Zuo, Zixi; (2025) Love, Relationships, and Sexuality: Chinese young people's Experience of Intimacies during Wuhan Covid-19 Pandemic. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the reconfiguration of gender and sexuality in the everyday lives of Chinese young people, with a particular focus on mediated intimacy. Unlike previous sociological work that emphasises macro-level transformations in intimate relationships driven by rising individualism, this study addresses a gap by examining how gendered subjectivities are constructed and negotiated in daily life, within China’s rapidly evolving neoliberal and digital landscape. The research centres on university-led relationship advice courses, Love Psychology, designed for Chinese university students. Using digital ethnographic methods, data was collected over ten months (October 2019 to August 2020) through online observation of three course lectures and interviews with eighteen students from two universities in Wuhan. This fieldwork coincided with the Covid-19 lockdown, a period that intensified mediated interactions and limited physical mobility. The lack of mobility associated with the pandemic accelerated the merging of the feminist new materialist concept of more-than-human actors – omnipresent digital media — as active forces in young people’s everyday lived experience of intimacies. Drawing on feminist new materialism and posthuman theory(Barad, 2007), this thesis reconceptualises intimacy as affective aesthetics — foregrounding how affect circulates through assemblages of bodies, technologies, and discourses in ways that disrupt hierarchical gender structures and anthropocentric assumptions. Drawing from my ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews with young people, the analysis highlights the ‘messy’ micro-ruptures – affective glitches – that emerge in young people’s negotiations with (hetero)normativity. Inspired by queer feminist scholarship (Braidotti, 2019; Renold and Ringrose, 2017; Allen, 10 2015), this research conceptualises young people’s gender and sexual identities as non-essentialist, discursive-material entanglements in a state of continuous ‘becoming.’ The research contends the conflicting gendered dynamics and persistent structural forces continue to operate on Chinese youth practices of intimacy. Informed by performativity theory, affect theory and discursive approaches, the analysis couches a series of contradictory gendered struggles and rhetorical egalitarian discourses within the local meaning-making process and the historical-social-political specificity of China. Nonetheless, the research still offers a glimmer of hope for dismantling of structural gender hierarchies and moving beyond the narrow confines of (hetero)normative intimacy. The findings also contribute to the development of sexuality and relationship education in China, offering new pedagogical insights aligned with young people’s lived realities.

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