Queer Women in Urban China is a timely addition to the fast-growing field of queer Asian and queer China studies. The book is one of the rare full-length studies of queer women (or lalas) in China from a “queer-feminist anthropological perspective” (p. 8). The author conducted ethnographic research of the queer women community in Beijing during 2004–06 and after. She has documented a significant period of LGBTQ community and activism in China when grass-root activism and social space for LGBTQ people began to appear and flourish in metropolitan cities. The author participated in queer women community events and social gatherings and talked to a large number of lala women both formally and informally in face-to-face interaction or via online communication tools. The book offers rich ethnographic description and analysis of the formative years of lala community and activism in Beijing and how individual lala women use different resources to construct a new sexual subjectivity (and life) at a time when they are still living under intense pressure to conform to heterosexual norms.

The book builds on and extends concepts and issues discussed in existing works of Chinese LGBTQ studies. Using the author's words, she offers “a nuanced ethnographic analysis of how a diverse population of women in Beijing negotiate emergent alternative understandings of what it means to be modern, woman, Chinese, and desire same-sex intimacy, in the context of dominant knowledge systems and conformist norms that often conflict with new alternate imaginaries and opportunities” (p. 154). The author elaborates on Yau Ching and Fran Martin's discussion of queerness and normativity in Chinese societies. She argues that the dominant understanding of queerness as resistance to normativity, as reflected in current queer scholarship, is coming from an Euro-American context and therefore limits our understanding of the complex and contradictory ways of how Chinese queers desire and strategically appropriate forms of (hetero-)normativity. Instead of seeing queer women as being forced to cope with normative pressure such as marriage pressure and the pressure to be a filial daughter, the author suggests to go beyond the “different/normal or transgressive/assimilative model” (p. 33) and the “victim narrative” that tends to see queer women as victims of normative ideologies and assumes that they always want to break away from those demands. The author uses Yau's concept of “different normativities,” proposed in her edited book As Normal As Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 2010), to look at the “complicit desires” (p. 21) of queer women to manipulate marriage and family pressures in order to pursue a desirable life and self. The author finds that lala women's strategic appropriation of normative cultural ideologies can allow them to attain normative social status and a sense of belonging at surface level in their family and everyday social context.

The book includes original cases of two emergent marriage practices of lala women in China, namely, the lala marriage (tonghun) and the lala-gay contract marriage (xinghun). Both practices appeared during the author's field work in Beijing since 2004. The author sees both practices as queer women's strategic subversion and appropriation of established family and gender norms. Together with other everyday strategies, lala women use them to negotiate everyday survival and to cope with normative pressures. The marriage cases are very important documentation of those creative practices used by lala women in China. They demonstrate the emergence of alternative ways and spaces of queer people to deal with heteronormative pressures and to desire a different life (or differently normative life). The book is also a rich ethnographic documentation of those social platforms and queer women groups in the early years of the new millennium. Lala spaces such as Lala Salon, Pipe (Feng) Bar, West Wing Bar and cultural, activist groups such as les + magazine and Tongyu (Common Language) are all important sites that nurtured the queer women community and activism in Beijing and China at large.

The book is a significant contribution to the fields of queer Asian studies and queer China studies. It is a timely ethnographic study of the emerging queer women community and activism in China after the new millennium. One of the most important contributions of the book is the insightful discussion of the complex issues that are faced by lala women in China and how queer subjects in different cultural, political and social contexts cope or even work with normative ideologies to create new forms of self and desirable life. As the author emphasizes throughout the book, their struggle and strategies cannot be simply understood by the binary models of “local/global, tradition/modernity, coming out/closeted” (p. 154).