Guerrilla Survival of Chinese Queers: A Whack-a-Mole Philosophy of Living in the Gaps

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 6: Sexuality, Desire, and Queer Identity

Abstract

This paper explores the daily survival strategies of transgender women as they navigate gaps between medical, legal, familial, and temporal structures in Chinese cities. Based on a nine-month multi-site ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Nanjing, including semi-structured interviews with 23 transgender women, participant observation, and digital ethnography, it proposes the conceptual framework of “structural gaps.” Rather than portraying transgender lives through a binary lens of victimhood or resistance, this study examines how transgender women negotiate legitimacy within fragmented identity systems, reconstruct kinship bonds amid patriarchal obligations, and endure the nonlinear shifts of gender transition through bodily stasis, repetition, and silence. These fragmented domains are theorized as “fissures”: zones of institutional misalignment and governance uncertainty that simultaneously constrain and enable action. I describe the emergent strategic patterns within these spaces as a “whack-a-mole philosophy of survival”, a guerrilla mode of existence characterized by rhythmic visibility, partial recognition, and continuous recalibration. Grounded in queer theory, medical anthropology, and East Asian kinship studies, this research reveals how transgender women construct ephemeral legal pathways, moral economies, and affective infrastructures. The paper ultimately argues that institutional gaps are not merely zones of exclusion but also sites of creativity and ethical improvisation, where subjects survive not by overcoming power but by navigating its fissures with ingenuity.

Author

• Qianwen Xue, University of Chicago