For decades queer women in the Sinophone world have followed a strict dating custom: a lesbian relationship usually consists of a masculine partner, known as a tomboy, and a feminine counterpart. In the 2010s, however, many queer women have come to reject this custom and abandon their own former identities as tomboys. Leaving The Tomboy Behind follows their journey moving beyond lesbian masculinity and turning towards global LGBTQ+ media from Japan, Thailand, and the United States to explore new forms of gender expressions. Carman K. M. Fung offers a rich ethnography of the impacts media has had on queer Sinophone women’s lives, focusing on transnational interpretations and misinterpretations, and how media globalization shapes viewers’ perceptions of unfamiliar places. Through a combination of personal interviews and analysis of the global media these communities consume, Fung traces the genealogy of the tomboy identity in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in relation to global queer and trans cultures.

Carman K. M. Fung is Lecturer in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University.

Table of Contents

List of Tables
List of Figures 
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. The Lesbian Sinophone Sphere and the Backlash against Tomboy
Chapter 2. One Hundred Years of the Tomboy Identity: a Lesbian Sinophone History
Chapter 3. Coming Out, Leaving Behind: Sinophone Queer Women’s Retrospective Disidentification with Postmillennial Tomboy Youth Culture
Chapter 4. The Femme World of The L Word: Sinophone Queer Women’s Transnational Misreadings and Utopian Imaginations
Chapter 5. Lesbian Feminist Occidentalism: Sinophone Queer Women’s Rejection of Tomboy and TBG/po Role Division
Chapter 6. Finding My Truth after Tomboy: Repressive Hypothesis of Subjectivity in Sinophone Queer Women’s Self-Stories
Chapter 7. Globalizing Transgender, Pathologizing Tomboy: Medicalization of Gender Variance in the Lesbian Sinophone Sphere
Chapter 8. Identities in Action
Filmography
Bibliography