Queer Women in Urban China

<p>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.</p><p><em>Queer Women in Urban China</em> 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.</p>