Yingxin Zhang (UCL) - 2024-25 Students
yingxin.zhang.24@ucl.ac.uk

Strategies or Struggles? Unveiling Chinese Queer Immigrants’ Cross-Border Cooperative Marriages Upon Returning Home

China’s economic growth has increased mobility among queer individuals, prompting many to move to Western LGBTQ-friendly countries. However, mobility does not necessarily resolve marriage pressures; in fact, numerous Chinese queers in Western countries actively seek cooperative marriages (contract heterosexual marriages between non-heterosexual women and men) performed in China to fulfil cultural/familial expectations. This study categorises this type of marriage as cross-border cooperative marriage. These immigrants typically maintain unbreakable ties in China, regardless of being permanent or temporary citizens in their queer-friendly host countries or whether they intend to stay in China or migrate back to these countries after the marriage. Their transnational experiences lead to intricate cooperative-marriage decisions influenced by Chinese queer culture, individual/family/state dynamics, and cultural/racial/societal contexts during their mobility journey. This study aims to investigate the multifaceted factors behind such marriage practices, document their marriage experiences, and explore how this process enables/restricts new ways of living as Chinese queers. It hopes to contribute in three ways: 1) enrich narratives of Chinese cooperative marriages through a transnational perspective (as opposed to only exploring them within national boundaries of China and/or host countries) and unravel new scripts of being/living as transnational Chinese queers; 2) enhance the localisation of queer theory in China by taking into account queer Chinese experience that is explicitly claimed for and by Chinese subjects (rather than imposed from the outside); 3) broaden current methodology by incorporating reflexive ethnographic data and applying a narrative approach to examine the nuanced dynamics of structure/agency/transnationalism within late capitalism (as opposed to earlier work proposing transnationalism as unquestioningly liberatory).

Principal Supervisor: Dr Thibaut Raboin