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Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Abstract

T/TB (tomboy), as a sociolinguistic category that denotes masculine lesbians in the Chinese-speaking world, has long been criticized by community members and Western academics alike for being too heteronormative and reductive in comparison to the post-identity queer figure in Western gender/sexual discourses. Through the detailed life histories of three T/TBs who moved to the United States for college, I problematize this East/West binary within queer geography and present a more nuanced framework to understanding queer migration and queer globalization. I argue that my interlocutors, while highly diverse in their subjectivities, all strategically evoke the United States, as both a physical and discursive site, to reflect on the gendered memories of home and to enable radical reimaginations of gender and sexual norms in the collective region of the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Via the complex interplay between space and desires, the making of an authentic, Chinese, masculine Self that inhabits a nonnormative gendered body is an unfinished process, in which the West is not the final destination but a point for continuous transit.

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