Noras on the Road

Abstract

During the past decade, we have witnessed the rise of Shanghai as a new metropolitan centre in China. The city has also become one of the most vibrant sites of lesbian community in the country. The author interviewed 20 lesbian women in the city in 2005. It is found that almost all of the women interviewed are experiencing the pressure of social conformity most severely from their immediate family, and the social expectation of marriage. In this paper, the author demonstrates the conflicts of family and marriage that many of the informants have encountered and how the hegemony of heterosexuality is still securely reproduced and carried out through the discourses of family and marriage in contemporary urban China, and finally, how the informants deal with the controls enacted by the institution of heterosexuality. doi:10.1300/ J155v10n03_06.

Reshaping boundaries: Family politics and GLBTQ resistance in urban Vietnam

“…Not unlike other places in the region (see e.g., Tonini, 2016), parents put their children under pressure to start a family to save the face of the family. As was also the case in Kam's (2007Kam's ( , 2013 research in the Chinese context, parents tended to be the people that our informants were most concerned about.…”

“…As is also the case in other countries in the region (see Cho, 2009;Kam, 2007Kam, , 2013Tan, 2011), the family is of central importance in Vietnam. "Good families" are put forward in official discussions as the basis of a "good society," and a good society is seen to help make "better families" (National Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 2000, preamble).…”

“…A woman who is not married after a particular age faces a certain degree of social stigma, and as Bui points out, this reduces the perceived importance of her sexuality. As Lucetta Yip Lo Kam (2007) has also observed in the Chinese context, an unmarried lesbian woman is doubly stigmatized and marginalized by the heteronormative and patrilineal family regime.…”

“…The patrilineal organization of society means that daughters are not able to provide heirs for their natal family, only for the family of their husband. Although there is still immense pressure from parents for daughters to marry, this has more to do with how it reflects onto the collective face of the family (see also Cho, 2009;Kam, 2007Kam, , 2013. Although for men, pressure to get married may continue into their 40s, for women there is a more clearly defined cutoff point of 30 before they are considered to be past a marriageable age.…”

“…As Bui highlights, parents may react negatively to their son or daughter coming out, not only because of their own views on sexuality and the importance of marriage, but also because of wider sociocultural norms and the negative implications it could have for the collective face of the family (Cho, 2009;Kam, 2007;Luu & Cheung, 2010;Tan, 2011).…”