Everyday Erotics
Older Chinese Women and Same-Sex Desire

Denise Tse-Shang Tang (Author)

9781478038566

Paperback / softback, published 30 June 2026

200 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.277 kg

“Everyday Erotics vividly presents abundant, fascinating data from a generation of older women, many of whom rarely speak publicly about their intimate lives. Tang provides a new, much-needed oral history of an Inter-Asian formation of queer female sexuality and community from the 1960s to the present.”—Amie Elizabeth Parry, English Department and the Center for the Study of Sexualities, National Central University, Taiwan

“This singular study of older Chinese lesbians presents a series of unexpected life histories of self-making. Tang’s engrossing ethnography offers a comparative analysis that neither replicates Euro-American accounts of sexual identity politics nor mimics the evolution of its authorized women’s movements. Instead, we encounter a world of same-sex desires, longings, and practices that reveal the day-to-day building of relationships and communities against the odds.”—David L. Eng, author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy

In Everyday Erotics, Denise Tse-Shang Tang explores the lives of older women with same-sex desire in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. Tang interviews women born in the 1930’s through the 1960’s, looking at how their lives differ across culture, class, and place, and how they lived and understood their own desires and social worlds. Through these tales of love, intimacy, family obligations, and personal respectability, she presents narrative accounts and analyses that complicate cultural notions of romance and desire at the intersections of gender roles, social class, and history. An ethnography grounded in inter-Asian cultural flows and connected histories, Everyday Erotics builds an archive of queer women’s lives and a genealogy of their experiences.

Note on Romanization ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Hong Kong Is Where I Begin 26
2. Of Longing and Waiting: Love and Desire 47
3. Everyday Erotics and Inter-Asia Spatial Practices 67
4. Activism, Coming Out, and the Know-How to Zoujan/Zouren 85
5. Imagining Futures: Resilience and Spontaneity 118
Glossary 137
Notes 139
Bibliography 161
Index 181