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Qualified to be deviant: stigma-management strategies among Chinese leftover women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2021

Qian Liu
Qian Liu*
Affiliation:
Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: liuqian@uvic.ca
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Abstract

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which ‘leftover’ women navigate legal and social discrimination. ‘Leftover women’ is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual ‘leftover’ women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: ‘buying a licence to be deviant’ and ‘identity-hopping’. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. ‘Buying a licence to be deviant’ refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. ‘Identity-hopping’ is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law.

Keywords

legal consciousnesssociologywomen's rightsintersectionalityidentityChina
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 17 , Special Issue 3: Stigmatisation, Identities and the Law: Asian and Comparative Perspectives , September 2021 , pp. 284 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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