“I love to eat, that’s why I’m so fat. You’re pretty, not fat like I am! You should eat more,” they said, trying to insert some light humor and chuckling while dipping a piece of naan into their tea as we waited for the Big Plate Chicken (dapanji) to be ready.
Looking down, their eyes filled with tears again and their voice wavered. “I like living at home with my parents. I would stay here and take care of them, and just be single my whole life. That I could bear. I could accept it; I could stand it. To take care of them in their old age would be a great honor, and I could live out my days alone, working as a photographer in my hometown until my death. If I could choose, that’s the destiny I would pick. But my parents will not stop pressuring me to get married. And I fear dishonoring them.
“But I cannot bear to get married, and I cannot bear to stay with my parents any longer under the pressure and their unending disgust for me. Even though I want to stay—I like Xinjiang, I like my hometown, I want to be among my own people—I have no choice but to go abroad. The only way my parents can accept me is if I run away. So that’s my plan.”
A rock sat in my stomach and all I could do was nod and keep eating the chicken in front of me.
In 2017, a year after Patigul and I had the conversation above, the Chinese state confiscated Uyghurs’ passports. Patigul’s shimmer of hope to go abroad dwindled. Patigul decided to try moving to the city of Urumchi instead, as I had suggested earlier.
Patigul was messaging me all the time and I didn’t know how to help. I hoped that meeting with two Uyghur lesbians, Salamet and Guzelnur, would help Patigul find some other sources of support. We found an empty bar in a Han neighborhood one afternoon, ordered tea and spoke in hushed tones in Uyghur—chances were pretty good that anybody else wouldn’t be able to understand us this way.
“It’s really hard to find an apartment in Urumchi if you’re Uyghur, you know that right?” Salamet told Patigul. “For us Uyghurs who were born in Urumchi and own a home, it’s still okay, but right now with the...situation... It’s hard for Uyghurs from the countryside to rent in the city. Really, really hard. The government isn’t allowing Uyghurs to rent houses at all. The situation is really tight right now. It’s almost impossible to find a house.”
An Islamophobic and racist paranoia gripped the city of Urumchi in 2017. A video of Uyghurs who had joined ISIS in Syria went viral. Uyghurs attacked the Chinese embassy in Kyrgyzstan. In response, the entire region panicked.
In an effort to appease the local Han population, control the Uyghurs as a cheap labor source, and maintain “safety” and “security” in the region, the government embarked on a mass incarceration campaign that landed over one million Uyghurs in concentration camps in the countryside that year. Rounding them up in the city, sending them back to the countryside, and refusing to rent homes to any Uyghurs in the city was a key part of the plan. The government's goal was to keep Uyghurs under strict lockdown, maintain space in the city to be more available to the Han, and restrict Uyghurs in the countryside for easy incarceration. Patigul was just one of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs who were affected by this policy of state terror and economic development.
“What about on a university campus?” Patigul asked, turning to me. She hoped to enroll in English classes.
“Maybe,” I shrugged. “But there’s no guarantee.”
“Because my parents are forcing me to get married. I need to get out of there,” Patigul said, starting to sound panicked.
“Can you do anything else though?” Salamet asked. “Because it’s almost impossible to go abroad right now. You know because of the political situation. Nobody has passports. It’s going to be really, really hard for you to get out. And it’s going to be next to impossible for you to find an apartment in Urumchi that will take Uyghurs.”
“I can’t stay here, I can’t live at home,” Patigul insisted.
“I might have to marry a gay man,” Guzelnur explained. “I don’t know. My younger cousins are all married and everyone keeps asking me when I’m going to get married. I just keep saying, ‘I will, I will,’ but the truth is that I don’t know.”
When we tried to suggest that Patigul try marrying a gay man, Patigul shook her head no.
Patigul was trapped. They had no desire to marry a gay man, and who can blame them for not wanting to enter into a life of falsehood and secrecy? However, because of the political situation, they were not able to go abroad nor move to the city. Patigul experienced state strangulation as well as cultural strangulation from strict Uyghur norms and moral righteousness around heteronormative standards.
Like Patigul, many queer Uyghurs find themselves ostracized by their own families. Patigul is trapped in the middle of multiple outside forces that are stripping them of their freedom and autonomy. Patigul does not have sovereignty over their own body. They are being forced into marriage not only with someone they doesn’t know or love, but also with a gender that they cannot bear to accept. If they were to get married, they would have to live with that bodily and emotional trauma for the rest of their life.
Losing sovereignty over one’s own body is part of the reproduction of state and colonial violence. People’s interaction with the state and colonial violence overlapped with trauma in the family. Patigul experiences being forced into marriage and plans to run away as the only escape from the violence on their own body. But racist policies in their own country as well as in the US mean that there is no hope for escape. State and colonial violence is reproduced in the family and on the body for the most vulnerable populations. The situation for Uyghurs only got worse as 2017 continued, when people disappeared into internment camps.
That day at the Han bar was the last time I saw Patigul. We exchanged a few messages after that, but soon it became too dangerous for them to have any contact with me, a foreigner, as police were arresting anyone with foreign connections.
LGBTQ+ Uyghurs experience significant stress and oppression from a limited definition of social membership that excluded them. Acceptance into the Uyghur community was based on the imagined moral superiority of “pure” (sap) Uyghur bodies. Whether based on virginity or heterosexuality, membership into the Uyghur community was exclusive and strict. Members policed non-conforming bodies. Straight and gay Uyghurs could be ostracized from family and friends, fired from their jobs, and kicked out of their homes if their body and bodily practices were different from the moral code. For simply loving who they want to love, they were criminalized.
But the exclusive definitions of Uyghur purity was especially oppressive for queer Uyghurs because when they found themselves kicked out of their own community, they turned to only find more discrimination from the Han community. Not for being gay this time. They faced discrimination from the Han simply for the ethnic identity that they were born into that was stamped on their ID card, for speaking their mother tongue, for looking different. For their ethnicity alone, they were criminalized.
From both communities, they found hatred simply for being themselves.
Queer Uyghurs thus find themselves ostracized from many aspects of society: textbook double minority oppression. Double or triple minority oppression is when a person is a member of multiple minority or underrepresented groups, a minority within minorities. For example, a queer black woman in a STEM field would experience triple minority oppression. The intersectionality literature has tackled this issue.
Layers of disadvantage for sexual and racial minorities suffering several marginalized statuses are well documented in the literature. For example, Rosenburg (2017) documents the criminalizing and policing of minority youth in white spaces of homosexual “care.” Many Black authors have written memoirs, personal essays, and poetry about the intersection of minority racial identities and queerness. Queer Black Americans live at the intersection of racism and homophobia. I draw a parallel with queer Uyghurs whose lives intersect with ethnic discrimination from the Han Chinese straight and queer communities. Patigul’s story illustrates the double minority oppression that queer Uyghurs experience in Xinjiang, where their only hope was to escape their homeland completely, but they cannot due to discriminatory practices that restrict movement.
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