you that platform A is much more lenient on queer content than platform B. Then, your next interviewee might tell you the exact opposite. And the next interviewee might just shrug and say, “They both feel great to me.” In fact, my interviewees couldn’t even all agree that there even WAS censorship. Some of my interviewees expressed feeling like they were being targeted for their sexuality. Others basically laughed and told me, “Not in the big 2025.” Most people talk about censorship as a minor, everyday inconvenience. They may not have even thought very carefully about it. So don’t come into the interviews with your mind made up, even if you think the literature paints a bleak story. The actual lived experiences can differ greatly when you hone in on a more specific point.
3. It never hurts to have more identity verification for yourself. While I definitely had more blasé folks, most of my interviewees were very cautious about participating, because of the censorship and the potential political implications of what we were speaking about. One of the potential interviewees told me that they wouldn’t be comfortable participating because of the survey questions (that the consent form is attached to) asking for age range, income level, and education level. I walked into the process thinking that my duke.edu mailbox would be enough. It is, to some degree, but it doesn’t hurt to have something like this blog post (!) posted by a verifiable source to prove you are who you are.
4. Finally, transcribe as you go along. This is more of a reminder to myself. If you ever hear a little voice whispering in your head, after you’ve just had an hour long interview with an interviewee who gave you their whole life story, “Do the transcription and the cleaning tomorrow,” do yourself a favor and banish it. Terminate it. Do whatever you need to do. That little voice will result in you having 10 interviews sitting on your Duke Zoom, waiting for you to transcribe them. Save yourself the anguish.

This experience has been incredible. I can’t express how much I have appreciated having the funding to visit many of the queer sites in Shanghai and China at large, and I am so profoundly moved by the community I have been able to witness through my interviews. I hope I can make them proud wherever I take this project to in the future. 

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