Finding a voice,fighting for rights: the emergence of the transgender movement in Hong Kong 1

Abstract

This paper is intended to provide a space for reflection on Hong Kong’s transgender movement at its current stage, with particular reference to the objectives and activities of the Hong Kong Transgender Equality and Acceptance Movement (‘TEAM’). Established in 2002, TEAM was the first organized group of transgender people and supporters in Hong Kong. First, the paper examines the emergence of the transgender movement in Hong Kong, situating the stated objectives of TEAM in the broader social, legal and political context in Hong Kong. It then considers the successes and limitations of TEAM’s activities to date, measured against its objectives. Finally, it examines why Hong Kong’s transgender community has not yet fought for the right to legal recognition of their gender identity, as have transgender individuals and transgender movements in many other countries around the world. In the Asia‐Pacific region these include Australia, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand. Through interviews with members of TEAM, the paper questions whether legal recognition is indeed a concern and/or priority for Hong Kong’s transgender community, and, if so, what prevents Hong Kong transgender people from claiming their right to legal recognition in the courts or through the political process.     

From passivity to a new border-crossing subjectivity

Abstract

1997 as a global media spectacle about Hong Kong’s handover of its sovereignty from Britain to China is now almost forgotten; yet Hong Kong is still caught between the politics of time and memory too complex to be captured under simple post‐colonialist notion such as ‘hybridity’. This paper tries to put in perspective a (post‐)colonial cultural politics of counter‐memory in Hong Kong cinema by investigating its decades‐long investment in a sub‐genre built around the motif of undercover‐cop. Specifically, the example of the blockbuster Infernal Affairs series is analyzed in details, with particular attention to its innovative plot, to show how the ‘structure of feeling’ about Hong Kong’s political fate is embedded in the films underpinning their local box‐office success. The allegorical reading of the film series attempted in this paper also connects the discussion about the ‘political unconscious’ of Hong Kong, now and in the past, with the wider problem of how the future political subjectivity of Hong Kong will take shape.     

Daejanggeum as ‘affective mobilization’: lessons for (transnational) popular culture and civil society

Abstract

(Transnationalized) popular culture and (global) social movement are often seen as unrelated, if not mutually exclusive. Popular culture is entertaining, consensual but trivial; social movement is serious, idealized and oppositional. Yet the WTO Ministerial Conference, held in Hong Kong in December 2005, saw the Korean protesters' adoption of the theme‐song of a popular Korean television drama, Daejanggeum, as their protest strategy. The Korean protesters had been framed by mainstream Hong Kong media as ‘violent rioters’, but the inclusion of the drama elements helped the protesters advance their cause by gaining instant rapport with the local Hong Kong news media and public/fans (of Korean wave). The impact of celebrity involvement in the WTO was also about an immediate transferal of fan affect, from celebrities to the movement, and to the Korean protesters. This ‘affect mobilization’, becomes important as movement capital, as the effective manipulation of emotions is a key to ‘getting the message across’ as movement strategies. The case of WTO Hong Kong reveals the possibility of a symbiotic relationship between transnational popular culture and globalized social movements. The ‘use’ of (Korean) popular cultural products enriches and complicates the affect subjectivities within the social movement, and arranges fan affect into multiple layers of emotion hierarchies/spheres. It remains to be seen, however, if this would set a precedence to protesters in future WTO rounds as they are keen to mobilize their causes in different locales. More research is needed, too, to demonstrate if the success of the Korean wave fosters the emergence of a transnational Asian ‘public’ or civil society. Yet, for now, the success of Korean protesters in the mobilization of Hong Kong public's affect epitomizes the hegemonic flow, or soft power, of Korean TV dramas in the Asian popular.     

