Lin Song, "Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)

China has one of the largest queer populations in the world, but what does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of paramount importance? This book analyzes queer cultures in China, offering an alternative to western blueprints of queer individual identity. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, questioning the Eurocentric assumption of the separation of queerness from family ties. Offering five case studies of queer representations, Queering Chinese Kinship: Queer Public Culture in Globalizing China (Hong Kong UP, 2021)also challenges the tendency in current scholarship to understand queer cultures as predominantly marginalized. Shedding light on cultural expressions of queerness and kinship, this book highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture.

Dr. Lin Song is a scholar of media and cultural studies, and Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism & Communication at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. He holds a PhD in Gender Studies from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is currently working on projects related to Emotional and algorithmic governance in China during the COVID-19 outbreak, and Erotic self-representation and queer cultural production in Chinese DIY pornography.

Cody Skahan (cskahan@ksu.edu) is an anthropologist by training, starting an MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland in August 2022 as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on the intersections of queerness, environmentalisms, and tourism in Iceland. Cody has a blog at where he sometimes writes about Games User Research and will totally, 100% in the future post the podcast and other projects he is working on.

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