Interpreting Realities:Same-sex Oriented Chinese In Cooperative Marriage,A Symbiosis Of Subjective And Collective Meanings

This paper is an attempt to understand the nature of a particular model of human relationships.Specifically,it aims to describe the individual perceptions and motivations that cause Chinese male and female same-sex oriented individuals to opt for formal marriages.In Chinese,the denomination of the phenomenon as formal marriage makes emphasis in the formal nature of the relationship.It implies that even though the partners are establishing a married status,their relationship is only contractual,formal,nominal;it does not carry the contents that are presumed to come with marriage.The research,however,analysis the cooperative nature of the phenomenon,which refers to the fact that the parts consciously agree to commit together in marriage to comply with specific familial and social requirements,while maintaining their right to choose alternative courses of life.Thus,the perspective of the research considers formal marriage or cooperative marriage not just as a form without content,but as an individual approach to create relationships and adapt to specific contextual conditions.The ethnographic approach of the research turns to the individual perspectives of the informants.It is an approach to analyse the perceptions of family and society that motivate the individual to read their reality from their particular point of view.Moreover,the research utilises the model of interaction between ritual and sincerity to explain how those particular readings can conjugate the confluence of subjective and collective interpretations of the self through the ritualistic nature of marriage.The research exposes the malleability of meanings that can be attached to rituals and the material instrumentalization that Chinese same-sex oriented individuals confer to marriage as a way to construct an individual interpretation to adapt to their cultural context and to the structures of power relations that define the subjective positions of the individual in society.Thus,cooperative marriage is the expression of sincere subjective desires through a conscient understanding of the power that meanings and symbols represent to manage the differences and ease the dissonances while living in society.Therefore,cooperative marriage is a symbiosis of ritual as a strategy and individual awareness of existence as a lifestyle.