Mundi: articulating a post-Umbrella common(s)

ABSTRACT

This paper shares the experiences of an emergent collective of young intellectuals in Hong Kong and its recent project, Mundi, which consists of publication, activist research and communal transmission of knowledge. The project negotiates the notion and practice of “common” at the limit, from within the historical experience of Hong Kong, between academia and public intellectuals, global universalism and local particularism, and colonial knowledge and everyday urban practice. Affected by an intense desire to analyse and theorise the reality of Hong Kong, Mundi engages in a long process of decolonising knowledge production. The paper also explores how Mundi responds to the demand of the present post-Umbrella Hong Kong situation by problematising and re-articulating the common.     

Responding to Hong Kong’s political crisis: moralist activism amongst youth

ABSTRACT

Discourses of morality are prevalent in contemporary Hong Kong youth activism. This paper suggests that this moralist disposition is the product of youth frustrations towards Hong Kong’s political crisis, whereby the power gap between civil society and the government renders the former incapable of exerting substantial influence over the governance of the city. Rather than ascribe the cause of this power imbalance solely to government policies, this paper reveals that civil society also contributed towards the making of this political crisis. By reviewing the citizen-led pro-democracy movement throughout the decades, it is shown that civil society has been ineffective in implementing political reforms because its actors and organisations harbour a political subjectivity that prioritises economic considerations over democratic aspirations, and are thus inclined to compromise with the government to preserve economic stability than to demand for political reforms. As a result, contemporary youth activists describe Hong Kong civil society as “uncaring” and lacking in moral commitment towards realising democratic reforms that will facilitate the development of a just society. Seeking to reconfigure such political attitudes that currently prevail in civil society, youth activists refashion themselves into political actors embodying a form of moral personhood that embraces notions of responsibility and of wanting to do good for the city, to show that another way of being politically engaged in Hong Kong is possible.     

Beyond the crisis: the “chaotic formula” of Hong Kong cinema

Abstract

Hong Kong's film industry has been living through and beyond the 1997 handover to China. Along a complicated socio-economic and cultural heritage, the city's “crisis cinema” successfully milked takeover fears for an anarchic display of showmanship. Local filmmaking conditions, popular narratives and aesthetics from that time can be identified as ingredients in a “chaotic formula” that instigated Hong Kong cinema's “Golden Age.” Unlike other film industries, which point to their disaster centres in a search or celebration of national identity, Hong Kong survived at a fragile historic juncture largely by sailing around the cliffs of political affront and resorting to metaphorical speech instead. Yet, following the handover, the film industry has retired its previous attitudes about itself and the future; it has integrated a new “China factor” and riddled cinema with contradictory statements about the “condition” of Hong Kong. System failure, madness and identity theft in crime stories appear alongside celebratory historicism, cultural allegiance and escapist spectacle, especially in Hong Kong-China co-productions. This paper follows the evolution of the crime genre along general dynamics and transformations of the formula from the 1980s, past the turbulent 1990s and into recent postcolonial Hong Kong, in which the inability to formulate a new crisis, or the resolution of the previous one, has put cinema itself into crisis.     

Asia's Chinese name

Abstract

Although the mother-tongue of some 90% of the population in Hong Kong is Cantonese, schools and universities in Hong Kong have witnessed the downgrading and even abandoning of Cantonese as a medium of instruction (MOI) in classrooms. For universities, this process is accelerated by the discourses of “internationalization.” For primary and secondary schools, the main compelling force is parents’ anxiety over their children's future. This paper discusses the social context in which the forsaking of Cantonese as a medium of instruction has occurred, and also the unintended consequences of silencing the mother-tongue of most of the Hong Kong students (and teachers) in secondary schools and universities.     

