Hong Kong’s lesbian and transgender lesbian communities exist within a specific convergence of pressures: a Chinese cultural framework that structures family obligation and gender expectation in particular ways, a postcolonial urban context that is neither straightforwardly Western nor traditionally mainland Chinese, and a city whose relationship to queer visibility has been shaped by its own distinct political and social history.
This ethnographic study documents that specificity. Drawing on queer theory, feminist sociology, postcolonial analysis, and urban studies, it centres the subjectivities of lesbians and transgender lesbians in Hong Kong—how identity forms here, how community gets built, what it means to navigate desire and selfhood within these particular structures.
The work’s value lies partly in what it refuses to assume. Chinese-context lesbian experience has its own logics, shaped by Confucian family structures, the weight of filial obligation, the particular dynamics of Hong Kong’s colonial and postcolonial history, and urban conditions unlike those that have generated most of the existing literature on lesbian community formation. The ethnographic method keeps that specificity grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction.
Published as part of Hong Kong University Press’s Queer Asia series, it sits within a body of work explicitly committed to documenting queer lives outside the Western Anglophone tradition—a tradition that has too often treated itself as the universal baseline. For researchers in lesbian studies, queer Asian studies, postcolonial theory, and the sociology of urban queer community, this is primary documentation of lives and communities that have been largely absent from the scholarly record.
Details
| ISBN: 9789888083022 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: LGBT Studies/Social Sciences; Lesbian Studies |
| Subject(s): Social Science |
| Publication Date: 2011-12-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Hong Kong University Press |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 194 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: |
| Book_ID: 106263 |