Rainbow parents and the familial model of tongzhi (LGBT) activism in contemporary China

Abstract An increasingly large number of Chinese straight parents joined an activist grassroots organization to advocate for gay rights in the public sphere during the last decade. They went through a multistage process of moral self-transformation and strategically employed the cultural capital of parenthood in the context of the rising neo-familism to engage the general public and negotiate with the state authority. Their advocacy work has resulted to an emergent familial model of LGBT activism in mainland China featuring the close collaboration between parents and gay children, the centrality of family relations instead of sexuality, the incorporation of LGBT activism into the neo-familism discourse and practice, and the shift from oppositional identity politics in the queer population to cooperative civic engagement with the society at large.