Decolonizing politics of (In)visibility and LGBT rights —— being queer/tongzhi in China’s “new normal”

Facilitated by Euro-American gender and sexuality discourse, human rights framework, and international funding since the 1990s, grassroots LGBTQ organizations and networks have proliferated across the People’s Republic of China. However, in the recent decade, rights activism is being scrutinized and targeted for its international connections as foreign interference in traditional Chinese values and as a neo-colonialist attempt to destabilize society and undermine the political legitimacy of the party-state. Being gay or doing identity-based activism is now considered anything from being “un-Chinese,” to posing threats to national sovereignty. Through a feminist decolonial lens and informed by “queer Asia” as method and “queer regionalism,” this article explores how contemporary conceptualizations of non-normative gender and sexual identities in China shift from practices deeply embedded in historically hierarchical sex-gender systems of marriage and family, to a distinct sexual-social identity that is intimately connected to regional and transnational flows of ideas, symbols, and ways of organizing in the past three decades. Reading three major historical milestone cases of LGBT rights activism against the grain, I suggest that facing different domestic and international audiences, queer/tongzhi activists used culturally sensitive strategies of visibility and invisibility in representing and constructing queer Chinese as a sexual-social identity bridging family, marriage, and Western notions of rights, freedom, and justice. I argue that such process is mutually constitutive, facilitated by the Chinese state’s evolving statecraft shifting from tacit allowance to politicization of LGBT activism, and tongzhi activists’ active re-narration and insertion of the stories of queer Chinese into the globally travelling narrative of gay pride.