CFR Presents ‘Contesting Queer Exclusion: Intersectionality and Marginality in Hong Kong (LGBTQ+) Migrants Pride’

The Centre for Feminist Research Presents:
“Contesting Queer Exclusion: Intersectionality and Marginality in Hong Kong (LGBTQ+) Migrants Pride”
By Dr. Daniel Conway (Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster)
Chaired by Dr. Amar Wahab (Associate Professor, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University)
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Date: Friday, March 29
Time: 10:30 a.m. to noon
Location: 626 Kaneff Tower, York University
Accessibility: Accessible space. Wheelchair-accessible and gender-neutral bathroom nearby. Wayfinding signs will be posted. Everyone welcome.
Click here for directions to York University
Link to Facebook event: facebook.com/events/257396741875270/
RSVP to: juliapyr@yorku.ca
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This paper draws from research conducted as part of a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship exploring the contemporary global politics of Gay Pride, focusing specifically on the forms of activism and issues raised at Hong Kong Migrants Pride 2018. Migrants Pride was first held in 2015 and is organised by migrant women’s groups in Hong Kong. Held the day after Hong Kong Pride, and separately from the Pink Dot and Pink Season LGBTQ+ festivals, the Migrants Pride Parade weaves through central Hong Kong, past the migrant women workers and their families who sit on cardboard boxes in the shadow of designer shopping malls and HSBC’s headquarters.
In 2018, Migrants Pride was held alongside HSBC’s Community Festival. This highlighted a tense and incongruous relationship between space, place and community making, which underpins the marginality and vulnerability that LGBTQ+ migrant workers face in Hong Kong. Migrants Pride represents domestic workers and sex workers who occupy a precarious and often overlooked place and status in Hong Kong. These workers are excluded from dominant constructs of LGBTQ+ community and also broader discourses of rights for privileged expatriate workers in Hong Kong.
Analysing the queering of space, vulnerability and exclusion by activists, the paper argues that Migrant Pride articulates intersectional rights and identities, enacting activist practices that engage with migrants’ inequality and precarity, while building solidarity and contesting invisibility and marginality. Combining ethnography, interviews and visual methods, this paper develops feminist and queer international relations theorisation of LGBTQ+ and women’s activism in global contexts.
Dr. Daniel Conway is the Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, and holds the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for his project “The Global Politics of Pride: LGBTQ+ Activism, Assimilation and Resistance”. His work has mainly focused on how modes of privilege, specifically whiteness, masculinity and heterosexuality, are constituted and the moments and possibilities for their contestation and reformulation. His work draws from and contributes to Feminist International Relations, political sociology and queer theory. Dr. Conway holds a PhD in Politics by Rhodes University, South Africa.
Co-sponsored by: Centre for Refugee Studies, York Centre for Asian Studies (YCAR) and the Sexuality Studies program.