Creating ‘relational leeway’ for implicit activism: Taiwanese lesbians’ coming out experiences and identity management within families

Abstract

This article explores lesbians’ coming out strategies in Taiwan, focusing on their identity management and interactions with families. The data came from in-depth interviews with females who self-identified as lesbians. This article centres on lesbians’ everyday lives and how their coming-out decisions were intertwined with familial relationships and goes beyond the dichotomous Western coming-out discourse. I demonstrate ‘hiding’, ‘passing’, ‘unmasking’, and ‘sharing’ strategies lesbians employed to navigate expressing identities and maintaining relationships. I argue that lesbians created diverse identity managements as temporal space for future reconciliation with families and ‘relational leeway’ as ‘implicit activism’ that contributes to future social changes.