This collection of essays is an intellectual summary as well as my personal reflections on my journal publications in the past decade. Through the documentation of these journal articles that I have published individually and as a co-author with A. Ka Tat Tsang in the last decade or so, we hope to show how our viewpoints and constructs for making sense of sexuality have changed over the years. These changes in viewpoints show how we have responded to the different currents of thought regarding sexuality for the purposes of advancing studies in the field, creating new courses at the university...

In this part we have included only one chapter which articulates our shared reflection on our work over two decades.

When we were young, My Fair Lady was sort of a cult classic in Hong Kong, which was then a British Crown colony. People who could consume entertainment in English back then belonged to a privileged minority. The musical film was, nonetheless, a blockbuster by the standards of those days. While the social critique intended by Shaw escaped most of us—and it was not until we were in university in the 1970s that we learned about its connection with...

The purpose of this article is to reflect on our own practices as social scientists and to raise questions about the language we use in such practices. More specifically, we will explore the use of language in representing, articulating, and communicating experiences associated with the words “sex” and “sexuality” in the English language. We hope to show how the language of social sciences or the professional/specialist, as a form of elite discourse (Schneider & Jacoby, 2005; Van Dijk, 1993), and the ordinary, everyday language of our research participants interrelate and affect each other. This exploration is based on our own...

The chapters in this section will help challenge medical language’s claim of superiority through focusing on body politics, corporeality and spirituality. In our study of university students attending my course on human sexuality, participants were invited to talk about their experiences of their sexual body parts during focus group interviews. Their narratives unglued us from our preoccupation with an appropriate language of sexuality or desire. We reappraised the value of using such precise terms as “vagina” and “clitoris” to describe the bodily experiences presumed to be associated with them (Ho & Tsang, 2005). This exercise expanded our awareness of the...

As a part of the male body, the penis is often regarded as unseemly, and is relegated to the realm of concealment. There is a code of silence regarding the penis which forbids women to talk about it in their everyday discourse. This socially reinforced practice of covering the penis, especially from the sight of women, is actually part of the dual politics of hiding and showing (Bordo, 1999). The penis, which is supposedly hidden, can be used as a powerful instrument of sexual intrusion and intimidation against women. In Hong Kong, women usually react with embarrassment, shock, or disgust...

Women’s bodies, especially their sexual body parts, are difficult to talk about. The academic discourse of the social sciences and the humanities often relegates female sex organs to the realm of concealment, and everyday discourse treats it as a taboo subject in an unspoken code of silence regarding sex. The words referring to a woman’s sexual body parts, such as the vagina, are “spoken rarely and in a hushed voice” (Steinem, in Ensler, 2001, p. ix). This code of silence, some believe, can only be broken by direct reference to the female sex organs. For example, Ensler’s play The Vagina...

The chapters in this part discuss different target groups of gay men and heterosexual women and explore how we can rethink identity in the new world order. We also hope to examine the division between researchers and subjects, the implied “membership requirement”—that it is better if the researcher is also a member of the community that he or she wants to study—and the risks from the appropriation of voices. These chapters will show how there has been an expansion of scope in the queering inquiry from an adoption of a paradigm called “queer” by queer theorists (including theorists...

Apparently a Westernized metropolis, Hong Kong still treats homosexuality as a taboo, whether on the legal, moral, social, or emotive level. The Offences Against The Person Ordinance (1865), inherited from Britain and in force since 1865, prescribed penalties of up to life imprisonment for anal intercourse between men, between a man and a woman or a man and an animal, and up to two years’ imprisonment for any act of “gross indecency”, i.e., contacts of a sexual nature by a man with another man, irrespective of whether it is performed with or without consent, in private or in public.

In...

Homosexual identity is often conceived as something that an individual acquires, involving processes of self-definition and identification with the socially constructed categories of gay, lesbian or bisexual individuals. Identity, in this sense, is grounded primarily on the similarity that an individual believes he/she shares with other people as it is expressed in the discursive domain through particular signifiers.¹ Although most theorists agree that homosexual identity should not be taken as essential and referring to a homogenous group of individuals, in practice, many analyses still resort to the convenience of a simple distinction between homosexual and heterosexual categories. Costello, for example,...

Mainstream theories construe depression in women as either individual or social pathology, and portray women as victims of their physiology, psychology or an unjust society, thus depriving them of their agency. Social constructionist theories, especially that of Foucault, provide an alternative basis for understanding depression which affirms the agency and autonomy of women. Foucault (1977) argues that subjectivity is the site where both domination and resistance take place. Becoming depressed/“sick”, therefore, is a way to acquire a new identity and create space for personal and social change. By examining the actual social rearrangements necessitated by the needs of depressed and...

