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Identity and Sexuality Formation Among Young Hong Kong Lesbians

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Identity and Sexuality Formation Among Young Hong Kong Lesbians Lingnan University Digital Commons @ Lingnan University Theses & Dissertations Department of Cultural Studies 8-30-2017 Learning to be a lesbian : identity and sexuality formation among young Hong Kong lesbians Yuk Ying, Sonia WONG Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.ln.edu.hk/cs_etd Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Recommended Citation Wong, Y. Y. S. (2017). Learning to be a lesbian: Identity and sexuality formation among young Hong Kong lesbians (Doctor's thesis, Lingnan University, Hong Kong). Retrieved from http://commons.ln.edu.hk/ cs_etd/32/ This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Cultural Studies at Digital Commons @ Lingnan University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Lingnan University. Terms of Use The copyright of this thesis is owned by its author. Any reproduction, adaptation, distribution or dissemination of this thesis without express authorization is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved. LEARNING TO BE A LESBIAN: IDENTITY AND SEXUALITY FORMATION AMONG YOUNG HONG KONG LESBIANS WONG YUK YING SONIA PhD LINGNAN UNIVERITY 2017 LEARNING TO BE A LESBIAN: IDENTITY AND SEXUALITY FORMATION AMONG YOUNG HONG KONG LESBIANS by WONG Yuk Ying Sonia 黃鈺螢 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies Lingnan University 2017 ABSTRACT Learning to be a lesbian: Identity and Sexuality Formation among Young Hong Kong Lesbians by WONG Yuk Ying Sonia Doctor of Philosophy While the LGBT equal rights movements in Hong Kong have become increasingly visible and popular in recent years, and lesbians, when compared to homosexual male, seem to enjoy high visibility in the city’s public space and relevant safety from violent discrimination, their presence in the public sphere continue to be low. Writings by local queer activists and scholars such as Mary Kam Pui Wai (2001) and Denise Tang (2011) point out that instead of violent attacks, since the beginning of local LGBT activism, female have been facing systematic silencing and marginalizing within the community, their presence invisible, and their problems often ignored or trivialized. However, lesbians are not imagined to be, and do not perceive themselves as, the most oppressed and disadvantageous members within the larger LGBT community. This study proposes that this seeming apolitical attitude and lack of acknowledgement of their marginalized position are the results of the unique “lesbian learning” taken place in the Hong Kong context that render their positions invisible and their problems unspeakable. I want not only to explore what these young women conceptualize as lesbian identity and sexuality, but through proposing the notion “lesbian learning”, offer a new framework to articulate and examine the formation and construction of the “field of sensible” that conditions their learning about lesbian(ism) in terms of perceptual equipment, information flow, as well as strategies of management and application, to see the meanings attributed to this identity, and the nuanced struggle for and negotiation of their lesbian identity formation, as both gender and sexual identity. The findings of this study shows that their conceptualization of lesbian identity as gender and sexual identity is largely conditioned by how they have learned to be female, with normative gender social expectations having a huge influence on how they perceive their sexual identity and sexuality, and their priority. Through documenting and examining the process of their learning the lesbian identity and ways of managing it, I hope to shed light on the mechanisms behind the social construction of female subjectivity that conditioned the specific configuration of lesbian identity and sexuality in the Hong Kong context, and the close ties between the two. To this end, 26 women between the ages of 20 - 30 were interviewed, additionally I spent 2 years conducting in-depth follow-up interviews and participant observation. With the help of social constructionist accounts of contextualization, interactionist accounts of meaning-making, the theory of sexual scripts, and Foucauldian notions of discourse and discipline, I seek to analyze how the Hong Kong lesbian subject is created, maintained, and regulated, both within different institutions operating at specific sites, namely family, school, and pornography, and by the lesbians themselves. By proposing the notion of “lesbian learning”, this study seeks to offer a new methodological tool of intervention, to examine the network of conditions of intersectional positions, and the negotiated agency of their understanding and imagination of identity, gender, and sexuality in the context of Hong Kong. DECLARATION I declare that this is an original work based primarily on my own research, and I warrant that all citations of previous research, published or unpublished, have been duly acknowledged. ______________________ (WONG Yuk Ying, Sonia) Date: CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………… iv – vi INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………...