In Conversation with Dr. Susanne Yuk-ping Choi (Chinese University of Hong Kong), author of "Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China" (UC Press, 2026)
In Conversation with Dr. Susanne Yuk-ping Choi (Chinese University of Hong Kong), author of Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China (UC Press, 2026), Zoom only at https://csusb.zoom.us/j/388207496
Dr. Choi is a Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research "examines how large-scale social transformations, including modernization, economic development, urbanization and migration, globalization, and digitalization, reshape gender and family relationships, sexual identities, work, social stratification, and social movements. She is currently leading two comparative projects on technology, gender, and cyber dating abuse and online sexual harassment in East Asia, focusing on Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, and Osaka. Both projects are funded by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council... Her lead-authored book, Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family and Gender in China, published by the University of California Press, received the Best Book Award from RC31, Section on Migration, of the International Sociological Association. Her second monograph, which explores transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people, will be published by the University of California Press in August 2026. She has also published widely in leading international journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Marriage and Family, Sociology, the British Journal of Sociology, The Sociological Review, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Global Networks, The China Quarterly, Human Relations, and Social Science and Medicine." Find more about her at her faculty profile here and her personal website here.
From the publisher's website of her new book: "Queer Resistance examines transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people. Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, Susanne Y.P. Choi traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals, and shows how LGBTQ+ people build communities amid intensified state crackdowns, develop new forms of personhood that subvert collectivist frameworks, and renegotiate intergenerational contracts. They navigate sexual possibilities opened up by marketization and digitalization while confronting hierarchies of desirability structured by class inequality and gender norms. The book demonstrates that younger Chinese people’s efforts to resist traditional obligations and pursue nonnormative life projects are relational, partial, and intersectional, shaped through encounters with changing configurations of power and inequality at the intersection of global forces and local histories."
“An intellectually courageous and innovative work that sets a new benchmark for the study of LGBTQ+ life in contemporary China. Based on a decade of meticulous research, Choi offers a theoretically rigorous and empirically expansive account of how everyday practices of negotiation and refusal accumulate into consequential forms of resistance under authoritarian rule. This book will shape scholarly debates for years to come and stands to become a foundational text in the fields of sexuality, family, and Chinese social transformation." Yunxiang Yan, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
This event is free and open to the public. For questions, please contact Jeremy Murray (History), jmurray@csusb.edu. Find past and upcoming events in the Modern China Lecture Series here.