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As Normal as PossibleNegotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong$
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As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong

Ching Yau

Print publication date: 2010

Print ISBN-13: 9789622099876

Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: September 2011

DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099876.001.0001

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PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2022. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use.date: 23 May 2022

Opening up Marriage: Married Lalas in Shanghai

Opening up Marriage: Married Lalas in Shanghai

Chapter:
(p.87) 5 Opening up Marriage: Married Lalas in Shanghai
Source:
As Normal as Possible
Author(s):

Kam Yip Lo Lucetta

Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press
DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789622099876.003.0006

This chapter is based on in-depth interviews with twenty-four lalas in Shanghai and it politicizes the discourses of standing up (zhan qi lai)/coming out (zhan chu lai). It also explores the negotiational conflicts between the desires for familial recognition of one's personal life and the aspiration for social recognition and political collectivity. In addition, it argues that the “politics of normalization” could be seen as a political strategy for maintaining sexual dissidence, earning visibility, recognition and potentially more freedom for a self-identified community in the long run. Married lala informants in this research show how sexually nonnormative women in China actively struggle for spaces between the two worlds of heterosexual marriage and same-sex relationship. Lala women who feel trapped in heterosexual marriages seek asylum in a foreign city that is away from their conjugal homes and familial obligations.

Keywords:   Shanghai, lala, heterosexual marriage, politics of normalization, same-sex relationship

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