Racialised Queer Chinese Migrants in Australia: Entanglements of Queerness and Chineseness

This article considers what it means to be queer, Chinese and diasporic in white settler-colonial Australian society. Considering the narratives of newly arrived young queer People's Republic of China's Chinese immigrants and older queer Chinese second-generation descendants of earlier China-born settler-immigrants, this paper asks specifically how these subjects negotiate the boundary of sexual other of whiteness and racial other of straightness. We interrogate the pernicious binary of the sexual other being white and racial other being straight and explore how queer Chinese migrants negotiate their racialised and queer existence. This article raises important questions on how the subjects' elaborate display of Chineseness may run the risk of unintentionally reinforcing the very racialising and orientalising frames they seek to reject. We conclude with a call to recognise dominant structures and their impacts and reflect upon our resistance efforts where we do not end up unwittingly reproducing these structures. Instead, we need to consider how we may work to abolish such structures that hurt us all, albeit differently and unequally.