Queer Resistance

"How do China's estimated 70 million LGBTQ people respond to intensified state repression? How do they construct community and identity amid persistent stigmatization and pursue nonnormative desires within strong yet changing family norms? Drawing on 187 interviews collected between 2015 and 2025, Susanne Y.P. Choi situates queer lives in post-socialist China within historical legacies, evolving state policies, and rapid socioeconomic transformations shaped by economic reform and global capitalism. Attending to global influences without assuming uniform change, her work highlights local innovations such as cooperative marriage, nondisclosure as care, and contestation of Western discourses on coming out and same-sex marriage, and directly challenges theories that would reduce Chinese society to a static culture, singular individualism, or authoritarian control. Here, queer resistance is a practice that is often partial, uneven, and shaped by multiple axes of inequality-and yet still a force that animates both organized and everyday forms of defiance and self-definition"--

"How do China's estimated 70 million LGBTQ people respond to intensified state repression? How do they construct community and identity amid persistent stigmatization and pursue nonnormative desires within strong yet changing family norms? Drawing on 187 interviews collected between 2015 and 2025, Susanne Y.P. Choi situates queer lives in post-socialist China within historical legacies, evolving state policies, and rapid socioeconomic transformations shaped by economic reform and global capitalism. Attending to global influences without assuming uniform change, her work highlights local innovations such as cooperative marriage, nondisclosure as care, and contestation of Western discourses on coming out and same-sex marriage, and directly challenges theories that would reduce Chinese society to a static culture, singular individualism, or authoritarian control. Here, queer resistance is a practice that is often partial, uneven, and shaped by multiple axes of inequality-and yet still a force that animates both organized and everyday forms of defiance and self-definition"--