……… 1 – 51 The visible but nonexistent subject Producing proper subjects Conditions of the sensible Being lesbians Being as learning to be Duality and Intersectionality Problematizing “lesbian”: What is a lesbian? Lesbian identification as context of desire Gender as the context of lesbian identification Heterosexual conditioning of lesbian possibility Against proper subjects Contextualizing lesbian(ism) Translation and transposition Different time, different space Politicizing the global and local Archiving the here and now Queer(ing) Daily Locating lesbian learning Thesis structure Chapter overview METHODOLOGY...……………………………………….………………… 52 – 67 To account for the here and now Sampling Ethnography as method Details In-depth life history interviews Participant observation and immersion Challenges and difficulties Communication and connection Structure Representation and comprehension Position and ethics of the researcher Chapter 1 – Being at home: Genderization, (de)sexualization, and identity development ..…………….………………………………...………………… 68 – 111 Being at home Being a daughter in a Chinese family Regulating young girls’ sexuality through gender in Hong Kong Chinese homes From girl to woman: puberty and the (de/re)sexualized body of daughters (De)sexualized bodies i Impossible femininity Beyond compulsory binaries Desire and identity within the spatiality of Hong Kong household Compact living, compact families Room of one’s own Spatial limits for identity development Conclusion Chapter 2 - Lesbian learning at School: Accomplice or counter-site? ……... 112 – 176 Negative learning Positive learning The subject called schoolgirl Girls in crisis A proper girl is a non-sexual girl Locating shame and empowerment Engendering education Containing sex in education Sex education as gender education The school as a site of lesbian learning Isolation and lineage Boundaries, and the absence of them Space within space, world within world Politics of identity Education and counter-education Appropriation and empowerment Subversion, negotiation, and rules of survival The unexpected “use” of tomboyism and lesbianism Living the script: The internalized temporality of “schoolgirl romance” Mistaken desire and false consciousness Temporality of tomboyism and lesbianism Butterfly Lovers as temporal allegory Conclusion Chapter 3 –The lesbian sexual script: Situating lesbian identity and sexuality in the sexualscape of Hong Kong ……………………………………………........… 177 – 261 Embodied and contextualized Scripted sexuality and circumscribed fantasy Porn as sex education Making sense of porn (and its relation to sex) Field of the pornographically-hence-sexually sensible Conditions of comprehensibility Lesbians and (straight) porn Lesbians and queer porn Conditioning access for girls who want to see porn Navigating a male-dominated pornoscape Engendering porn consumption The proper place for porn, and sex Negotiating spectatorship ii Lesbian reading? Conceptualizing lesbian sexuality as female-gendered sexuality Some ways of desiring are more proper than others Conditions and politics of choice Othering as a choice? Porn choice as resistance You couldn’t because you shouldn’t The lesbian sexual script Compulsory homosexuality and its price “Convertible” femme and “fake” lesbians What is bisexuality anyway? Scripting sexual (im)possibility The impossible sex For lack of a better word Conclusion CONCLUSION – Politics of lesbian identity: Lesbian learning and re-politicization amidst social change …………………………………………...………..… 262 – 301 Identity is in the learning Being as learning to be Locating lesbian learning Queer Daily Conditions of being queer Being as negation Being as making-do Being as to be publicly and politically correct Compulsory homosexuality New politics of acceptance One of what Conditions of lesbian possibilities Dear comrades De/Re-politicization of the lesbian identity? Generative Refusal Coda REFERENCES…………………………………………………………..… 302 – 315 APPENDIX: List of informants and details of interviews iii | ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | Getting lost is inevitable, if not necessary “In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.” ― The Virgin Suicides This is not a comfortable undertake. In fact, it is so difficult that for many times
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