Negotiating fluidity: How China’s “fourth-love” redoes gender within heteronormativity

Abstract

Challenging monolithic understandings of heterosexuality, this paper introduces the “Fourth-love” relationship, an emergent paradigm in contemporary China. Drawing on constructivist grounded theory and in-depth interviews with 22 practitioners, this study analyzes their practice as a process of “negotiating fluidity” within heteronormativity. The findings reveal this negotiation to be a central, ongoing paradox. Practitioners actively deconstruct patriarchal scripts in their intimate lives, primarily through practices of female sexual agency and the performance of male vulnerability. Simultaneously, they consolidate heteronormativity by grappling with anxieties over their public heterosexual identity and navigating the persistence of traditional caretaking roles. This paper conceptualizes “Fourth-love” not as a fixed state, but as a dynamic process of queer heterosexuality. We argue that this study expands the theory by demonstrating how deconstructive aspirations and normative consolidation are not a binary contradiction, but co-exist in a lived negotiation. This offers a non-binary framework for understanding how gender is uniquely contested and “redone” from within heteronormativity, rather than in simple opposition to it, in contemporary China.