The ‘battle of Hong Kong’ and implications for Asian social movements

Abstract

The Hong Kong Declaration, which came out of the WTO ministerial that was held in Hong Kong from 13th to 18th December 2005, was a victorious outcome for transnational corporations and the major powers. They gained successes in all negotiations – services, Non‐Agricultural Market Access (NAMA) and even in agriculture – although governments and neoliberal pundits declare otherwise. Initially the WTO secretariat and developed countries such as US and EU had downplayed the objective of the Hong Kong ministerial. However, with some concessions from major developing countries such as Brazil and India, the WTO was able come to such conclusions. This is a reflection of the fact that developing countries are becoming more immersed in the neoliberal economic order. On the other hand, global social movements, led by 1500 Koreans, were active from 11th December until the end of the ministerial and even beyond, in mobilizing protests and other anti‐WTO activities. Although movements failed to ‘derail’ the ministerial, they were also successful in many ways. First of all, they gained worldwide attention through militant and diverse non‐violent activities. In addition, Asian movements were able to strengthen regional solidarity from the various joint activities conducted in Hong Kong. Also because Asian movements were in the forefront, they rose to become a very important part of the global movement against imperialism and neoliberal globalization. Just as Asian economies come to play a larger role in the global order, Asian movements also need to exert themselves into a more prominent role in the continuing struggle against the WTO and the neoliberal regime.     

Gender and everyday evasions: moving with Cantopop 1

Abstract

In this paper, gender negotiations in the production, musical forms, and consumption of Cantopop are taken as a cultural exemplar for a social and political imagination of ambivalence, which seems to be shaping popular life in Hong Kong. It has three focal points – musical forms and expressions of Cantopop (style, lyrics, iconography, affect), gender politics, and ‘everyday‐ness’ – which converge to mark a notable cultural logic performing an enlarging sense of ambivalence about a city that has seen a shift from high moments of economic prosperity to the current postcolonial uncertainties. In other words, Cantopop signals a shift in our sensibilities, a redrawing of our affective map of everyday life after an important historical and politico‐administrative shift. In a sense then, this paper explores Hong Kong's changing identity within the sight and sound of popular culture, by specifically tracing some of the ways in which gender politics is inscribed, coded, negotiated, performed, or simply flirtingly posed on the surface of popular culture.     

A regional gateway: Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong, 1990–2005

Abstract

In popular culture, Hong Kong is probably the most “Japanese city” outside Japan. It is home to a wide variety of Japanese popular cultural products and a regional base to many of the Japanese music and television companies who expanded their operations in the city in the early 1990s. Hong Kong's emerging middle class, especially the younger generation, has enthusiastically accepted Japanese contemporary culture and lifestyle, making the city one of the biggest destinations for Japan's cultural exports. Based on fieldwork surveys and interviews, this paper looks at the organizational aspect of popular culture during the heydays of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong in the 1990s and early 2000s. The investigation focuses on the marketing strategies and promotional efforts used by agents of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong and the role of popular culture piracy in this process. Beyond analyzing the Japanese case, the paper introduces a new framework to examine the transnational expansion of popular cultures across markets in East and Southeast Asia, highlighting the role of companies and promoters in this process.     

Johnnie To's “northern expedition:” from Milkyway Image to Drug War

Abstract

After the Regulations on the Administration of Movies came into force in 2002, Johnnie To became famous for sticking with the Hong Kong market while Hong Kong filmmakers rushed north. In Drug War, his 50th film, he decided to bring his unique genre to the Mainland for the first time. Drug War was the first Johnnie To gangster film to be shot entirely in the Mainland. Despite its outstanding box office record in the Mainland, some Johnnie To fans would lament that his typical style is missing in Drug War, a film that has become “realistic.” This paper argues that Johnnie To's “northern expedition.” backed up by a tradition of translations between business and pleasure, has to be interpreted against the backdrop of his production company Milkyway Image (HK) Ltd. Johnnie To, as a migrant crossing the border, brought with him the long tradition of cultural translations from Milkyway Image, which acted as a “seed of the untranslatable” in Homi Bhabha's term. It was this untranslatability of Milkyway-cum-Hong Kong flavour that distinguished To from other Hong Kong directors who were assimilated into the Mainland market as a simple mélange. To capture the rich inter-textual allusions to not only Milkyway Image but also to Hong Kong in Drug War helps one to understand how Hong Kong cinema can move on in the age of Chinese cinema.     

