Unfinished Revolution: An Overview of Three Decades of LGBT Activism in China

Abstract

This essay offers a feminist political economic analysis of the development of Chinese urban-based LGBT activism since the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women. First, it meditates on the gendered politics within LGBT activism; second, it explores how LGBT groups' NGO-isation process in the context of transnational movements is playing out vis-a-vis the Party-State’s attempts to eliminate organisations linked to the 'imperial West'. According to the author, the onset of a new era of precarity is calling for Chinese LGBT activists to come up with urgent and creative strategies for survival and care.