Queering Female Kinship Terms: Reappropriation of jiemei and Reworking of Sexual Identities in China

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.