In this research, face-to-face in-depth interviews and extensive participant observations were conducted. There are twenty-five major informants, aged from early 20s to mid 40s, and a small number of supplementary ones. They were either Shanghai residents or were active in the city's lala communities. / In this thesis, I will look into the conflict between public inauguration and the private dilemma of lalas in contemporary urban China and the strategies they employed to cope with this conflict. Also, I will theorize lalas' existences in both ideological public and private domains, and the implication of the dominant community politics of "public correctness" to their symbolic existence and survival. / Since the economic reform period (1978 onwards), Shanghai has become one of the most vibrant sites of lala (the local identity for women with same-sex desires) communities in China. During my field visits from 2005 to 2007, I interviewed twenty-five self-identified lalas in Shanghai. One recurring theme that always came up in the interviews is the conflicts between the informants' desire to have same-sex relationship and the familial expectation of them to get married, or for those who have married, the pressure to maintain the heterosexual family. / The newly acquired economic freedom and geographical mobility in the reform era do not automatically translate into a breakaway from family control. The existence of rapidly developing and widely accessible tongzhi communities in both online and offline spaces, together with a paradigmatic change of the official treatment of homosexual subjects in the legal and medical domains, and the increasingly visible and organized involvements of state experts in the new normalization project of the homosexual population in the country, the exposure and discussion of homosexuality and its subjects have never been so public (in spatial and ideological senses) and diverse as compared to the past decades. Homosexual desire is going more and more public, yet the majority of homosexual population remains to be closeted subjects who are forced to keep their desires and presence as invisible as possible in non-public contexts such as family and more specifically, the heterosexual home space. / Kam, Yip Lo Lucetta. / Advisers: Kit Wai Eric Ma; Hon Ming Yip. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-09, Section: A, page: . / Thesis submitted in: December 2008. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 200-214). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.