In contemporary Chinese contexts, language is an important tool for people to negotiate identities and create distinctions. This paper analyzes the usage of female kinship terms among gay men in a Chinese queer advocacy group, focusing on one specific term jiemei (sisters). Through both in-person and digital ethnographic fieldwork, including one-on-one in-depth interviews with group members, I explore how the queer group members, as a distinct community of practice, continuously construct stances, social relationships, and negotiate their gender and sexual identities by reappropriating the term jiemei. By proposing a typology of jiemei register, with the mechanism of higher orders of indexicality, I argue that not only is jiemei multifunctional and multifaceted across social contexts, but the indexed intimacy and solidarity, yet sometimes dialectical distancing, associated with jiemei is bi-culturally unique. In the meantime, by combining theories of language ideologies and tactics of intersubjectivity, I show the heterogeneous jiemei register, shifting identities and contesting language ideologies among the queer group members contribute to their divergence from and challenge to a monolithic and stereotypical social type: stigmatized effeminacy under societal heteronormativity and binary gender roles. In summary, through a linguistic anthropological perspective, this paper helps better understand the innovative language use of Chinese queer community in relation to their gender and sexual identity within and beyond the group.
