Notes from the Field | Jade Hui, Phil Freestone, Crip-Queer Intersections in Hong Kong

How do everyday generalizations about identity obscure our understanding of intersecting Crip/Queer subjectivities and the lived experiences of those who identify in these ways? How might encountering Hong Kong people whose sense of belonging is situated at this intersection enhance our understanding of how ableism and queerphobia cause harm? As a research team working on a project on discourses of queer belonging in Hong Kong, we are in the process of collecting qualitative data, focused on the relationship between Hong Kong identity and Queerness. One of our outreach events was organized in a local crip community space, which was kindly offered to us by its residents, and this brought up interesting reflections for the team, drawing our attention to key questions of identity and their implications for social justice.

As part of our project, we hosted a book club event on the green, industrial floorpainted unit – a wheelchair-friendly, back-pain-friendly, accessible space run by a collective dedicated to platforming, showcasing, and supporting Crip artists of Hong Kong. Knowing that both the collective’s organizers are openly Queer, we asked for their consent to hold space for a gathering to discuss a local queer sociologist, Travis Kong’s, book, Sexuality and the Rise of China: The Post-1990s Gay Generation in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China (2023). We used this as a springboard of ideas to generate dialogue between Queer-identified people in Hong Kong. We also expected Crip people to attend, given that the venue was provided by the collective, and the fact that they were simultaneously recruiting participants. Building on team discussions on the role of culture in issues of queer visibility, we used the second chapter of Kong’s book, which focused on the topic of ‘Coming Out’, confessing, and integrating one’s sexuality into other aspects of life, as a discussion anchor (Kong 2023: 63).

Drawing also on other insightful work carried out in Queer East Asian contexts, and following Kong in taking some inspiration from Chinese literature (Kong 2023: 66), we reflected on the practicalities and the relative social implications of indexing queer identity in various contexts. At the same time, we paid deconstructive attention to the now classic models of ‘East and West’ cultures of sexual identity. One point which had already become very clear, as a result, is that modes of ‘being out’ and ascribed sociocultural values related vary; across social contexts and across life stories. With this in mind, we find it inadequate, and potentially divisive, to account for these modes and values using the monolithic, everyday identity categories that often eclipse diversity and reify stigma, such as ‘Chinese gays’ or ‘Hong Kong queers’, which often also implicitly connote normative and ableist perspectives. Indeed, it is crucial to distinguish between productive generalizations and problematic essentializations, and to interrogate what we think we know about a given cultural context (Freestone 2023). The words of one participant, S, in the event, drew attention to these themes:

My home is kind of special, and because I am Crip, they would never ask, ‘When will you be dating?’ ‘When will you get married?’ or have babies, there’s no questioning. My relatives don’t even dare to ask me about my relationship issues, because they know that I’m Crip and probably destined to be alone. Then how will they ask me these things? They’d only ask me about my work and achievements. So my case is quite special. Other families would, of course, ask about these things.

This participant clearly sees hers as a ‘special’ case, an exception to the norms which might typically be understood as generally applicable across Hong Kong or further afield. We also witness multiple layers of ableism at work, for instance, equating Crip with being single; ‘destined’ is a strong word here. Ableism also drives people apart, with relatives hesitant and too afraid to ask about her love life. Finally, her relatives, diverting their attention towards her work and achievements, are also grounded in ableism, assuming success as a ‘safer’ topic. This example shows that we cannot simply assume all ‘Chinese’ (as an ethnic label) parents and family relatives would interrogate one’s relationship and marital status. However, our attention is drawn to the lived experiences of numerous Crip and/or queer people who might experience the same; being ‘exempted’ from such interrogations because of their Crip and/or queer status, with families deliberately avoiding discussing relationships or politics, whether or not queer or crip belonging is visible in the case of the life story in question.

One related approach to queer sexuality in Sinophone cultural contexts that is often discussed in the literature is a ‘two-step’ approach, whereby satisfying broader societal expectations is seen as a necessary precursor to queer visibility, to “first come out as a successful citizen in terms of education/and or career and then as a less-than-desirable son or daughter” (Kong 2023: 67). This approach is sometimes called the ‘path-paving’ (pulu/鋪路) approach, and previous research by our team has shown this to be a prominent, recurring narrative of queer identity and visibility amongst queer-identified people in Sinophone contexts. Importantly, however, we would not use our observation of such trends as a basis for framing this style as a social and cultural reality which is broadly applicable, or which can be uncritically promulgated as a feature of ‘Chinese’ approaches to queer sexuality.

