Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
As Normal as PossibleNegotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
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

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use.date: 18 September 2021

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

Hong Kong Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .