Of longing and waiting: An inter-Asia approach to love and intimacy among older lesbians and bisexual women

Abstract

This paper examines same-sex intimacies formed by and among older Chinese lesbians and bisexual women who were born from the late 1930s to the late 1950s through qualitative interviews and participant observation conducted in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. For this paper, I aim at complicating cultural notions of love, romance and intimacies, that were brought up within interstices of connected histories, gender roles and marginalized sexual subjectivities. Based on ethnographic data collected during 2016–2018, I elaborate on the moments of longing and waiting as redefining modern notions of love and intimacy across time and spatial dimensions. Then I bring up a methodological episode where inter-Asian referencing intersects with Chinese modernities to illustrate how gender and sexuality meet, intersect and influence each other in the cultural imagination and eventual materialization of women’s same-sex desires. The last section will examine the politics of butchness as protection and as a form of politeness.