The language of non-belonging: Chronotopes, stances and bisexual futurity in digital China

Drawing on a queer linguistic perspective, this paper explores the chronotopic awareness of language in queer women’s shared narratives that plot hope within loss/suffering in the Chinese digital space. Through digital ethnography across Chinese social media, I conducted discourse analysis of threads across queer groups on Douban. By focusing on the thread titled My sense of identity belonging is really weak, I examine the spatiotemporal dynamics in the negotiation of non-/belonging between the original poster (OP), a Chinese bisexual woman, and forum members.
The OP articulates a diminishing sense of belonging to both gender and queer categories. Tropes associated with animals, witches and dark forests become discursive resources to imagine utopian and heterogeneous futures and de-humanise the bi body to transgress normative temporalities.
This study also offers a non-western perspective on the bisexual capacity for identity loss as a generative force that asserts queer politics of imagination to produce new gender and sexual subjectivities in the digital sphere. Through mobilising spatiotemporal fragments, queer women in China situate hope not in belonging to any imagined community, but in negotiating a localised sense of community with affective bonds. In doing so, they constantly construct bisexual-favouring collective identities to explore the queer potentiality in the unintelligible bisexual temporality through united and utopian envision (Muñoz, 2019), despite being caught in the double bind of homonormative identity policing and broader heteronormative constraints.