On the continuing necessity of anti-Americanism

Abstract

In Hong Kong, even though the Bill of Rights Ordinance (the localized version of ICCPR), Sex Discrimination Ordinance and a series of legal reforms (such as the cancellation of marital exemption of rape and the recognition of sexual discrimination in criminal law) were enacted and introduced respectively since the 1990s, gender/sexual discrimination in the legal discourse still persists; for example: Chinese customary law which only recognizes the male’s right to build small houses in the New Territories remains an exception under the Sex Discrimination Ordinance; the government insists on not tabling an anti‐sexual‐orientation discrimination bill; the right to same sex marriage/partnership is still absent from any legal‐political agenda; and so on. Some politicians and academics argue that any attempt to transplant a Euro‐American individual‐centric perspective of gender/sexual equality/justice will violate the Han‐Chinese culture of harmony. In the paper, I will adopt a critical perspective in examining the above argument and examine why harmony politics becomes a meta‐narrative in Han‐Chinese socio‐legal culture and how human nature/subjectivity is re‐constituted in such a context. I will further argue that a culture should always be meticulously and critically represented and investigated in order to reproduce ‘gender/sexual justice’. I will also investigate the possibility of scrutinizing and exploring the spaces of resistance within the Han‐Chinese socio‐legal culture in Hong Kong, where foreign theory of gender/sexual justice/equality and related legal reforms can be engaged to politicize current discrimination and suppression.     

Archiving queer feelings in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article argues for the revitalization of a productive tension between ‘queer’ and ‘theory’ and underscores its necessity for a study of ‘local queer theory.’ While there is an apparent lack of academic queer theory in Hong Kong, there are numerous examples of writings that advance theoretical positions, albeit in unfamiliar guises. The article analyzes three examples of queer writings by Hong Kong authors, penned between 1984 and 2000. Focusing on the texts’ archival effect and affective expression, the analysis demonstrates that these writings form an archive of queer feelings. As a repository of the discomfort and anxiety that are constitutive of queer lives, these writings can offer fruitful interventions into current theoretical debates. The article concludes with a call for more creative and irreverent – in short, queerer – ways of localizing the global phenomenon of queer theory.     

Associative identity politics: unmasking the multi‐layered formation of queer male selves in 1990s Japan

Abstract

This paper discusses one way to articulate queer male identity politics in 1990s Japan through Fran Martin’s conceptualization of the ‘mask’ (Martin 2003 Martin, Fran. 2003. Situating sexualities: queer presentation in Taiwanese fiction, film and public culture, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.  [Google Scholar]). By comparatively examining two key Japanese ‘gay’ coming‐out narratives, the paper shows how a reading of queer subject formation in the decade through a metaphor of ‘masking’ can shed light on the complex scenarios functioning beneath the surface of identity politics. I argue that the notion of ‘masking’ is useful in reading the multiple axes incorporated into queer identity formation in Japan in the context of globalization. The paper further refutes any reductive claim that queer identity in Japan can be understood in terms of essentialist epistemological binaries, such as global/local, West/non‐West, and Japan/abroad.     

Trees and umbrellas: a parallel reading of the Istanbul Gezi Park Movement and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

This paper makes a parallel reading of two recent urban protest movements: the 2013 Istanbul Gezi Park Movement (GPM) and the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (UM). As regional centers at both ends of Asia, Istanbul and Hong Kong might at f?rst sight appear to be incongruent cities for comparison. Istanbul’s recent past has been defined by contrasting opinions about the city’s post-imperial identity, while Hong Kong’s recent past has been shaped by competing visions around the city’s post-colonial status. Directing attention to the striking parallels between the GPM and UM in terms of the nature of the events themselves, the profile of the participants and opponents, the government response that they received, and the cultural sensitivities concerning the questions of belonging and identity that they rekindled, the paper argues that comparative studies of the new urban protest movements would provide significant insights for discerning the dynamics of emerging illiberal democracies across the world.     

