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This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which 'leftover' women navigate legal and social discrimination. 'Leftover women' is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual 'leftover' women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: 'buying a licence to be deviant' and 'identity-hopping'. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. 'Buying a licence to be deviant' refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. 'Identity-hopping' is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the studies of Japanese society and culture undertaken by Hong Kong-based sociologists and scholars in related disciplines. It presents information on research projects funded by the Research Grants Council, Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) journal articles, authored and edited books, book chapters, non-SSCI and non-A&HCI journal articles, as well as master and doctoral theses written by scholars and graduate students associated with Hong Kong's major universities. It is found that the main topics of research are Japan's capitalist development and corporate growth, meanings and social ramifications of traditional and popular culture, education, gender, and marriage, as well as aspects of work and employment, whereas the major research methods include document analysis, ethnography, and in-depth interviews. The limited amount of research and the preoccupation with economic development and popular culture reflect in part Hong Kong's unique political conditions and the government's indifference to the pursuit of social and political policy analysis. In recent years, the growth of academic exchanges between scholars in Hong Kong, Japan, and other East Asian regions and the heightened emphasis by university administrators on academic research will hopefully bring about advancements in such academic endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Among the Sui people of rural southwestern China, descent-group loyalties are closely tied to linguistic features. In every village, long-term dialect contact occurs between local villagers and in-marrying women from different clans, yet most speakers maintain their original dialect features to a high degree. The present study conducts ethnographic interviews to more deeply understand why such behavior occurs. Most current, practice-based models of identity tend to emphasize dynamic, flexible, individualistic choices - an approach that suits variation on many levels in many societies. However, to understand the descent-group loyalties particular to indigenous, non-Western, clan-based cultures like Sui, a more tempered, culturally sensitive model is necessary. Speakers show a deep sense of stability, permanence, and collective loyalty to communities of descent , (re)produced through stable linguistic expressions: acts of loyalty . The study also highlights the use of indigenous minorities' own categories (place, toponyms, lineage) rather than non-indigenous categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]