The price of salt☆: the capable self in the face of heteronormative marriage pressure in the discourses of the “post-90s” Chinese lesbians

Abstract

This article presents two sets of recorded interview data in which young Chinese lesbians (i.e. born in the 1990s) performatively negotiate a capable and neoliberalized identity in narrating how their relationships are threatened by heteronormative marriage pressure. In applying discourse analysis to examine aspects of performativity and agency in the data, this study determined the ways in which the participants made use of language to index different ideologies. The findings suggest that the discursive strategies adopted by the “post-90s” lesbian subjects in dealing with marriage pressure reflect the influence of both neoliberal and nonliberal ideologies in contemporary China. The strategies demonstrate neoliberal reductionism because structural pressure was reduced to practical problems that could be settled by personal agency. They also demonstrated the nonliberal elements of Chinese sociocultural values because subject positions which are typical in heteronormative discourses were used to normalize lesbian practices. However, the participants’ discourses index new desires that are specific to this generation, which has significant exposure to global queer ideologies. Thus, the results indicate that in response to marriage pressure, a capable and neoliberalized lesbian identity could be constructed at the intersection of sociocultural heteronormative ideologies, neoliberal values in contemporary China, and global queer discourses.