Professor Susanne Y.P. Choi
This book talk is co-organised by the Oxford Sociology Network and the Oxford China Centre.
Abstract
How do resistance and social change unfold under increasingly restrictive political conditions? Drawing on her recent book, Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family and Inequality in Post-Socialist China, Susanne Choi examines changes in community formation, identity construction, and intimate negotiations, as well as collective and everyday resistance among China's LGBTQ+ communities. Adopting a multi-temporal, multi-domain, and intersectional analysis that connects structure and agency and examines heterosexual and homosexual lives relationally, she illustrates how queer resistance serves both as a diagnostic of changing state, societal, and familial power and as an interpretative lens for understanding its varied possibilities, partiality, and consequences. The changing circumstances of LGBTQ+ people illuminate China's distinctive trajectory of social change, characterized by the divergence of state, societal, and familial power in enforcing heteronormativity, even as the state strives to maintain its monopoly on political power while seeking legitimacy both domestically and internationally.
Speaker bio
Susanne Choi is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research examines how economic development, migration, and digitalization reshape gender, family, sexuality, and work relations in Chinese societies and East Asia. Her work has appeared in journals including the American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Marriage and Family, Sociology, and the British Journal of Sociology. She is the co-author of Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family and Gender in China and the author of Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family and Inequality in Post-Socialist China.