Negotiating Performances of “Real” Marriage in Chinese Queer Xinghun

Abstract

This article explores how marriage is negotiated by Chinese queer subjects who face tension between the heteronormative expectations of their families and their desire to maintain a same-sex relationship. Specifically, we critically assess the cultural performances of xinghun (形婚), or contract marriage between a gay man and a lesbian woman. Focusing on the experiences of queer Chinese women, we investigate the enactment of marriage and gender dynamics in xinghun. Our analysis of personal accounts and online discourse in personal ads shows how Chinese queer subjects perform the “realness” of heteronormativity in their queer marriages. We argue that xinghun is an ambivalent cultural formation that at once reproduces heteronormativity and contests gender and sexual norms in a heteropatriarchal society.

Keywords:

• China
• marriage
• performativity
• queer
• xinghun

Notes

1 While the term xinghun (形婚, “pro forma marriage”) is widely used in Chinese LGBT communities, other terms also circulate, both inside and outside academia, to refer to this kind of marriage. Other terms for the xinghun marriage arrangement include “nominal marriage” (Choi & Luo, 2016), “contract marriage” (Engebretsen, 2009), “cooperative marriage,” “marriage for convenience,” and “marriage without sex.” Despite the range of terminology, none of these terms quite accurately captures the unique nature of this kind of marriage. More importantly, these terms falsely indicate that a marriage between a lesbian woman and a gay man is not a “real” marriage (“nominal”) just because it is cooperative, contract based, for the consideration of convenience, or not involving sexual activities. Given these reasons, and also because xinghun is the term used by our participants, we have chosen to use xinghun as the signifier of this type of marriage.

2 In this article, we use conventional terminology of “male” and “female” and “men” and “women.” While the gender identification of xinghun seekers we examined on Chinagayles.com was not frequently explicated, it is important to note that the 13 people we interviewed were cisfemales and cismales.

3 Here and in one following instance in the article, when we refer to xinghun performances of “realness” by lesbian women and gay men, we intentionally inject a hyphen in “hetero-sexual” to mark the fact of different-sex bodies but to destabilize and decenter a presumption of different-sex desire or attraction.

4 Another reason may be that, as some scholars have noticed, gay men face more pressures to carry on the family bloodline, because it is the patrilineal family line that needs to be carried on in Chinese convention (Rofel, 2007). More importantly, family as an institution “still provides men with moral privilege and access to social power, which is not true for women” (p. 100). As a result, lesbian women are more willing to renounce marriage (see also Engebretsen, 2008).

5 For a discussion of queer people’s relations to reproduction and technologies of reproduction, see Mamo (2007). For accounts of debates about the normative or resistive dynamics of queer people choosing children, see Mamo (2007), especially “Imagining Futures of Belonging,” pp. 224–249, and Lehr (1999), especially “Who Are ‘Our’ Children?,” pp. 139–167.

6 Other queer subjects try to use syringes to transfer the sperm from the gay male body to the lesbian female body in order to mitigate the economical and/or legal pressure.