As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong
Ching Yau
Abstract
This volume poses new challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines. Issues related to sexuality have acquired a new visibility in China in the past several years. The growth of religious fundamentalists and global gay discourses, heightened media attention and even more intense censorship, LBGTIQ activist movements, and the struggles of sex workers, have all contributed to this visibility. There is an urgent need for intellectual work to articulate and analyze the complexity of issues of sexuality ... More
This volume poses new challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines. Issues related to sexuality have acquired a new visibility in China in the past several years. The growth of religious fundamentalists and global gay discourses, heightened media attention and even more intense censorship, LBGTIQ activist movements, and the struggles of sex workers, have all contributed to this visibility. There is an urgent need for intellectual work to articulate and analyze the complexity of issues of sexuality, and the ways in which different norms line up and become synonymous with one another, in order to build situated knowledge in strengthening the discursive power of non-normative sexual-subjects-in-alliance. This book showcases the work of scholars working mostly outside Euro-America and focuses on cities including Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. It is a sustained collections on Chinese non-normative sexual subjectivities and contemporary sexual politics published in English. It highlights the various ways in which different individuals and communities — including male sex workers, transsexual subjects, lesbians, and Indonesian migrants — negotiate with notions of normativity and modernity, fine-tuned according to the different power structures of each context, and making new and different meanings.
Keywords:
queer studies,
Chinese sexuality,
lesbians,
sex workers,
sexual politics
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2010 |
Print ISBN-13: 9789622099876 |
| Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: September 2011 |
DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789622099876.001.0001 |
