Conceptualising Confucian queer subjectivation: how Chinese LGBTQ teachers make sense of and navigate their sexuality in schools

In this article, I introduce a novel concept of Confucian queer subjectivation to explore the formation of sexual and gender subjectivity in China. Drawing on Confucian understandings of the relational and cultivated self, alongside empirical data from Chinese LGBTQ schoolteachers, I argue that Confucianism exerts an inadvertently queer effect, producing a form of destabilisation of sexuality within the fulfilment of social roles. I conceptualise this process as Confucian queer subjectivation and elaborate its three key features within the Chinese school context: (1) de-privileging sexual and gender identity, (2) relational and situational navigation of sexuality, and (3) subjectivity as self-cultivation and continuous becoming. This article suggests that Confucian queer subjectivation reconfigures the meaning of queerness within Confucian-influenced contexts and offers an alternative cultural form of queer politics with potential for resistance and subversion in education and broader society.