Many gay Chinese women, both in China and abroad, must confront the conflict between same-sex desire and heteronormative social expectations to marry and bear children to a man. This paper explores how gay Chinese women living... [ view full abstract ]
Many gay Chinese women, both in China and abroad, must confront the conflict between same-sex desire and heteronormative social expectations to marry and bear children to a man. This paper explores how gay Chinese women living in Melbourne, Australia, confront this conflict linguistically.
The paper is based on an ongoing linguistic ethnography which consists of participant observation and unstructured individual and group interviews with gay Chinese women living in Melbourne. All participants have expertise and affiliation with both (Mandarin) Chinese and English. The data collected includes audio recordings of observed interactions and interviews and field notes. The data is analysed through an interactional sociolinguistic lens, combining conversation analysis of the interactional data with discourse analysis influenced by theories of superdiversity (Arnaut, Blommaert, Rampton, & Spotti, 2016) and translanguaging (García & Li, 2014). This mixed micro and macro analysis sheds light on what linguistic techniques are used by some gay Chinese women and how these techniques are indexical of and produced by social subjectivities such as gender, sexuality and culture.
The main argument of this paper is that language play through translanguaging is an effective technique used by some gay Chinese women to challenge conflicting subjectivities. By combining different linguistic aspects of both Chinese and English in a single phrase, word or morpheme, gay Chinese women can produce humorous or satirical utterances. These utterances are a key part of linguistically confronting and reconciling some of the conflict experienced by gay Chinese women.
Arnaut, K., Blommaert, J., Rampton, B., & Spotti, M. (2016). Language and superdiversity: New York, NY: Routledge.
García, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
