AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities

5. Recognition through Mis-recognition: Masculine Women in Hong Kong

FIVE RECOGNITION THROUGH MIS-RECOGNITION Masculine Women in Hong Kong Kam Yip Lo Lucetta People often called me Boy-head. My relatives used to call me that when I was playing, especially when I was yelling and playing rough in ball games. They actually sounded quite appreciative, and I didn’t sense any derogatory tone. For example, I didn’t cry when I was having an injection, and people would say, “Aiya, you’re even better than boys!” When I was a kid, comments like this would make me very happy, because I took them as a compliment! —Kit, twenty-eight years old They [female colleagues] always thought that I was immature and had no clue how to behave like a lady. They naturally assumed that I wasn’t dating anyone. When they spotted my new ring a few months later, their reaction was like, “Wow! How come you are wearing a ring?” They teased me about it. To them, the ring was obviously evidence of dating. I think they were overreacting, and I wonder if they were teasing me for dating or simply trying to figure out the gender of my date. —Ted, twenty-four years old For years I have noticed how my many masculine-styled female friends cause scenes in women’s washrooms, are addressed as men by shopkeepers, and are scrutinized from head to toe by strangers on the street. More than once, my own androgynous gender presentation has resulted in similar public mis-recognition. As time passed, my curiosity about these women grew. I was eager to know about their experiences of being a differently gendered woman and how they manage to live through all the gender 100 . K A M Y I P LO LUCE T TA scrutiny and washroom dramas. Hence, I carried out research on them (and, simultaneously, research on my own masculine self). Here I report on part of a research project I carried out between February 2002 and April 2003 in Hong Kong on the gender negotiations of eighteen Chinese women, all biological women and self-identified as women, who have been mistaken for men throughout or during certain periods of their lives (for some, the “mistake” was intended or anticipated). The gender misidentifications happened everywhere, including in washrooms, restaurants, gas stations, on the streets, or at job interviews. I treat gender identification in this study as a continual process of negotiation. As Judith Butler puts it, gender is an assignment (or reassignment) of the tools that are available to us in any given culture.1 We are restricted by the number of tools available to us. Yet the ways we pick up and use the tools are possible sites for cultural resignification, new forms of recognition and identification. In this chapter, I sketch a range of gender discourses in Hong Kong that are productive or repressive of the existence of women who present themselves in styles the culture recognizes as masculine. The Gender That Has No Name “Masculine woman” is not a commonly used term in Hong Kong. I use this term because of the lack of positive identity labels given to masculine women in local Hong Kong society (the terminological choices available in English are also limited). There is no self-identified community of “masculine women” in Hong Kong. Informants were recruited to this project through their shared experiences of being mistaken for men and their experiences of masculine identification in different periods of their lives. The term “masculine women” and the entire research project are partly inspired by Judith Halberstam’s theorization of female masculinity.2 Halberstams analytic framework is particularly useful for this study. She denaturalizes masculinity from the male body and reclaims the importance of forms of masculinities displayed on female bodies for changing cultural interpretations of masculinity. In this study, I treat masculinity as a set of gender attributes that are defined by a given culture in a specific period of time. Masculinity can be actualized on all kinds of bodies, and each contributes to the overall understanding of the discourses of masculinity at work in a given culture. The current body of research on female masculinity in Hong Kong focuses on local masculine lesbian genders.3 My research project attempted to study the gender identifications and negotiations of ethnically RECOG NITION THROUG H M I S-RECOG NITION . 101 Chinese masculine women in Hong Kong, both inside and outside the lesbian...