Digital Intimacy: Young Women & Social Transformation in Asia | Mini Symposium#5
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.
The research is supported by the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong.
Date: 12 May 2022 (Thu)
Time: 8:30 p.m. GMT+8 HK/Singapore/China | 6:00 p.m. IST India
Format: Zoom
Speakers: Hua Su and Nimmi Rangaswamy
Register here: https://lingnan.asia.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8kxr4gV5sM3GCtE
Speakers
Hua “Sue” Su
Lecturer, School of Journalism and Communication in Beijing Language and Culture University
Playing with Ambiguities: Hua Su will share her recent research on the online dating experiences of young women in urban China. Her talk will focus on the contradictions and dilemmas these women face while negotiating the increasing instrumentalism and materialism in Chinese romantic relationship and seeking “pure love” and egalitarian gender relations. Through the talk, Hua Su hopes to discuss the importance of examining the cultural meanings of ambiguity in online dating and the intersectionality of gender, class and sexuality in China’s contemporary dating culture.
Nimmi Rangaswamy
Professor, Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad
Digital Dilettante and the Creation of Romance: A study of Youth Sub-stratum in the Digital Shadow lands of India
Her talk explores myriad experiments with creative expressions of the constructing the self in the digital sphere summarizing a 12-year research journey with young adults and social media. Discussions of anonymity and pseudonymity, of intimacy, desire, connection, and attention will draw examples from the marginalised sections of youth in India. Romance emerges as the social theme underlying the power of digital media to overcome social constraint overlaying the thirst to connect, friend and chat going beyond Goffmanesque social performativity and towards defining potential social transgressions. Romance is the medium channeling and staging fantasies, aspirations and play to explore potential possibilities of social mobility.
