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Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age. In response to the proliferation of queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires, especially as manifested online, this book explores extended, diversified, and transculturally informed fan communities and practices based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that have cultivated various forms of queerness. To right an imbalance in the scholarly literature on queer East Asia, this volume is weighted toward an exploration of queer elements of mainland Chinese fandoms that have been less often written about than more visible cultural elements in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Case studies drawn from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the flows among them include: the Chinese online Hetalia fandom; Chinese fans’ queer gossip on the American L-Word actress Katherine Moennig; Dongfang Bubai iterations; the HOCC fandom; cross-border fans of Li Yuchun; and Japaneseness in Taiwanese BL fantasies; among others.

The first book about Asian female migrant workers who develop same-sex relationships in a host city. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, the book explores the meanings of same-sex relationships to these migrant women. Instead of searching for reasons to explain why they engage in a same-sex relationship, the book provides an ethnographic perspective by addressing their Sunday activities and considering how migration policies and the practices of Hong Kong people unintentionally produce alternative sexuality and desires for them. The author contrasts the migrant experiences of same-sex relationships with the Western discourse that individuals carry a strong sense of sexual identification prior to migration; same-sex desires among Indonesian domestic workers are often not realized until they leave home. Addressing the changes from maid to queer, this book documents the intersections of domestic work, labor migration, race, and religion on the sexual subject formation, specifically how Indonesian women negotiate heteronormativity and remake a space for their love, sex, and intimacy. The book aims to create a dialogue between Asian labor migration and LGBT studies. For those interested in lesbian studies, Asian labor migration, sexual citizenship, and queer migration, this ethnography fills an important gap in explaining how the feminization of international migration and the constraints imposed on live-in domestic workers unintentionally become productive possibilities of queerness and normativity.

Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities examines the germination and movements of emergent queer cultures and social practices in the early twenty-first century. Under the dual pressure of compulsory familism and compulsory development, the configurations and understandings of gender and sexuality have become less sedentary and increasingly mobilized beyond traditional frameworks, categories, and boundaries. Through a reconsideration and requalification of queer mobilities, this groundbreaking project integrates and intervenes into the changing family and kinship structure, internal and international migrations, cultural flows and counterflows, and social inclusion and exclusion in queer China and Sinophone Asia. It considers the values and pitfalls of the development-induced mobilities and post-development syndromes that have conjointly structured and sustained queer people’s ongoing longings and sufferings, establishing fresh concepts and new paradigms in a rich and provocative social analysis and cultural critique of queer homecoming and homemaking, cultural production and circulation, and middle class formation and position. Through an interdisciplinary approach and expansive scope, Queer Chinese Cultures and Mobilities offers a revolutionary framework that interweaves sexual mobility and modernity with geographical, cultural, and social class migration and mobilization to interrogate the meanings of mobilities for queer people amid China’s internal transformation and international expansion for its great dream of revival in the twenty-first century.