Querying or Queering Gender: The lived experience of zhongxing (middle gender/sex) women in China and Hong Kong

Abstract

The mediated and gendered phenomenon of zhongxing (‘middle gender/sex’ or ‘neutral gender/sex’) since the 2000s has mainstreamed non-normative gender expressions among women in the Sinophone world and attracted considerable academic discussion. Scholarly works have either placed heavy emphasis on textual representation or assumed that zhongxing is exclusively relevant to masculine lesbians. In this talk, I would like to extend the current literature by exploring the everyday practice of zhongxing among both heterosexual and queer Chinese women in urban China and Hong Kong. By drawing from 70 semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis of Internet forums, I argue that Chinese women practise zhongxing to construct alternative modes of doing gender. My findings suggest that my research participants engage in precarious boundary management by re-doing appearance and personality, as well as negotiating between respectability and authenticity.  Although most of them agree that zhongxing has offered new opportunities to explore their gendered selfhood, their everyday practice of zhongxing paradoxically reinforces gender binderies and heteronormative values.

Speaker Biography

Eva Cheuk-Yin Li is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. She has an interdisciplinary background, encompassing PhD in Gender, Media, and Culture (King’s College London) and MPhil in Sociology (The University of Hong Kong). Her research and teaching interests include media and culture, fandom and participatory culture, and gender and sexuality in the East Asian and transnational contexts. Her work has been published in edited volumes and journals including East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, International Sociology, Crime, Media, Culture, and Transformative Works and Cultures.