Straightjacket : same-sex orientation under Chinese family law – Marriage, Parenthood, Eldercare

Straightjacket discusses how Chinese same-sex-oriented persons deal with family law. It asks how they respond to the pressure of getting married, giving birth and securing eldercare. Instead of seeing this ‘straight’ life path only as oppression, the author highlights the seductive legal and social benefits it offers. The interdisciplinary study combines rigorous legal analysis with the vivid life stories of more than 60 respondents interviewed in ethnographic fieldwork. It depicts how Chinese same-sex-oriented people obey, utilize and/or resist the legal and social norms on marriage, parenthood and eldercare. This study reflects on controversial issues such as cooperative marriage (xinghun, between lesbian woman and gay man) and 'fraudulent' marriage (pianhun, between same-sex-oriented man and ‘unwitting’ straight woman). In this context, it problematizes the binaries of in/out, gay/straight and lie/truth produced by the ‘epistemology of the closet’. This thesis therefore calls for a beyond-marriage approach of legal reform, so as to benefit both same-sex couples and other non-normative relationships. This is a volume in the series of the Meijers Research Institute and Graduate School of the Leiden Law School of Leiden University. This study is part of the Law School’s research programme ‘Effective Protection of Fundamental Rights in a pluralist world’.