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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Queer Resistance examines transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people. Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, Susanne Y.P. Choi traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals, and shows how LGBTQ+ people build communities amid intensified state crackdowns, develop new forms of personhood that subvert collectivist frameworks, and renegotiate intergenerational contracts. They navigate sexual possibilities opened up by marketization and digitalization while confronting hierarchies of desirability structured by class inequality and gender norms. The book demonstrates that younger Chinese people’s efforts to resist traditional obligations and pursue nonnormative life projects are relational, partial, and intersectional, shaped through encounters with changing configurations of power and inequality at the intersection of global forces and local histories.
Susanne Y.P. Choi is Professor of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also lead author of Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family, and Gender in China.
“The People’s Republic of China no longer treats homosexuals as criminals or as mentally ill, but in recent years it has increased repression against its estimated 70 million+ LGBTQ+ citizens. Nonetheless, a vibrant and diverse LGBTQ+ community has managed to create increasing social space and tolerance in order to live the lives they aspire to. In Queer Resistance, based upon a decade of in-depth interviews with large numbers of informants from all walks of life, Susanne Choi presents a rich and emotionally moving portrait of the struggles of the LGBTQ+ community in China today.”—Martin King Whyte, John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Sociology, Emeritus, and Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
“Queer Resistance offers a sensitive, insightful account of the pursuit of queer dignity, joy, and intimacy in contemporary China, equally attuned to everyday acts of resistance and struggles to navigate authoritarian state governance and familial expectations. Choi’s compelling research and clear prose illustrate how efforts to realize sexual autonomy and empowerment unfold amid the complex intersectional inequalities that define Chinese society today.”—Sara L. Friedman, author of Exceptional States: Chinese Immigrants and Taiwanese Sovereignty
“An intellectually courageous and innovative work that sets a new benchmark for the study of LGBTQ+ life in contemporary China. Based on a decade of meticulous research, Choi offers a theoretically rigorous and empirically expansive account of how everyday practices of negotiation and refusal accumulate into consequential forms of resistance under authoritarian rule. This book will shape scholarly debates for years to come and stands to become a foundational text in the fields of sexuality, family, and Chinese social transformation."—Yunxiang Yan, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
“Choi makes a new contribution to sexuality studies both in the China field and in queer studies. Cautioning against universalizing assumptions about how LGBTQ people challenge heteronormativity, she demonstrates the importance of the intersections of family transformations, economic inequality, and global capitalism to understanding queer life in China today. This is one of the most notable book on sexual minorities in China that I have read in the last decade.”—Lisa Rofel, author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture and coauthor of Fabricating Transnational Capitalism