Stretched Kinship
Queer kinships are often physically and emotionally stretched when people leave their original families to pursue education and employment through internal or international migration. This chapter argues that the so-called “coming out as coming home” strategy no longer works, and “home” has often become an impossible location for people to return to. It proposes a new paradigm of “stretched kinship” to consider a wide range of practices in queer homecoming and homemaking to better understand and make sense of the changing queer kinship structures shaping and shaped by today’s queer Chinese cultures and mobilities. It further explores “alternative families” as an emerging form of queer family-building, through which “home” once again becomes a possible ontological and symbolic location and destination.