Lala (lesbian) and gay communities in mainland China have emerged rapidly in the 21st century. Alongside new freedoms and modernizing reforms, and with mainstream media and society increasingly tolerant, lalas still experience immense family and social pressures to a degree that this book argues is deeply gendered. The first anthropological study to examine everyday lala lives, intimacies, and communities in China, the chapters explore changing articulations of sexual subjectivity, gendered T-P (tomboy-wife) roles, family and kinship, same-sex weddings, lala-gay contract marriages, and community activism. Engebretsen analyzes lala strategies of complicit transgressions to balance surface respectability and undeclared same-sex desires, why "being normal" emerges a deep aspiration and sign of respectability, and why openly lived homosexuality and public activism often are not. Queer Women in Urban China develops a critical ethnographic analysis through the conceptual lens of "different normativities," tracing the paradoxes and intricacies of the desire for normal life alongside aspirations for recognition, equality, and freedom, and argues that dominant paradigms fixed on categories, identities, and the absolute value of public visibility are ill-equipped to fully understand these complexities. This book complements existing perspectives on sexual and gender diversity, contemporary China, and the politics and theories of justice, recognition, and similitude in global times.

The trajectory and logic of urban development in post-Mao China have been shaped and defined by the contention between domestic and global capital, central and local state and social actors of different class status and endowment. This urban transformation process of historic proportion entails new rules for distribution and negotiation, novel perceptions of citizenship, as well as room for unprecedented spontaneity and creativity. Based on original research by leading experts, this book offers an updated and nuanced analysis of the new logic of urban governance and its implications.

This Handbook offers a rich survey of topics concerning historical, modern and contemporary Chinese genders and sexualities. Exploring gender and sexuality as key dimensions of China’s modernisation and globalisation, this Handbook effectively situates Chinese gender and sexuality in transnational and transcultural contexts. It also spotlights nonnormative practices and emancipatory potentials within mainstream, heterosexual-dominated and patriarchally structured settings. It serves as a definitive study, research and resource guide for emerging gender and sexuality issues in the Chinese-speaking world. This Handbook covers interdisciplinary methodologies, perspectives and topics, including: History Literature Art Fashion Migration Translation Sex and desire Film and television Digital media Star and fan cultures Fantasies and lives of women and LGBTQ+ groups Social movements Transnational feminist and queer politics Paying acute attention to nonnormative genders and sexualities and emphasising the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity and class, this Handbook offers an essential, field-defining text to Chinese gender and sexuality studies.

This three-volume set is a rich resource for readers in any discipline interested in understanding the global, regional, and domestic experiences of LGB people. This interdisciplinary set makes a vital contribution to understanding how LGB rights are progressing—and in some cases, regressing—around the globe. The three volumes look at the lived experiences of LGB people from varied perspectives and provide comprehensive coverage on a wide variety of topics ranging from LGB youth and LGB aging to the approaches to LGB people of different religions, including Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Chapters focus on topics including the ongoing criminalization of same-sex sexual conduct and how international human rights law can be used to improve the lives of LGB people. Particular attention is paid to the rights of bisexuals, a group often ignored in works focusing on sexual orientation. Volume 1 focuses on history, politics, and culture relating to LGB people; Volume 2 focuses on the laws—domestic and international—governing LGB people; and Volume 3 provides snapshots of the current state of LGB experience in countries worldwide, presented by geographical region: Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Korean people have faced successive waves of foreign domination, authoritarian regimes, forced dispersal, and divided development. Throughout these turbulent times, “queer” Koreans were ignored, minimized, and erased in narratives of their modern nation, East Asia, and the wider world. This interdisciplinary volume challenges such marginalization through critical analyses of non-normative sexuality and gender variance. Considering both personal and collective forces, contributors extend individualized notions of queer neoliberalism beyond those typically set in Western queer theory. Along the way, they recount a range of illuminating topics, from shamanic rituals during the colonial era and B-grade comedy films under Cold War dictatorship to toxic masculinity in today’s South Korean military and transgender confrontations with the resident registration system. More broadly, Queer Korea offers readers new ways of understanding the limits and possibilities of human liberation under exclusionary conditions of modernity in Asia and beyond. Contributors. Pei Jean Chen, John (Song Pae) Cho, Chung-kang Kim, Timothy Gitzen, Todd A. Henry, Merose Hwang, Ruin, Layoung Shin, Shin-ae Ha, John Whittier Treat

This book traces how the legacy of the Maoist gender project is experienced or contested by particular Chinese women, remembered or forgotten in their lives, and highlighted or buried in their narratives. Xin Huang examines four women's life stories: an urban woman who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976), a rural migrant worker, a lesbian artist who has close connections with transnational queer networks, and an urban woman who has lived abroad. The individual narratives are paired with analysis of the historical and social contexts in which each woman lives. Huang focuses on the shifting relationship between gender and class, fashion and shame in the Mao and post-Mao eras, queer desire and artwork, and contemporary transnational encounters. By rethinking the historical significance and contemporary relevance of one of the twentieth century's major feminist interventions—socialist and Marxist women's liberation during the Mao years—The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era provides insight into current struggles over gender equality in China and around the world.

This book explores the extent to which women have been initiators, mobilizers, and driving forces of social transformation in China. The book considers how conceptions of women’s roles have changed as China has moved from state socialism to engagement with capitalist globalization, examines the growth of women’s gender and sexual consciousness and social movements for women’s rights, including for marginalized social and sex/gender grouops, and discusses women’s roles in society-state interactions, including many forms of social activism, cultural events, educational innovations, and more. Overall, the book demonstrates that women have not simply been passive receivers of the consequences of the forces of global capitalism, but that they have had a profound, active impact on social transformation in China.

An exploration of the transformations of contemporary China, firmly grounded in both disciplinary and China-specific contexts.

This book examines how gender and heterosexuality structure the lived experiences of people in living apart together (LAT) relationships in contemporary Chinese society. Using in-depth interview data with Chinese LAT people of different ages, the author explores why they live apart; how they construct and make sense of their everyday family lives and negotiate their gender roles; and how they experience intimacy while being physically apart. This text sheds new insights on non-cohabitating intimate partnerships by bringing together themes of gender, family, intimacy, and relationality. Through looking at people’s lived experiences in LAT relationships, it argues that practices of family and intimacy are closely implicated with doing gender, and consequently, that gendered family lives and heterosexuality are reconstructed, rather than deconstructed, in order to reclaim conventional forms of family and gender norms in Chinese social, historical and cultural contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars across Gender and Sexuality Studies as well as Family Studies, in addition to scholars of contemporary Chinese culture and society.

Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in northwest China, Casey James Miller offers a novel, compelling, and intimately personal perspective on Chinese queer culture and activism. In Inside the Circle: Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China, Miller tells the stories of two courageous and dedicated groups of queer activists in the city of Xi’an: a grassroots gay men’s HIV/AIDS organization called Tong’ai and a lesbian women’s group named UNITE. Taking inspiration from “the circle,” a term used to imagine local, national, and global queer communities, Miller shows how everyday people in northwest China are taking part in queer culture and activism while also striving to lead traditionally moral lives in a rapidly changing society. The queer stories in this book broaden our understandings of gender and sexuality in contemporary China and show how taking global queer diversity seriously requires us to de-center Western cultural values, historical experiences, and theoretical perspectives.