Negotiations Between Chinese Gay Men and Lesbians and Their Parents About Marriage

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used for studying and analyzing self-identified gay men’s and lesbians’ (simplified as gays and lesbians in the following) marriage challenges. Chinese gay men and lesbians face many challenges, among which marriage is conceivably their top concern. The majority of these individuals must negotiate this issue with their parents. Discourses woven by gays and lesbians to influence their parents are crucial for understanding how they negotiate this issue. Such an understanding is the focus of the present study of 20 participants including 10 lesbians and 10 gay men in China. This study applies CDA to unveil the functions, linguistic techniques, and ideological bases of gay men’s and lesbians’ discourses in negotiation. The application demonstrates the strength of CDA in analyzing how people use language to produce and construct identities and activities. The current research advances the use of CDA not only by taking the initiative of using it to study this emerging issue but also by incorporating the analysis of inherent discursive ideologies.