Title：Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family and Inequality
Speaker：Susanne Choi ( Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Chair：Lake Lui（Professor of Sociology, NTU）
Time：June 11, 2026 (Thu.) 12:30–14:00
Venue：Department of Sociology and Social Work R319
Registration：https://forms.gle/zV2uMg29n63f17uD9
About the Speech
Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, this talk traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals in post-Socialist China. It 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 talk illustrates how 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.
About the Speaker
Susanne Choi is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She currently serves as an associate editor of Gender, Work and Organization, and sits on the editorial (advisory) boards of Gender and Society, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Gender, Work and Organization, Asian Population Studies, Families, Relationships and Societies, and Sexuality and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her research examines how large-scale social transformations, including modernization, urbanization and migration, globalization, and digitalization, reshape gender and family relationships, sexual identities, work, social stratification, and social movements. Her lead-authored book, Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family and Gender in China (University of California Press), received the Best Book Award from RC31, Section on Migration, of the International Sociological Association. Her second monograph, Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family and Inequality in Post-Socialist China, 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.
