Queer feminist kinship: an intersectional approach to creating activism and community in Chengdu, China

This is an ethnographic exploration of the relationship between feminist activism and the LGBTQ rights movement in China. It questions how sexual and gender identities influence individuals' desires to align with the feminist movement. The project revisits established anthropological questions about relatedness and social ties (kinship), to examine the formation of community and political alliances on the basis of gender and sexuality. I question classical kinship approaches to China by observing kinship structures formed among LGBTQ communities. Shared experiences of discrimination bring LGBTQ individuals together in alternative kinship groups based on identity, which substitute for conventional kinship structures and provide safety from discrimination.

Intersectional theory contends that social categories like race, gender, age, sexuality, and class overlap to create unique forms of discrimination. I will use intersectionality as a methodology to question how experiencing overlapping subjectivities and correlative discrimination influences individuals' lives. This extended case study analyses the work of a feminist activist couple, Xiao and Zhang, as they establish a feminist/LGBTQ community in Chengdu, China. Xiao, a pansexual, and Zhang, a lesbian, link their identities as feminists to discovering their sexualities and the LGBTQ community. Joining the feminist movement enabled them to express their sexualities openly, and actively subvert gender and sexuality norms (femininity and heterosexuality). In contributing to the internationally 'marginalised' space of feminism-queering, this ethnography of activism aims to rethink the synergies of feminist and queer resistance. It aims to unpack frictions between sex-sexuality-gender taxonomies (linking female to femininity and heterosexuality), Chinese state policies and the everyday.