The entangled coexistence of materiality and subjectivity: a new materialist analysis of China's jiese community.

Abstract

The article utilised a perspective grounded in new materialism and agential realism to understand and explore China's jiese community (whose members commit to abstaining from masturbation and pornography). Data were collected through online ethnography and semi-structured interviews with 11 self-identified jieyou, conducted between 2021 and 2023 via the online Abstinence Bar and the Zhengqi mobile application. Study findings revealed that the occurrence of jiese behaviours and the development of an abstainer identity are not solely driven by individual agency but by dynamic intra-actions between individual subjectivity and multiple material factors. Importantly, jiese cannot be disentangled from specific material factors and contextual conditions. It emerges as the outcome of the intra-actions between technology, culture, the body, and the environment, while also representing a dynamic process of subjectivity co-constituted with these materialities within a particular context. Ultimately jiese is perhaps best understood as a condition or 'situation'. Lastly, study findings highlight how materiality not only possesses the agency to shape subjective behaviour but also that the subject, through reflection and practice, actively adapts to and reshapes itself within the constraints of materiality. This process facilitates the integration of materiality and subjectivity, through a co-constitutive and dynamic interplay.