Digital Intimacy: Young Women & Social Transformation in Asia | Mini Symposium 3
How do young women understand and experience intimacy in the age of social media? Are their experiences qualitatively different after the millennial turn and the rapid expansion of digital technologies? What impact do these digital experiences and understanding of intimacy have on how millennial subjects experience, understand, and negotiate social relations in globalising Asia?
This mini-symposia series is a part of the multi-sited ongoing research project, Digital Intimacy: Young Women and Social Transformation in Asia, which looks at college-going women in Bangalore, Singapore, Hong Kong and Guangzhou to understand how their lives in these aspiring “smart” cities are being shaped by the phenomenal growth of digital technology use in Asia in the past ten years. It aims to throw new light on emerging practices of digital intimacy, with specific reference to how young, college-going women cultivate digital personae of their selves, and how such personae forge new ways of negotiating and navigating the realms of (a) courtship/marriage, (b) kinship/family and (c) tertiary education.
This project is supported by the General Research Fund (Project No.: 13600720), Research Grants Council Hong Kong.
Date: 10 March 2022 (Thursday)
Time: 8:30 p.m. GMT+8 HK/Singapore/China | 6:00 p.m. IST India
Format: Online via Zoom
Speakers: Carman K. M. Fung and Smita V
Speakers
Carman FUNG
Teaching Associate, University of Melbourne
“Lesbian dating apps (such as LESDO and Butterfly) are emerging as crucial sexual landscape in China and Hong Kong. Previous scholarship have analysed new formations of cyber communities and intimate encounters on these platforms, but less attention was given to the use of identity sub-labels, and more importantly, to the ways in which dating apps contribute to ongoing lesbian feminist debates on identity sub-labels. How do users privately feel about this system? What self-presentation strategies do they employ and what are the boarder impactions about constructing sexual identity in the age of digital dating?”
Smita V
Project Coordinator, Women's Rights Programme
“In the current world, our bodies and lives exist in both online and offline spaces, and somewhere in between and beyond. What do we understand by digital intimacy in this context? Can one by sure that what is intimacy is also private? Does intimacy only mean romantic or sexual intimacy, or is it much more in the online? When everyone doesn‘t have free and meaningful access to digital spaces, and with a digital gender gap which is higher in Larger World countries, how does digital intimacy play out for people of diverse identities?”
