Border-crossing as Sexual Subjects

Abstract

Transnational migration shapes young people’s sexual subjectivity in profound ways as cultural and racial borders are crossed. In this context, interracial relationships occupy an uneasy position in young Chinese’s lives against parental authority, patriarchal gender relations, nationalism, and assimilation. As a racial minority in New Zealand (NZ), the Chinese diaspora’s notions of masculinity and femininity are both subjugated by racial stereotypes, constraining the possibilities of sexual expression and producing uneven power relations in intimate relationships. Simultaneously subject to assumptions of sexual sameness by co-ethnics and sexual difference by NZ society, Chinese young people must constantly negotiate the two tugging sets of racial relations in their practice of interracial dating. The entanglement of these power relations illustrates that being diasporic is simultaneously a racial/gendered/sexual project.