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Focusing on the anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong, this paper employs the concepts of doing and undoing gender to investigate the barriers that female frontline protesters encountered and the strategies they adopted. It shows that stereotypes linking high-risk activism and physical prowess with masculinity, the association of the frontline with high risks of arrest and injuries, and physical confrontation with the police meant that the frontline was marked discursively as a male domain. However, the leaderless characteristic of the movement facilitated women crossing this discursively marked gender boundary. Once on the frontline, women took different paths. Some began to do gender by taking on tasks that were considered less risky and more compatible with femininity because of the gendered interactions amongst protesters. On the other hand, women with experience, and access to social support and mentorship gained the confidence they needed to take on tasks that were seen as 'masculine', and thus undoing the gender stereotype that women lacked the capacity for frontline protest. The findings illustrate the continuous challenge women face as they are held accountable for their gender in social movements. At the same time, they also suggest that women's doing of gender in social movements is not inevitable, but contingent on social contexts and interactions. Certain factors such as the leaderless characteristic of a movement and peer support and mentorship can facilitate gender boundary crossing and neutralize gendered interactions. These, in turn, allow gender to be undone in social movements and promote women's participation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines women's movement between sex work and intimate economies, with a specific focus on how non-Chinese women in Hong Kong leverage intimacy as a means of managing legal and socio-economic precarity within various institutional and individual constraints. To capture the diversity of women's experiences, we use the term 'intimate-material exchanges' to broadly refer to compensation or material support provided in exchange for sexually intimate relations. We ground our analysis of the interactional processes involved in intimate-material exchanges in 39 interviews with ethnically non-Chinese women and men in Hong Kong. For the women in this study, intimate-material exchanges were shaped by migration and distinguished by pragmatism, strategy and intentionality that involved adapting, improvising and experimenting with sexual scripts in an ambiguous legal space in order to derive maximum material benefit. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of migration and intimate-material exchanges for sex worker rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender norms, roles and relations differentially affect women, men, and non-binary individuals' vulnerability to disease. Outbreak response measures also have immediate and long-term gendered effects. However, gender-based analysis of outbreaks and responses is limited by lack of data and little integration of feminist analysis within global health scholarship. Recognising these barriers, this paper applies a gender matrix methodology, grounded in feminist political economy approaches, to evaluate the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and response in four case studies: China, Hong Kong, Canada, and the UK. Through a rapid scoping of documentation of the gendered effects of the outbreak, it applies the matrix framework to analyse findings, identifying common themes across the case studies: financial discrimination, crisis in care, and unequal risks and secondary effects. Results point to transnational structural conditions which put women on the front lines of the pandemic at work and at home while denying them health, economic and personal security – effects that are exacerbated where racism and other forms of discrimination intersect with gender inequities. Given that women and people living at the intersections of multiple inequities are made additionally vulnerable by pandemic responses, intersectional feminist responses should be prioritised at the beginning of any crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural studies, as a cultural and political re-articulation of common sense, knowledge and community practices, aims at opening up new cultural space for criticisms, reflections and action. Originating from the women's movement and later flourishing in the academy as well, feminism espouses similar aims to cultural studies. Both cultural studies and feminist/gender studies have a strong sense of intervening into everyday life politics. This paper is an attempt to discuss how feminism and cultural studies interface with each other, largely based on examples of gender-related everyday life politics taken from the feminist movement in Hong Kong. It will examine issues concerning the conflict of consumption and female subjectivities, the reconceptualization of home and housewives, and the representation of everyday life for women and history writing. It is argued that by blurring, negotiating or deconstructing the boundary or division between positions, identities and domains—such as subject and object, housewives and workers, private and public, personal and political, consumption and production—the re-articulation of knowledge about 'victim', 'exploitation', 'home' and 'history' in the feminist movement will not only provide the movement with new impetus and insight to reconsider its strategies in fighting for more cultural, social and economic space for women and other marginal groups at large in Hong Kong, but will also 'metabolize' the newly developed discipline of cultural studies in Hong Kong by providing a platform to strengthen the dynamic arm of cultural studies education and research. Based on her feminist and teaching experiences in Hong Kong, the author has highlighted activism and pedagogy as the two important dimensions of feminism and cultural studies in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumption is an integral part of contemporary capitalistic society. By means of a textual analysis of letters to the editor of a women's magazine in Hong Kong, as well as