| 摘要: | The term “yao” encompasses meanings related to “gender,” “sexuality,” “the body,” and “labor.” In short, it refers to “biological males” who engage in prostitution and, as part of this occupation, cross-dress and/or undergo “breast augmentation,” often lacking clear or fixed awareness or practices of normative gender and sexual identities. By employing an ethnographic research approach that combines in-depth interviews and participant observation, this paper theorizes the everyday tactics of disadvantaged yaos in Northeast China, particularly those based in L Park, Shenyang, as forms of “la(n)bility,” framed through the interconnected notions of “lanbi,” “shanzhai,” and “shamelessness.” Moreover, this paper examines the contested relationship between the politics of “la(n)bility” and normative gender and sexual identity politics within the increasingly Westernized, globalized, and gentrified milieus of contemporary Chinese LGBT activism. Furthermore, it probes how these marginalized subjects negotiate and modularize their prostitution practices, thereby challenging the exclusivity and rigidity of the emerging contemporary Chinese transgender subjectivity. |
