Introduction

Race constitutes an important power relation in the production of Chinese young diasporic sexual subjectivity. Racial relations incurred by migration underscore the (re)production of a sexual profile that otherises young Chinese diaspora as both conservative and reckless (Simon-Kumar 2009). Noted as the ‘sexual turn’, increasing attention in mobility studies has been given to the way ‘migrants and other “people on the move” are sexual beings expressing, wanting to express, or denied the means to express, their sexual identities’ (Mai and King 2009: 296). Interracial relationships, as personal practices as well as a phenomenon, sit at the nexus of sexuality and racial relations. Discussing interracial dating could therefore generate understandings for both sexuality and race, and more importantly, how the two aspects intersect in producing diasporic subjects.

I unpack my analysis in three parts in order to critically examine interracial relationships in the context of Chinese young people's transnational movement to Aotearoa New Zealand. I show that while interracial dating offers young Chinese people room for resisting oppressive sexual/gender norms, the practice is by no means simply liberating, as implied by problematic narratives of global mobility from ‘east’ to ‘west’ as entailing a move ‘from repression to freedom’ (Grewal and Kaplan 2001: 670). As a racial minority whose heritage culture is deemed ‘foreign’ or Other by the dominant society of New Zealand (NZ), young Chinese diaspora's sexual subjectification in interracial dating involves a complex navigation within racial power relations.