Strategic Resistance against Gender Binaries: Chinese Women Doing Zhongxing in Hong Kong and Urban China

Zhongxing (中性), literally meaning ‘middle gender/sex’ or ‘neutral gender/sex’, is a mediated and gendered phenomenon in contemporary East Asian Sinophone societies that refers to young women who do not perform the normative gender regardless of their sexual orientations since the mid-2000s. In this talk, I will explore the lived experience of zhongxing among women in urban China and Hong Kong, drawing from  in-depth interviews and online discourse analysis. I argue that an identitarian approach is inadequate in understanding this precarious and ambiguous position in doing gender. Instead, informed by an interdisciplinary framework of transnational feminist and queer Asian studies, I propose a practice approach to understand the fluidity, precarity, and situatedness of women’s strategic resistance against gender binaries in their everyday life.