Migrating intimacies: Media representations of same-sex love among migrant women in East Asia

Abstract

This article explores contemporary photography and film works that highlight same-sex intimacy among female Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. My discussion expands upon feminist migration scholarship by examining how these projects document new migrant socialities and, further, how they invite reflection on the often transient intimacies they depict. As I show, the works render legible and validate sexual and romantic affiliations among migrant women that are commonly elided from their public representation. Yet the visual narratives move notions of intimacy beyond the frameworks of permanence, domesticity, and heteronormativity to interrogate how such framings intersect with concepts of good citizenship and market logics of privacy that foreclose the visibility of non-normative migrant socialities. What is more, by circulating “improper” images of migrant women's same-sex intimacies, the photography and film works mobilize alternative value economies through which the women's experiences are rendered legible without being made appropriable.

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