This book talk is co-organised by the Oxford Sociology Network and the Oxford China Centre.

Abstract

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 one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, Susanne Y.P. Choi traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals, and shows how LGBTQ+ people build 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 marketisation and digitalisation while confronting hierarchies of desirability structured by class inequality and gender norms. 

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.

Susanne Y.P. Choi is Professor of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also lead author of Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family, and Gender in China.