Knowledge production and epistemic politics: A scientometric review of Chinese sexuality studies in English-language academia

Abstract

In recent decades, sexuality studies has become an increasingly important field of social scientific research in and beyond China. This paper uses CiteSpace and VOSviewer to carry out a bibliometric analysis of 26,975 sexuality-related papers included in the Web of Science database in the past four decades through mapping knowledge domains. Situating the literature on Chinese sexuality studies in global English-language academia, this study adopts performance analysis, collaboration network analysis, and co-citation network analysis to identify the main bodies that produce knowledge in the field and their networks of collaboration. We also depict the research trends and the hotspots in the field of (Chinese) sexuality research. Drawing on insights from postcolonial sociology, we discuss the epistemic politics in the social scientific knowledge production of (Chinese) sexuality that emerges from the findings. Specifically, we recognize the importance of a global intellectual division of labor whereby Westerners theorize the world and the rest of the world serves as data. We argue that the early stage of Chinese sexuality research was largely conditioned and profoundly influenced by this Western-centric global intellectual division of labor in terms of research problematics and themes. Recent development in the field, by contrast, indicates a departure from this labor division by challenging the Western-centric notion of sexuality and opening up possibilities of theorizing sexuality from an Asian/Chinese perspective.