Stretched Kinship: Queer Chinese Mobilities in the Twenty-First Century

• In Event: Queer Media Mobilities

Abstract

This presentation examines queer mobilities in global Chinese societies and diaspora communities, with China as the intersectional focal point, through research findings from ethnographic fieldwork, textual and contextual analysis of autobiographical queer films and videos, and digital ethnographic study of online and mobile queer social media. I propose a three-fold conceptual and analytical tool to scrutinize and make sense of social and spatial queer mobilities in Chinese societies. These include changing queer kinship structures (the result of mobilities), the increasingly frequent queer migrations and cultural flows (the manifestations of mobilities), and queer social upward mobility and social class migration (the underlying driving force of mobilities) in the early twenty-first century.
This talk will focus particularly on the impact of social and geographical queer mobilities on traditional Confucian kinship structure. I argue that the widely influential “coming-out-as-coming-home” strategy is no longer possible in today’s China, when the increasingly frequent domestic and transnational migrations have further stretched kinship ties. “Alternative families” such as queer film clubs have hence emerged in urban centers to cultivate a sense of belonging and community for young queer migrants in the age of mobility.

Author

• John Wei, Media Design School