From Family Rupture to Chosen Intimacy: Character Trajectories and Social Marginalization in Niezi (Crystal Boys)

Abstract

This paper examines Bai Xianyong’s Niezi (Crystal Boys) through the trajectory from family rupture to chosen intimacy, focusing on how homosexuality becomes the immediate trigger of family rupture and how sexual-minority characters reorganize belonging after leaving home. Rather than treating family rupture as a neutral background condition, the study reads it as a socially produced break activated when same-sex desire becomes visible within the family and allied institutions. The study asks how the novel narrativizes family rupture, and how the three main characters, Li Qing, Xiao Yu, and A Feng, construct alternative intimacy after that rupture under conditions of social marginalization. Methodologically, the paper combines close reading, thematic coding, and comparison across characters. Drawing primarily on Barnwell’s discussion of family estrangement and Weston’s theory of chosen family, while integrating Foucault’s account of discipline, Link and Phelan’s conceptualization of stigma, and Butler’s theory of gender performativity in the analysis, this paper argues that chosen intimacy functions as a mode of survival that is shaped by unequal access to space, resources, and recognition, thereby revealing the social marginalization of homosexuality in the Taiwanese context represented in the novel.