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Since 2013, LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and other) activism in China has existed in a gray area between noncriminalization in legal terms and fragmented strategies of suppression. The expansion of home-grown social media platforms has provided a (relatively) safe haven for LGBTQ+ people to connect, and a growing number of LGBTQ+ groups have established themselves in the country. However, in recent years, laws, policies, and mass closures of LGBTQ+ social media accounts have chipped away at organizational capacity. In this exploratory study, we center the voices of LGBTQ+ activist communities in China. Drawing from 26 interviews, we explore the effects of increased surveillance in digital and physical spaces on queer communities via the theoretical concept of “social sorting.” The findings suggest that LGBTQ+ communities were already under extensive institutional and digital surveillance prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has further amplified state-led surveillance and censorship. The norm setting of an ideal citizen of China has occurred through enhanced institutional marginalization, digital censorship, and police monitoring and harassment. These practices have harmed but not broken the resolve of LGBTQ+ communities, who had been finding unconventional ways to connect prior to the pandemic, albeit constrained as if in a metaphorical fish tank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies examining the gendered impacts of COVID-19 have shown that women have been disproportionately impacted by the socio-economic effects of the pandemic across multiple areas, including economic and food security. We sought to understand how the impacts of the pandemic on women's food security in the Indo-Pacific region were influenced by women's roles in performing the bulk of unpaid work and care involved in social reproduction. We interviewed 183 female farmers and vendors (market stallholders) in Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines. We found that across all three countries examined, women described an impact on their food security as well as their labour, processes of reproduction, and private household dynamics. Women's household food security was impacted because of decreased income, increased business costs, rising food costs, and additional household costs. Further, our findings show that because it was typically women's responsibility to manage household food security, women were anticipating food shortages and engaging in risks to mitigate against food insecurity. These findings demonstrate the urgent need to introduce national and international crisis response measures that differentiate the gendered social and economic impacts of crises that centers, rather than marginalizes, social reproduction in analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]