Noras on the road: family and marriage of lesbian women in Shanghai

During the past decade, we have witnessed the rise of Shanghai as a new metropolitan centre in China. The city has also become one of the most vibrant sites of lesbian community in the country. The author interviewed 20 lesbian women in the city in 2005. It is found that almost all of the women interviewed are experiencing the pressure of social conformity most severely from their immediate family, and the social expectation of marriage. In this paper, the author demonstrates the conflicts of family and marriage that many of the informants have encountered and how the hegemony of heterosexuality is still securely reproduced and carried out through the discourses of family and marriage in contemporary urban China, and finally, how the informants deal with the controls enacted by the institution of heterosexuality. doi:10.1300/ J155v10n03_06.