The Failure in Queering Kinship: An Autoethnographic Reimagination of Queer Futurity in China

In this paper, I utilise autoethnography to reflect my own queer experience, discussing the concept of 'queer failure' (Halberstam, 2011) as a queering strategy re-imagining queer futurity in mainland China. My autoethnographic narrative positions China as an intersection of both globalised and localised socio-cultural contexts regarding gender and sexuality. The queer articulation in China does not fully correspond to the Western-originated queer theory and its research, precisely because political activism cannot be openly visible. Thus, I believe my writing is necessary to provide evidence and documentation of how Chinese queers entangle their queerness with daily challenges and realities, and how the 'queer failure' approach can embody and interact with the internalised pressure and fear under a broader heteronormative and patriarchal regime. Autoethnography plays a key role in this study in how queer failure is embodied across multifaced Chinese contexts of queer kinship, and how it provides emotional triggers of queer feeling (Ahmed, 2004) in respond to heteronormative ideologies such as 'reproductive futurity' (Edelman, 2004) and 'happy queer' (Ahmed, 2004). I argue that queering kinship - including their biological family and romantic partnership - in China becomes a significant site to imagine and practice 'queer utopia' (Muñoz, 2009), and to interfere with existing heteronormative structures. Providing an innovative means of integrating personal storytelling with broader queer theoretical discourse, this study contributes to the potential of queer failure to inspire non-normative forms of queer actions and futurity within a decolonial context that moves beyond the Western-centred perspective of queer theory and practice.