Towards an Alternative Queer Historiography of Hong Kong: Class as Method

• In Event: East Asian Queer Cultures Part I: Inter-Referencing the Trans/Local Communities of Hong Kong and South Korea

Abstract

This paper intends to supplement a recently proposed theoretical paradigm, which reconsiders queerness in Asia as characterized by non-Western disjunctive modernities and non-teleological model of sexual progress (Yue and Leung 2015). By utilizing my ethnographic engagements and life history interviews with middle-aged professional-middle-class and working-class gay men in Hong Kong, this paper raises questions that describe a class-informed queer historigraphy of the city and attempts to generate theoretical relevance to subject concerned.

As generally perceived, the queer culture in the Hong Kong began to emerge in the 1980s and 90s, the period that saw the decriminalization of homosexuality and the formations of same-sex identity in consumption spaces and the civil society. Resembling to other East Asian territories, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and also Singapore, Hong Kong also underwent rapid economic restructurings during the similar time in history, when intergenerational upwardly mobility was high due to the expansion of professional and managerial sectors in the occupational composition.

Taking into accounts that some queer people not only became legal subjects, but also the so-called new middle-class citizens, through the coming-of-age narratives of my informants, this paper articulates the ways in which hierarchies and differentiations among queer subjects were diachronically shaped through the history of social change. By juxtaposing two historical trajectories, namely the queer cultural formations and the economic transformations in Hong Kong society, it addresses how an alternative modernity might be envisioned as a theoretical framework that disentangles queer and class subjectivities in Hong Kong and other inter-Asian contexts.

Author

• Ting Fai Yu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong