Queer Resistance

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Queer Resistance examines transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people. Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and possibly one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, the book traces shifting modes of power governing intimacy and the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative norms. It illustrates how LGBTQ+ people construct communities amid intensified state crackdowns, develop new forms of personhood that subvert collectivist frameworks, and renegotiate intergenerational contracts. They navigate sexual possibilities opened up by marketization and digitalization, while confronting hierarchies of desirability structured by class inequality and stalled gender transitions. The book demonstrates that younger Chinese people’s efforts to resist traditional obligations and pursue nonnormative life projects are relational, partial, and intersectional, shaped through encounters with changing configurations of power and inequality at the intersection of global forces and local histories.