Being a good Muslim man in Asia's world city: Performing youthful South Asian Muslim masculinities in Hong Kong

Abstract

Hong Kong has long been home to immigrants and citizens of South Asian background, popularly known as ‘ethnic minorities’. Young Muslim men are both ethnically and religiously stigmatized in the contemporary conjuncture as the bearers of patriarchal masculinities and radical Islamism in Asia, as elsewhere. This paper looks at the ways in which young Muslim men of South Asian background perform their masculinities in Hong Kong. My analysis focuses on differentiated capacities for mobility, embodied practices of Muslim manhood as well as complex entanglements of desire, fear and safety to understand the ways in which ethno-religious difference of minority populations are produced, experienced and accommodated through embodied ethno-religious encounters in Asian cities. Through my ethnographic fieldwork with young Muslim South Asian men in Hong Kong, I explore how these youth draw from different cultural traditions and engage various discourses of pious subjectivity to negotiate an unstable politics of belonging in Hong Kong. My findings point to the importance of transnational moral geographies operating at multiple scales in regulating embodied encounters with, as well as constant (mis)recognition and negotiation of, cultural difference in ‘Asia's world city’.