Overview

What does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of such great importance? This book makes sense of queer cultures in China-a country with one of the largest queer populations in the world-and offers an alternative to Euro-American blueprints of queer individual identity. This book contends that kinship relations must be understood as central to any expression of queer selfhood and culture in contemporary cultural production in China. Using a critical approach-""queering Chinese kinship""-Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, and questions Eurocentric queer culture's frequent assumption of the separation of queerness from blood family. Offering five case studies of queer representations across a range of media genres, this book also challenges the tendency in current scholarship on Chinese and East Asian queerness to understand queer cultures as predominantly counter-mainstream, marginal, and underground. Shedding light on the representations of queerness and kinship in independent and subcultural as well as commercial and popular cultural products, the book presents a more comprehensive picture of queerness and kinship in flux and highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture.

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9789888528738

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"""Queering Chinese Kinship is an important and timely contribution to the field that captures and reflects on the transforming role of family and kinship in the Chinese-Sinophone context. In doing so, it also sheds light on the Western theorizations in queer kinship studies. . . What this book prompts and leaves the readers to reexamine is the concept of the public per se, considering the changing political economy that commodifies and repoliticizes the public visibility of queerness. Furthermore, it urges reflection on the evolving role of public culture in envisioning a future political landscape for queerness in China.""-- ""The China Quarterly"""

""Queering Chinese Kinship is an important and timely contribution to the field that captures and reflects on the transforming role of family and kinship in the Chinese-Sinophone context. In doing so, it also sheds light on the Western theorizations in queer kinship studies. . . What this book prompts and leaves the readers to reexamine is the concept of the public per se, considering the changing political economy that commodifies and repoliticizes the public visibility of queerness. Furthermore, it urges reflection on the evolving role of public culture in envisioning a future political landscape for queerness in China.""-- ""The China Quarterly""

Author Information

Lin Song is a lecturer in the School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University in Guangzhou, China.

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