Stretched Kinship: Parental Rejection and Acceptance of Queer Youth in Chinese Families

ABSTRACT

Kinship has been the primary concern among young queer people in today’s China and other parts of Asia under the strong and ongoing familism, who often find it challenging to come out and negotiate their sexuality with their parental family. This paper adopts the concept of stretched kinship to critically analyze the digital videos released by PFLAG China (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in China) from 2015 to 2020, focusing on the experiences of the parents in their responses to young people’s coming out. It both extends and challenges the concept of stretched kinship by turning the spotlight from queer youth to their parents—a topic often overlooked in queer Asian and Chinese studies—to examine how Chinese parents reject and accept their queer child contextualized in the rapid and ongoing social change in twenty-first-century China and Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer youth
• coming out
• stretched kinship
• PFLAG China
• parent-youth relationship
• parental rejection and acceptance
• kinship and family

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