Unlike mobile apps for gay men, lesbian dating apps have been slow to catch on as a habitual space to look for friends and lovers. This study adopted a qualitative approach to investigate the social expectations and romantic longings of Chinese lesbians and bisexual women aged 35 and above in establishing same-sex relationships using mobile media. In-depth interviews were conducted with 12 Chinese lesbians and bisexual women, and participant observation was carried out on the Hong Kong-based lesbian social networking site Butterfly. The aim of the study was to explore the social meanings of intimacy created, negotiated and changed among Chinese lesbians and bisexual women. I argue that although social media presents ample opportunities for love and intimacy, the prevailing conservative values and cultural norms surrounding dating and relationships in Hong Kong are often reinforced and played out in their choice of romantic engagement.
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.
Two German graffiti artists are sentenced to caning in Singapore, as a group of prisoners dance to 'Gangnam Style' in the Philippines. Members of Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement create new DIY artworks as a form of grassroots resistance, as Taiwanese Sunflower protesters occupy the central parliament. Documentaries exposing corruption and state crime are suppressed in Cambodia and Indonesia, as Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei flits in and out of surveillance in China. Welcome to Crime, Media, and Culture: Asia-style. The twenty-first century has been termed the 'Asian century'. Asia holds some four billion of the world's population, and hosts four out of ten of the world's largest economies-China, Japan, India and Russia-and a number of smaller nations with growing economic weight. The growth of China, in particular, has become a defining feature of the world's political landscape. Images of Asia in Western popular culture tend to support this vision of progress and attainment-the futuristic cityscapes of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo suffuse Hollywood, from Bladerunner to Ghost in the Shell. This outward projection of success, however, masks striking examples of inequality, exploitation and control. From the historical erasure of mass killings in Indonesia to the 'bargained authoritarianism' of political protest in China, Asia is littered with examples of suppression and control, bolstered by what are often state-controlled media outlets. It is within this space that the study of crime, media and culture can make a vital contribution. To date, however, Foucault's depiction of criminology as an 'elaborate alibi to justify the exercise of power' (Cohen 1998: 5) is perhaps a more appropriate characterisation. As others have demonstrated (Lee and Laidler 2013), criminology in Asia is overwhelmingly administrative, concerned with the correct categorisation of crime and its response; often allied with the law, social work and administration of government rather than as an independent field of social science. As a result, the cultural, critical and sociological roots that animate much criminological scholarship in the United States and Europe have thus far struggled to find fertile soil. In this Special Issue we make the case for an alternative way of 'doing criminology' in Asia, as we showcase research studies within the strong critical tradition in media and cultural studies, sociology and film studies, that deal specifically with themes of power, politics, criminalisation and postcolonialism. While in recent years there has been a firm recognition among criminologists, sociologists and media scholars for the need to move beyond knowledge created in the global North, production of this apparently 'global' knowledge remains clustered in a relatively narrow range of geographical sites. In this Special Issue we contribute to a broader research agenda focused on 'criminology of the periphery' (Lee and Laidler 2013; Laidler and Lee 2016) and 'Southern criminology' (Carrington et al 2016) that seeks to challenge and disrupt these ...
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.
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