Dissertation
Straightjacket: Same-Sex Orientation under Chinese Family Law
‘Visibility and secrecy are both valuable tactics and should not be antagonized in LGBT movements, ’ says Jingshu Zhu. Zhu defended her dissertation on Wednesday 21 February.
- Author
- Jingshu Zhu
- Date
- 21 February 2018
- Links
- News item PhD defence Jingshu Zhu
- Leiden University Repository
Although the questions that prompted my PhD thesis are not specific to same-sex-attracted people, I chose to narrow down my research on them. This study gives a panorama of both the official laws and the informal social norms that influence these people’s family life. It discusses a wide range of issues, including de/criminalization (the change of the crime of hooliganism), de/pathologization (conversion therapy and the objection thereof), homosexual representations (such as trademarks and films), same-sex weddings, the distribution of communal property of same-sex cohabitants, custody in divorce cases, official and de facto adoption, fostering, in vitro fertilization conducted by lesbian couples, transnational surrogacy by gay couples, inheritance between same-sex partners, medical decisions in an emergency, same-sex marriage campaigning, old-age planning, coming out to parents, etc. It also documents how ordinary people, lawyers and activists change the law via legislative proposals, impact litigation and transnational linkage.
I carried out this research taking an interdisciplinary approach. Alongside detailed legal analysis, this thesis features vivid storytelling following eight months’ anthropological fieldwork. I conducted semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with more than 60 respondents. The storytellers include same-sex couples of different generations, cooperatively married lesbians and gay men, “cheating” husbands and unwitting wives in mixed-orientation marriages, parents of lesbian and gay adult children, friendly lawyers, activists and so on. The thesis weaves ethnography into statutory laws and court decisions, giving the readers a comprehensive understanding of the actual experiences of Chinese same-sex-oriented persons with or without a lesbian, gay or bisexual identity.