Editorial introduction

The city-state of Hong Kong had a unique postcolonial birth in 1997, when it was handed over to the motherland, China, after the expiration of a hundred year lease on Hong Kong held by the British. In this paper, I suggest that Hong Kong's unique attainment of postcoloniality, and the evolution of her subsequent complicated relationship with Mainland China, leads to a deep sense of anxiety in Hong Kong's identity as a global city. This anxiety, I further argue, is mapped on to the physical landscape of Hong Kong. By analysing the portrayal of Tin Shui Wai, a marginal and isolated area of development in Hong Kong, and the contrasting depiction of public and private spaces in Ann Hui's 2009 film Night and Fog, I attempt to explore the Freudian “uncanny,” the return of the repressed, which constantly threatens to erupt. In the concluding section of the paper, I use Kristevian theories of abjection and the spatialization of identity to argue that the figure of Ling, the Mainland mother in Hui's film, brings to the fore Hong Kong's anxiety about its postcolonial identity and relationship with China. She epitomizes the othered self, the return of the repressed, the foreigner who must necessarily be expelled (through murder) from within the nation-space of Hong Kong.     

Spectral city: San Francisco as Pacific Rim city and counter‐cultural contado

Abstract

San Francisco, since its global takeoff in the Gold Rush Days and long‐standing trafficking in Bohemian, socialist, queer, and left‐leaning energies in and beyond the Beat era of the 1960s, has a complicated global/local history of trying to disentangle its city‐space and urban imaginary from the Greco‐Roman will‐to‐supremacy that would turn California into a frontier settlement of Asian/Pacific domination and US‐framed empire. Forces of social becoming like the Beats and post‐Beat hippies as well as more experimental authors like Jack Spicer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, and Bob Kaufman helped to forge a different literary‐social vision of San Francisco and the Pacific Rim city as a porous community of transnational innovation and outer‐national becoming. This paper will invoke some literary and film texts from Howl and Tripmaster Monkey to Vertigo to Margaret Cho stand‐up performances as well as some geopolitical studies, such as Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco and City Light Press’s Reclaiming San Francisco to substantiate this double vision of San Francisco as global/local US site of (a) imperial ratification and (b) counter‐orientalist deformation.     

Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture

Taking action cinema as an example, this paper outlines a historical approach to the transnational study of globally popular cultural forms. Action cinema has long had a complex economy in which Hollywood not only trades stars, styles and narratives with the hybrid culture of Hong Kong cinema itself, but draws on a vast ‘direct to tape’ industry significantly based in East Asia. The paper outlines a Hong Kong‐based approach to two earlier phases in the history of action: the ‘international co‐production’ as an industrially innovative form (1973–85), and the golden age of the ‘direct to tape’ industry enabled by the rapid spread of video technology (1985–93). Focusing on the latter, it suggests that the global uptake by filmmakers of a ‘contact’ narrative and an ethic of emulation taken from Hong Kong cinema allowed direct‐to‐video action to address issues of social class in emotionally complex ways.     

Imagining accidental fetal citizens: pregnant Mainland women and the cultural politics of birthright citizenship

This essay looks at the mobility of pregnant Mainland women in Hong Kong to expose the reverberations of the SAR government's immigration policies relating to cross-border birth tourism. Pregnant Mainland women and their children (fetuses), as emergent social subjects, embody conflict and the negotiation between population governance and economic benefits. The government denies pregnant Mainland women the right to give birth in Hong Kong based on their non-eligible status while admitting their children to be born in Hong Kong on the grounds that their children meet Hong Kong's future demand for population renewal, in this way boosting the development of childbirth tourism. However, the localism, which has had an extensive influence on Hong Kong local society in recent years, has rejected the SAR government's “population renewal” imaginary by suggesting its own “locust imaginary.” The government's acceptance and the local's exclusion of the population flow between China and Hong Kong imply distinct cross-border subject imaginations. Only by contextualizing and critically analyzing the various othering identities such as the non-eligible or locusts can we better understand the cultural politics of Hong Kong birthright citizenship over recent years.