Desiring Queer, Negotiating Normal

This chapter explores the entanglement between queer desires and struggles with normativities in fandoms through the case study of Denise Ho (a.k.a. HOCC) in Hong Kong. HOCC is one of the few celebrities in the Chinese-language entertainment industry to have come out as a lesbian. Data is drawn from participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 29 fans between 2009 and 2014. By analyzing the interplay between Hong Kong sexual cultures, fans’ everyday lives, and fans’ interactions with global media, it is found that fans struggled with negotiating HOCC’s gender and sexuality and their own before HOCC’s coming-out, leading to the paradoxical celebration and self-policing of queer reading at the same time. HOCC’s coming out in 2012 has significantly reshaped her queer fandom. It is observed that fans have turned their attention to the negotiation of HOCC’s “proper” lesbian embodiment as the “correct” representation of the LGBT/ tongzhi movement. By revealing the complex relations between heteronormativity and homonormativity, this chapter concludes that HOCC fans in Hong Kong, who are situated within macrostructural and micropolitical forces, desire to be queer by transgressing normal and paradoxically desire to be normal by tactically negotiating the limits of queer.