Sexual minority expatriates as agent of change? How foreign same-sex couples won the recognition of same-sex relationship for immigration purposes in Hong Kong.

Most previous research on sexual minority migrants focused on those who move from places where there are fewer legal rights for sexual minorities to where there are more. This paper distinctively fills a research gap through a focus on a subset of sexual minority migrants: sexual minority expatriates. It presents a five-year ethnographic case study of a judicial review in Hong Kong QT v Director of Immigration and other lesbian and gay couples who moved to Hong Kong, and business organisations that advocate for immigration equality. First, the analysis highlights that both subjective cultural assumptions and objective legal conditions play an important role in sexual minority expatriates' assessment of gay-friendliness of the work destination. Second, this paper uncovers the agency of gay and lesbian expatriates' impact on the local legal sexual landscape and illustrates how sexual citizenship could be reclaimed by relying on the homonormative logic that the same-sex couples are productive labour and beneficial to the economy. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of sexual minority migration by theorising how sexual minority migrants may not only be constrained by the legal and social environments in the migration destination, but they may also actively change and shape them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]