Queer Exploration of a Mobile China: The Transnational Journey of Queer Women from China

The mobility of LGBTQ+ people around the globe has accelerated in the past 30 years. The typical mobile queer subject in public imagination and scholarly discussion is always male. There is a growing body of work on transnational Chinese and in the spotlight are affluent mobile Chinese with “flexible citizenship” and international students from China. While gender has been highlighted by some scholars as an important factor in transnational mobility, sexuality is always overlooked in transnational Chinese studies. In this chapter, I look into these two under-studied areas to study queer Chinese women’s transnational mobility in the context of post-socialist China and queer globalization. This chapter is based on the interviews of thirty “mobile queer women” in China and Australia between 2015 and 2018. I examine the intersection of sexuality, gender, and transnational mobility, with a focus on queer women’s mobility and immobility, in terms of geography and culture, in both their home and host societies. Areas of investigation include their network capital in their home and the host societies, their changing relationship with family in China, and the formation of subjectivity in the process of transnational mobility.