Search

The last decade has witnessed the emergence and consolidation of new and established gay cities in East and Southeast Asia, in particular, the sexualisation of the Singapore city-state, the commerce-led boom of queer Bangkok, the rise of middle-class gay consumer cultures in Manila and Hong Kong, and the proliferation of underground LGBT scenes in Shanghai and Beijing. In the West, scholarships on urban gay centres such as San Francisco, New York and London focus on the paradigms of ethnicity (Sinfield, 1996), gentrification (Bell and Binnie, 2004) and creativity (Florida, 2002). Mapping the rise of commercial gay neighbourhoods by combining the history of ghettos and its post-closet geography of community villages, these studies chart a teleological model of sexual minority rights, group recognition and homonormative mainstream assimilation. Instead of defaulting to these specifically North American and European paradigms and debates, this paper attempts to formulate a different theoretical framework to understand the rise of the queer Asian city. Providing case studies on Singapore and Hong Kong, and deploying an interdisciplinary approach including critical creative industrial studies and cultural studies this paper examines the intersections across the practices of gay clusters, urban renewal and social movement. It asks: if queer Asian sexual cultures are characterised by disjunctive modernities, how do such modernities shape their spatial geographies and produce the material specificities of each city? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a relatively overlooked aspect of social polarisation in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taipei: its gender implications. The transformation of these cities, from industrial to post-industrial cities, has been accompanied by a transition from Chinese patriarchal society to modern society. A dual gendered structure is emerging—a regime of labour intimacy (RLI) under state regulations and a technomuscular capitalism (TMC), presenting itself as a competitive labour market. Migrant workers are introduced to compensate for the loss of household labour, but the wage gap between them and their local counterparts may be controlled. The occupational segmentation and income disparity between men and women are improving because of the upgrade of women’s status. The model of bound RLIs and open TMCs emphasises a more contextually situated construction in which state migration policies and changing gender status play an intermediate role in the division of labour between work and home. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) has been the flagship labouratory of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and open-door policy and the forerunner of China’s capitalist transformation. The initiation of the Shenzhen SEZ was driven by the imperative of political and economic survival along the state hierarchy and was informed by the international practices of export processing zones (EPZs). Shenzhen’s capitalist fundamentals, such as the commodification of land and labour, were largely established through imitating its ‘big master’ Hong Kong across the border. However, Shenzhen’s policy learning style has gradually shifted from laissez-faire Hong Kong to authoritarian Singapore, propelled by the aspiration, shared among policy-making party élites across China’s administrative hierarchy, of perpetuating the single-party rule. Theoretically, this paper demonstrates how policy mobility is shaped path-dependently by the pre-structured institutional/ideological regime, in what ways the idiosyncratic geographical/historical conjuncture matters, and why political representation and participation are crucial to policy selection and mutation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]