Reconfiguring Queer Asia as Disjunctive Modernities: Notes on the Subjective Production of Working-Class Gay Men in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Informed by the framing of queer Asia as disjunctive modernities, this article argues for the analytic relevance of class to Hong Kong queer culture amid proliferating sexual progress. Based on ethnographic research concerning a support group for middle-aged, working-class gay men in a non-governmental organization (NGO), the findings demonstrate how their understanding and experiences of class were displaced into the culturally specific discourses of aging and generational difference. By examining the ideological work underlying three sets of local discourses (namely, generational experiences, urban redevelopment, and industrial transformation), the analysis reveals a temporal logic of class relation that governed the informants’ class displacements and, in turn, safeguarded the reproduction of inequalities in their lives. This article concludes by highlighting the interferential potential of class for understanding the queer cultural and subjective formations in other East Asian societies that went through similar processes of postwar economic development and class formation.

KEYWORDS:

• Hong Kong
• queer Asia as disjunctive modernities
• social class
• gay men
• sexual progress
• East Asian modernization
• compressed modernity
• ethnography
• qualitative research

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at a seminar organized by the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (March 22, 2018, Hong Kong). I thank Eric Florence for the invitation to present and Benny Lu for being the discussant who offered constructive comments. I also thank Jerry He Xiyao for his editorial suggestions. I moreover wish to thank the participants in my study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. With the notable exceptions of the work by Benedicto (2014).

2. Following Ortner’s definition, my usage of “displacement” is not to be confused with the privileging of class over other categories of social difference; rather, it makes an effort to show that “[t]hey are always already mutually implicated in one another” (Bettie, 2014, p. 49).

3. As of 2016, on average men in Hong Kong are living up to 81.3 years and women 87.3 years (Senthilingam, 2018).

4. For example, Kong’s (2012, 2014) oral history project of Hong Kong gay men over the age of 60.