in-depth interviews with readers and editors, this paper examines how women's cultural consumption creates, constructs and circulates women's identities. Results reveal that the processes of identification can be constructed on three equivalent consumption levels. Firstly, women readers identify certain "imaginary communities" through reading the magazine, and by modeling the behaviors and styles of the communities they feel they are sustaining their relationship with them. Secondly, women identify with an idealized community-constructed beauty and seek to consume products which collectively suggests this idealized beauty for them. Thirdly, women regard the "communities" as providing shelter for rapport and comfort from the emotional and relational problems of real life. In sum, structured identification-consumption has shaped working class women into an identity, which conforms to society's dominant capitalist logic. Despite these findings, however, there are always a few women who attempt to seek alternative lifestyles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents and evaluates an approach to teaching practicing social workers in Hong Kong qualitative research from a feminist perspective. Using a problem-based format, graduate social workers in Hong Kong were taught critical appraisal skills while learning to do qualitative interview research in their practices. While the problem-based design supports models of adult learning and is a successful method for teaching new research skills to a diverse student body, linking epistemology with methodology and practice was a challenge in the cross-cultural context for both students and instructor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the women's movement in Hong Kong in the context of the political transformation of the 1980s and 1990s. This period is significant in that it witnesses the unfolding of two related political processes, namely, de- colonization and the transition of sovereignty to the People's Republic of China. These two processes have a great impact on the women's movement, as they do on other aspects of social development. Also, this article relies on in-depth interviews of twelve core members of local women's (and mostly feminist) organizations that have appeared since the mid-1980s. Hong Kong witnessed the emergence of a distinct local identity and culture in the 1980s, following the maturation of the first postwar generation of Chinese who have grown up in an unprecedented period of social and political isolation from mainland China. This process of decolonization and localization had a great impact on the women's movement, shaping its nature and direction. It is claimed that the demands for greater liberalization and democratization of the polity, in response to the threat of state authoritarianism signified by 1997, have resulted in deep political cleavages in society.

Based on data collected through interviewing b-girls (breakdancing girls) and participant observation of b-girling, we analyse gender inequalities confronting women who practise breakdancing in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, document these women's struggles against gender inequality, and illustrate that these inequalities and struggles differ somewhat from those found in the US context and even from those found in studies of women who practise rap music. We outline the contours of a Chinese hip-hop feminism and suggest adopting it to investigate the local specificities of hip-hop-based gender politics in Chinese societies. We find that culture is a key part of the matrix of domination on which Chinese hip-hop-based gender politics focuses, but that racism is not. We discuss how such local specificities pose difficulties for the internationalisation of hip-hop feminism. We also construct a tentative signpost for understanding how a feminist assessment of hip-hop based on research on breaking differs from that based on research on rap. The signpost, which sums up the central findings of current studies and the present one, is "remaking hip-hop, redoing gender": the remaking of hip-hop in a way that is fairer for women and the redoing of gender by b-girls for themselves, their audiences and society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist geography research in East Asia is weak, although Women's and Gender Studies as an interdisciplinary field in this region is strong. This is true of Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. In this article, we examine how studies on women started in Taiwan and Hong Kong and have become institutionalized in the last two and a half decades. In this period, courses and research proliferated in several disciplines as a result of gender equity policies stipulated by governments, as well as the increasing number of female staff in the faculties of humanities and social sciences. Several reasons account for slow progress in the development of feminist geography: the male-dominated structure of geography departments in both countries; an emphasis on the scientific as opposed to social scientific nature of geography; and a general lack of feminist consciousness among geographers who tend to study issues at a macro level. In addition, the small proportion of women teaching at the university level has also led to setbacks in the development of feminist geography. While there are a few courses that incorporate gender perspectives and lectures on feminist geography have been given as part of other geography modules, gender blindness continues to prevail in teaching and research in human geography. This article, however, sees two recent factors that may help to advance feminist geography in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Firstly, the number of female faculty members and graduate students has increased, thus providing momentum in the appreciation of gender geography. Secondly, Chinese-speaking countries in East Asia have played active roles in internationalizing the discipline, thus connecting themselves with feminist scholars abroad, and increasing opportunities to engage in collaborative work. The IGU Commission on Gender and Geography, which encompasses a diversity of world views, is one avenue for facilitating this trend in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]