IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v54y2017i3p747-764.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Notes towards the queer Asian city: Singapore and Hong Kong

Author

Listed:
  • Audrey Yue
  • Helen Hok-Sze Leung

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed the emergence and consolidation of new and established gay cities in East and Southeast Asia, in particular, the sexualisation of the Singapore city-state, the commerce-led boom of queer Bangkok, the rise of middle-class gay consumer cultures in Manila and Hong Kong, and the proliferation of underground LGBT scenes in Shanghai and Beijing. In the West, scholarships on urban gay centres such as San Francisco, New York and London focus on the paradigms of ethnicity (Sinfield, 1996), gentrification (Bell and Binnie, 2004) and creativity (Florida, 2002). Mapping the rise of commercial gay neighbourhoods by combining the history of ghettos and its post-closet geography of community villages, these studies chart a teleological model of sexual minority rights, group recognition and homonormative mainstream assimilation. Instead of defaulting to these specifically North American and European paradigms and debates, this paper attempts to formulate a different theoretical framework to understand the rise of the queer Asian city. Providing case studies on Singapore and Hong Kong, and deploying an inter-disciplinary approach including critical creative industrial studies and cultural studies this paper examines the intersections across the practices of gay clusters, urban renewal and social movement. It asks: if queer Asian sexual cultures are characterised by disjunctive modernities, how do such modernities shape their spatial geographies and produce the material specificities of each city?

Suggested Citation

  • Audrey Yue & Helen Hok-Sze Leung, 2017. "Notes towards the queer Asian city: Singapore and Hong Kong," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(3), pages 747-764, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:54:y:2017:i:3:p:747-764
    DOI: 10.1177/0042098015602996
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098015602996
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0042098015602996?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Natalie Oswin, 2012. "The Queer Time of Creative Urbanism: Family, Futurity, and Global City Singapore," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 44(7), pages 1624-1640, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Chris KK Tan, 2015. "Rainbow belt: Singapore’s gay Chinatown as a Lefebvrian space," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 52(12), pages 2203-2218, September.
    2. Nathaniel M Lewis, 2017. "Canaries in the mine? Gay community, consumption and aspiration in neoliberal Washington, DC," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(3), pages 695-712, February.
    3. Alison L Bain & Julie A Podmore, 2021. "Linguistic ambivalence amidst suburban diversity: LGBTQ2S municipal ‘social inclusions’ on Vancouver’s periphery," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 39(7), pages 1644-1672, November.
    4. Christopher Harker & Lauren L Martin, 2012. "Familial Relations: Spaces, Subjects, and Politics," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 44(4), pages 768-775, April.
    5. N/A, 2012. "Guest Editorial," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 44(7), pages 1529-1535, July.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:54:y:2017:i:3:p:747-764. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.