Living through becoming: An ethnographic study of women-loving women’s subjectivity in the 2010s in mainland China

With anthropological tools and feminist ethics, Yiran Wang in her doctoral project studies the everyday realities, imaginations and aspirations of same-sex attracted women living in the second decade of the 21st Century in mainland China. Wang’s analysis of these women’s “becoming” journeys weaves the data collected from ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai and Yunnan Province, China, together with her own personal life experiences, cases discussed in other scholars’ works, and discourses and materials circulated in mass media. Inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s theory of “nomadic subjectivity”, Wang maps out how “subjectivity/zhutixing”, a concept more etic than emic in Chinese everyday language and context, can be understood, observed, narrated and embodied in non-heteronormative female experiences. Wang specifically discusses five interrelated themes: globalisation; heteronormativity; sexual identity and gender expression; love and sex; coming out of the closet. Although these are not new topics in the existing scholarly literature of Chinese gender and sexuality, Wang’s revisits to them constitute a series of critical and creative explorations of “self” and “other”, researcher and the researched subjects, desire and body, translating and transnational, past and present, home and hope, in the latest Chinese sociocultural context and the highly globalised world. Thus, Wang’s personal journey and the production of her PhD thesis have also been embodied in each other’s becoming process