Stretching normativity
Middle-class Chinese lesbian placemaking in leisure spaces
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24216653 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Meiyun Meng (0009-0005-2477-5294, University College Cork) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-19 |
| Publication date | 2026-10-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14649365.2026.2740105 |
| OpenAlex | W7215128866 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 40 |
This paper explores how middle-class lesbians from mainland China negotiate a classed ideal of normative womanhood through placemaking in leisure spaces in China and Japan. Applying Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to sensory ethnographic fieldwork with fourteen highly educated Chinese lesbians, I reveal how Confucian familial obligation, state demographic governance, and a neoliberal rationality combine to demand that a woman convert her professional achievements into reproductive value within the heterosexual family. Same-sex desire breaks that conversion, leaving a woman accomplished yet unrecognizable as a proper woman. Against this disorientation, these women practise what I term ‘stretching normativity’ in mainstream leisure venues: an agentive, temporary reworking of a venue’s own gender order. On basketball courts in China and a rock stage in the diaspora, they use athletic skill and creative expression to reclaim what it means to be a woman, without establishing a permanent queer space or seeking respectability that comes with fitting the marriageable, domestic ideal. While these venues offer a sense of recognition in the moment, the relief is temporary and place-bound, leaving the wider middle-class script intact. Through the concept of stretching normativity, the paper advances the intersectional analytics of lesbian geographies beyond Western and territorial models.
gender norms · Middle class · Normativity · recreational areas · Urban space · Gender and Feminist Studies · Gender, Sexuality, and Education · Geography and Education Methods
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| Highly cited | No |
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