‘Passionate aesthetics’: T-P gender practices and discourses, and the hierarchies within lesbian (lala) communities in contemporary mainland China

As a masculine-feminine pairing comparable to butch-femme lesbian genders in Euro-American societies, T-P gender roles constitute lively elements in the lesbian, or lala, subculture in contemporary mainland China. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in the mid-2010s in Shanghai and Yunnan Province, China, and applying the theoretical framework of ‘passionate aesthetics’, in this article I investigate discourses and practices relevant to T-P genders. I analyse how hierarchies have been (re)produced inside lala communities, and how, in these processes, (hetero)normative understandings of gender and sexuality have become both sources of knowledge and objects of critique. I argue that multiple and competing passionate aesthetics, including the dominant form of heteronormativity in China and globalized, if not Western, knowledge about gender and sexuality, have entailed three major kinds of hierarchy among lalas: hierarchies among T-P categories, which are paradoxically defined by the notion of ‘pureness’; hierarchies in feminist and LGBTQ activist discourses, which trivialize or even silence everyday T-P embodiments; and hierarchies between masculinity and femininity, which encourage diverse practices of female masculinity but still value masculinity over femininity.