Legal recognition of same-sex partnerships and marriages has been at the forefront of media attention in East Asian societies. For our comparative study, we carried out qualitative in-depth interviews with 31 gay men and lesbians to investigate the nuanced understanding of marriage, family and sexual citizenship within the context of debates on marriage equality across Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan. Expanding on the theoretical concepts in Chen’s ‘Asia as method’, Iwabuchi’s ‘inter-Asian referencing’ and Yue and Leung’s ‘queer Asia as method’, we aim to understand how the act of marriage is defined, conducted and rationalized amidst a web of social relations within each research locale. We argue that despite the variations in the structure and practice of kin relations, same-sex unions cannot be detached from the kinship institution in the three research sites. Our study points to a different perspective on same-sex marriage that goes beyond the binary of assimilation to/dismantling of the heterosexual marriage institution by attending to the structural and symbolic significance of the family and community.

This paper examines same-sex intimacies formed by and among older Chinese lesbians and bisexual women who were born from the late 1930s to the late 1950s through qualitative interviews and participant observation conducted in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. For this paper, I aim at complicating cultural notions of love, romance and intimacies, that were brought up within interstices of connected histories, gender roles and marginalized sexual subjectivities. Based on ethnographic data collected during 2016–2018, I elaborate on the moments of longing and waiting as redefining modern notions of love and intimacy across time and spatial dimensions. Then I bring up a methodological episode where inter-Asian referencing intersects with Chinese modernities to illustrate how gender and sexuality meet, intersect and influence each other in the cultural imagination and eventual materialization of women’s same-sex desires. The last section will examine the politics of butchness as protection and as a form of politeness.

Lesbian spaces, in terms of their social, cultural, sexual or political purposes, have been dwindling in recent years within global North lesbian geographies. For this article, I would like to put forward a historical analysis of social spaces in Hong Kong through a qualitative ethnographic study of 12 older lesbians and bisexual women aged 60 years and above. Expanding upon Yue and Leung’s theoretical assertion of disjunctive modernity and urban neoliberalism, I proceed to develop my argument that lived experiences in an urban environment diffuses and decenters the assertion of one’s lesbian identity and sexual subjectivity across time and space. Under the British colonial era, the assertion of one’s Chinese womanhood as independent and modern intersects with rapid industrialization and social transformations which lead to culturally-specific spatial practices in locating lesbian desires. I call this mode of spatial practice as everyday erotics in density to describe the way of navigating sexual desires in relation to urban development, where becoming a woman with lesbian desires mean not only carving out one’s alternative erotic space but also disengaging with traditional gender roles in one’s life course and redefining gender and sexuality for an older generation of women.

This study uses a governmentality approach to examine poverty and welfare media discourse as a complex aggregate of a wide variety of knowledge and political rationalities aimed at governing citizens. A discourse analysis of newspaper articles about poverty from 1994 to 2013 was conducted. Five discursive strategies and four oppositional claims were found in the 20-year sample period. The findings illustrate the relationship between neoliberalism and governmental strategies in poverty discourse.

To understand power dynamics between Chinese and Western cultures, this research examines the content of advertisements from bridal magazines in Hong Kong, China, and the US. Wedding magazines in Chinese societies visualize the hegemonic power of Western cultures using English language text, Caucasian models and Western wedding practices. Meanwhile, culture plays a role in selling ritual goods. Clothing advertisements were more common in the US, suggesting that the beauty of the bride in the US is important with respect to the body, whereas in China beauty in terms of both the body and face is important.

This article examines the news framing of the 2017 Hong Kong Chief Executive election using a big data analysis approach. Analyses of intermedia framing of over 370,000 articles and comments are conducted including news published in over 30 Chinese press media, four prominent Chinese online press media, and posts published on three candidates’ Facebook pages within the election period. The study contributes to the literature by examining the rarely discussed role of intermedia news framing, especially the relationship between legacy print media, online alternative news media, and audience comments on candidates’ social network sites. The data analysis provides evidence that audiences’ comments on candidates’ Facebook pages influenced legacy news coverage and online alternative news coverage. However, this study suggests that legacy news media and comments on Facebook do not necessarily have a reciprocal relationship. The implication of the findings and limitations are discussed.

The literature on cross-border marriages between women from the global south and men from the global north largely assumes patrilocality as a direct result of hypergamous marriage migration. There has been little research into the experiences of brides who relocate to their husband’s country to fulfil the roles of wife and mother but are not given citizenship rights or brides who do not relocate even after obtaining residency or citizenship in their husband’s country. Inconsistencies between the legal and residential status of foreign wives suggest that researchers should decouple legal and spatial migration. Using ethnographic data from Mainland China–Hong Kong cross-border couples, this article examines the causes and consequences of two forms of decoupling: (1) wife migrates spatially before her legal status changes and (2) wife’s change in legal status is not accompanied by spatial migration. We argue that these two forms of decoupling have their origins in state policies, economic constraints and personal choices, and that their impact on the intimate and household dynamics of cross-border families is gendered. Unravelling these complex dynamics sheds light on the intricate relationships between gender, marriage, migration and the state, and highlights the increasingly heterogeneous circumstances of cross-border couples.

This chapter provides a reflexive account of my research experience as a Chinese male ethnographer with male and female Nepali drug users in Hong Kong within various drug settings. Specifically, the chapter describes how I use various strategies to create multiple gender identities to approach male informants at drug rehabilitation centres and female informants on the streets, and how this flexible gendered performance has helped me to obtain a better understanding of the informants who are also practising multiple gender identities throughout their drug career. The chapter draws a contrast with previous drug studies done by male researchers who have often highlighted the importance of performing a hegemonic masculine identity in their fieldwork. Their approach is similar to transparent reflexivity, which overlooks the complexity and uncertainty of the research process. This chapter highlights the intersectional approach to reflexivity and emphasizes the correlation between the generation of knowledge and the performances of the researcher and researched in a particular social space.

Making and sharing food plays an essential role in foreign domestic
helpers’ work and leisure life. However, this has seldom been
addressed in the voluminous migrant domestic helper literature.
In Hong Kong, overseas helpers are employed in over three hundred
thousand households. This article explores their food experiences
in both their leisure and work spaces. It first examines the
“contact zones” in which these workers share food with co-ethnics.
It then considers the kitchen space in which foreign domestic
workers serve their employers. It shows how these domestic
helpers make use of their culinary skills to secure better human
relationships and gain extra bargaining power through the provision
of tasty ethnic dishes. Despite the immense power imbalance
between the employer and the domestic helper, such food contact
has shed light on the everyday resilience embedded in kitchen
politics in Hong Kong.

This article assesses how contemporary forms of regional assimilation by centralizing states affect the political behavior of threatened social groups within peripheral polities. Recent mainlandization, “the blurring of the physical, social, cultural and psychological border between Mainland China and Hong Kong,” has constrained the region’s autonomy. Here, we consider the political consequences of Chinese mainlandization. How does mainlandization affect the likelihood of political participation in Hong Kong? Drawing and expanding upon theories of social identity, we argue that mainlandization increases the political involvement among those who make the choice to identify as Hong Konger because this is the group under threat by China’s recent actions. Hong Kongers politically mobilize as a response to mainlandization to combat Chinese threat and to improve the status of their identity group, of which their own sense of selves is also tied to. Using an original survey experiment, we find support for our theory. Hong Kongers are influenced by mainlandization to attend contentious protests, recruit others to attend such rallies, and sign pro-democratic petitions. We conclude by noting implications for China’s increasing attempt to assimilate this electoral autocracy and discuss how our research informs Hong Kong political activism in 2019 and 2020.