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Masculinity in Exile: A Choreography of Gender and Intimacy for Asylum-seekers in Hong Kong

Date : 2018-10-24

Time : 12:30pm – 2:00pm

Venue : Room 109, Chen Kou Bun Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Speaker: Prof. Sealing Cheng (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, CUHK)

Moderator:
Prof. Tseng Hsun Hui (Assistant Professor, Gender Studies Programme, CUHK)

Registration:
https://bit.ly/2QcS0Kx


Abstract:

Men in forced displacement are denied a range of institutional access to political, economic, and social resources in their host society, often resulting in an erosion of their sense of masculine identity and power over time. Temporality is significant because the passage of time transforms both the experience of asylum-seeking as well as one’s gendered sense of self in relation to broader global processes and historical shifts. Using the idea of choreography, paying attention to the relational engagements between bodies, space, and time in asylum-seeking men's everyday life and intimate practices, I examine how masculinity, vulnerability, and aspirations are interweaved into the temporality of the asylum system. Such choreography has implications not only on interpersonal relationships but are also expressions of historically contingent political-economic transformations.

Biography of Prof. Sealing Cheng:

Sealing Cheng is an anthropologist. Her research is focused on gender and sexuality in the context of migration and its regulation. Her book, On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (University of Pennsylvania Press 2010) received the Distinguished Book Award of the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association in 2012. She has been conducting research on asylum-seekers in Hong Kong since 2012.