Hong Kong: dating apps, political activism and the neoliberal subject

Through an ethnography with college-going women between the ages of 18 and 24 across 8 publicly funded universities, we examine the formation of digital subjectivities of Hong Kong young women against a backdrop of neoliberalism and a fast-changing socio-political environment. We analyse the multiple transformations that occurred in their relationships with friends, families and lovers through digital mediation. Our cohort has experienced the anti-national education social movement in 2011–12, the Umbrella Movement in 2014 (as secondary school students), and the anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (ELAB) in 2019 (as university students). Significant changes in Hong Kong’s socio-political environment affected young women’s digital practices and habits, and influenced the city’s digital culture as a whole. We first take a comprehensive look at the digital landscape of the city and the educational context that impacts digital development. Then we discuss the impact of recent social movements on the way social and romantic relationships were developed, sustained or broken. We analyse our interviewees’ efforts at boundary-work, revealed in how they filter their different social media circles, as evidence of their concerns with safety and privacy in the digital world. In Hong Kong, we see a kind of ambivalence about digital intimacy tied to aspiration, mobility and precarity in a neo-liberal context. What our interviews revealed was that both monogamy and marriage were in question, and that conventional gender roles were being destabilised, as were relationships of filial piety, as Hong Kong’s late colonial neoliberalism intersected with capitalist posthumous socialism from China.