When Chinese women in Hong Kong live their lives according to a “conventional” heterosexual life-script, they are often called si-nais by the time they reach middle age. The two characters in the term mean “teacher” and “breast”. This article follows the evolution of the term si-nai in Hong Kong from the 1960s, when it was a term of respect, to the present, when it has acquired a derogatory meaning reserved exclusively for middle-aged married women who are ignorant, overweight, and “penny-wise but pound-foolish”. It also presents an analysis of interviews with 45 married women aged 35 to 55, the aim...

Middle-aged Chinese women in Hong Kong who live according to a “conventional”, heterosexual life-script are often called si-nais. The two Chinese characters mean “teacher” and “breasts”. In the 1960s, when the term first became popular, si-nai was used to refer respectfully to a teacher’s wife, but during the 1980s it became a label for housewives in resettlement estates. Nowadays it is usually a derogatory term reserved exclusively for middle-aged, married women who are ignorant, overweight, and “penny-wise but pound-foolish”. The changing meaning of the label is suggestive of the economic and sociocultural changes of postwar Hong Kong and how the...

The chapters in this part explore various forms of relationships within and outside of marriage. We will see how there is a move from coloniality to post-colonial reality (from interracial gay relationships to Hong Kong men and women’s cross-border intimacies) as a result of the relaxation of the border especially post-1997. We will examine the reconfiguration of the city’s political life space. In terms of theoretical framework, we will also see how the construction of identity has moved from categorical identity based on presumed sexual orientation, into identity based on performativity and strategies of resistance, identification, and being that have...

This chapter explores the experience of people who have multiple sex partners or are “polyamorous” (Anapol, 1997; Barker, 2005; Easton & Liszt, 1997; Lano & Perry, 1995). The purpose of this exploration is threefold: to document the lived experiences and perspectives of eight men and women in Hong Kong with multiple sex partners; to analyse through their narratives the way they see themselves and their relationships, and how they cope with the social and moral pressures related to their sexual choices; and finally, to explore a new way of mapping out desire which will help us rethink Gayle Rubin’s concept...

This chapter contains a study of the experiences of middle-aged married women in Hong Kong and how they understand their own lives, marriages, and sexual relationships in relation to their social status as si-nais (housewives). According to Rubin’s (1984) categorization, the heterosexual, married, monogamous, reproductive si-nais (now considered a derogatory term) in Hong Kong undoubtedly exist within the “charmed circle” and at the apex of the sexual hierarchy. But how do these si-nais’ experience their apparently superior status on the sexual hierarchy?

In her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex”, Rubin reviewed a wide range of sexual stigmas and regulations. She contended...

This chapter¹ uses the case of anal intercourse in interracial gay relationships to show how power is negotiated through sexual practices. Given the major sociopolitical changes brought about by the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, Hong Kong provides a particularly salient example for the analysis of the complex relationships between sex and power. Anal sex in interracial relationships is an interesting articulatory device to show the complex realities of coloniality. It is argued that sex is not just about sexual pleasure or desire, which is generally perceived as inborn...

This book and in particular this part is intended to show how we have moved from a focus on sexuality to a broader notion of desire in our understanding of the lived experiences of our research participants. We became more convinced that we should continue to emphasize the importance of locating sexuality within the everyday, as part of the fabric of routine day-to-day social life, enmeshed with other nonsexual aspects of our lives that are of importance too.

Sexuality is a good entry point here, because it covers every domain of the life-world. It challenges, unsettles, and problematizes taken-for-granted notions,...

Public discourse, policy, and social programmes related to retirement are dominated by a male-centred model—one that is based on an idealized trajectory of life transitions, employment, and retirement modelled on a prototypical male worker who is assumed to be a rational economic man (Hewitson, 1999). Such a model is based on a masculinist assumption that disregards the significance and character of women’s labour (Beasley, 1994; Collins, 1990; DeVault, 1991; Folbre & Bittman, 2004; Hooks, 1984). It discounts the experiences of women, including maternity, which often contribute to a discontinuous involvement in the labour market or a disrupted career path....

Every once in a while we are reminded of the ever-increasing popularity of the internet and the addiction of the young to it.² The Asian internet growth rate is found to be very high (Mitra & Schwartz, 2001). The rapid growth of the internet is increasingly international, with young people being the early adopters in most countries (Skinner, Biscope & Poland, 2003). As witnessed in our own lives, the first thing many of us do in the morning is to check our mailboxes—the virtual ones. In addition to using email and instant messengers, constructing and maintaining personal websites has...

Using empirical data from an Asian context, Tsang and I aimed to interrogate Western theories of sexuality that have largely focused on the sexual; to conceptualize a realm of erotic justice that goes beyond the legal and social dimensions; and to raise questions about research methodology that will help us elicit data, discover useful researcher-subject relationships and environments, and perform relevant analyses; and to represent stories that will have an impact beyond the academic circle. Women’s ideas of justice, the way they manage their balance sheets in marriage, sex and family, and their elusive/“irrational”/“trivial” strategies of resistance, are crucial to...