Confucian queer agency: conceptualising the mechanisms of LGBTQ teachers’ resistance in Chinese schools

This article engages with Judith Butler’s theorisation of gender performativity and seeks to expand understandings of agency in queer theory by conceptualising the mechanisms of resistance in practice, using the case of Chinese schooling as its focus. Drawing on the Confucian dual concepts of ming (name) and shi (actuality), alongside empirical interview data from 25 LGBTQ schoolteachers, I rethink queer agency as the tactical reworking of the performative (re)citations between naming and being. I identify three distinct mechanisms: (1) practising reinterpretation in a nameless way; (2) separating actuality from the inhabiting name; (3) introducing a new name alongside a corresponding actuality. Together, these mechanisms constitute what I neologise as Confucian queer agency – a conceptual framework that captures and clarifies how individuals navigate their sexualities while resisting heteronormativity within complex sociocultural and institutional constraints.