Furthermore, from a Crip perspective, it could be argued that there is a strong underlying sense of ableism at work here – implying that ability (educational or professional) can compensate for ‘less-than-desirable’ identities. Ableism can make it difficult for people to ‘come out’, and perhaps we therefore need to expand the term’s original meaning of confessing one’s sexuality to themselves or an audience to also connote a sociolinguistic tool for confessing neurological differences and disabilities as well. For instance, one participant of the event, B, shared,

When some people are talking about Pride, actually, they are neglecting the pressure and the pain that we have to face, before we come out. And the come-out process, as you have said, is not a one-time process; it’s a very, very long process, not only for LGBTQ, but actually for Crip people too. Like if I want to tell my friends, tell other people I’m mentally ill, it takes many times for people to understand.

Here, Pride as a celebration is interpreted as a facade, while the associated pressure and pain of stigmatised identities seem to apply to both LGBTQ and Crip people. Furthermore, this participants’ words, “very, very long process” and “many times” draw our attention to another recurring theme in our reflections on identity and visibility, in sync with Ellen Samuels’ observation that:

The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear. (2017)

Are we overly conditioned to believe that being “out” is something that applies to only one stable “identity” that “becomes” in one specific moment, that lasts forever, and that has implications cutting across all social contexts we find ourselves in? With insight from crip perspectives, and from the relatively deconstructionist perspective of queer sociolinguistics, within which we work as a research team, it seems that, instead, we need to complicate the notion of coming out. Neither is it a linear process or an expression of visibility on only one level. In turn, perhaps we also need to complicate the notion of identity itself, with a view to reaching an extended and pluralistic framework of Crip/Queer visibility and belonging.

Another approach to visibility that Kong mentions, echoing key authors on queer Asia from the turn of the century and since, is ‘Coming Home’; “when one brings home an intimate partner without disclosing the same-sex relationship” (p. 67). This notion has been set up as evidence for the enduring cultural dichotomy of East and West, in approaches to queer visibility, and has been widely celebrated as an alternative approach that ‘the Chinese’, as a broadly generalisable group, take-up. This is an important intervention, in resistance to, Eurocentric and colonial paradigms that take ‘coming out’ as a self-evident and necessary milestone in queer lives. The aforementioned participant, S, shared her related experience:

I think whether or not to come out largely depends on the home situation. I’ve never officially so-called come out, mainly brought someone back home, and family members would know. Because verbally conversing with parents, basically, they won’t understand. Because, for them to understand, I think this task is too toilsome. I would need to explain a lot. So when they notice that I never bring guy friends home, mostly girl friends, then they will know, for sure, that [I’m] different.

It is interesting how Coming Home is not equated to formally Coming Out here, and that the former is seen as a means to conserve verbal and emotional labour. Further, this statement was originally in Cantonese, and we noted an interesting use of the word for ‘difference’ –in this case, a euphemism for Queerness. We also noted that the sentence structure in the original Cantonese form did not include [I] as a subject. This speaks to another set of questions which follow-on from the above; How can we understand individuals' presumed stable ‘identities’ without paying attention to the specific linguistic forms and conversational strategies that they use in performing (or concealing) certain aspects of felt belonging? How can we presume that certain social and cultural influences will affect individuals in certain ways without looking at the ways they manage them, sociolinguistically and semiotically, in specific situations?

Based on her use of euphemism and avoidance of personal pronouns, we might interpret this participant’s approach according to the approach of reticence (含 蓄) around queer identity; verbal indirectness and subtlety in communication (Liu & Ding 2005). This is a parallel (and often entwined) approach to that of Coming Home, and another type of behavior that is widely presumed ‘Chinese’, being commonly assumed to be a key feature of Sinophone societies when dealing with queer sexuality. However, we prefer to foreground the fact that, despite recognisable and broadly generalisable social trends of this type, taking cultural assumptions for granted in this type of way is often problematic. Similarly, we argue that paying attention to the Crip/Queer intersection in Hong Kongers’ identity work could be one way to highlight the attendant dangers of culturalist overgeneralisation, and to promote the project of qualified deconstruction (Freestone 2025).

Overall, the event left us with some key questions, old and new. How do ableism and heteronormativity work to oppress Crip and/or Queer people? How might we work towards social justice for Crip and/or Queer people, not simply seeing them as exceptions to presumed universal cultural norms, but honouring their survival wisdom in navigating difficult or even offensive questions and assumptions? How may we co-create a society that is safe for Crip and Queer people to ‘come out’? How might we better recognise that coming out is not an isolated moment leading to a new, stable ‘identity’ anyway?

Further studies may want to examine the role of ableism in Hong Kong, or even a broader range of Asian societies, to draw attention to the burden on Crip/Queer peoples’ shoulders. How might we create space for loving at one’s own pace, and better understanding how Queer Crip people could find love? How might we facilitate conversations that will allow us to be seen in our own light, without presuming social impossibilities, whether based on ableist and/or culturalist presumptions?

Works Cited

Freestone, Phil. (2025). Discourse and Queer Sinophone Male Identities: A Western Immigrant Perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Freestone, Phil. (2023). Do “Chinese gays” come out?: A Discursive-Sociocultural Approach to Queer Visibility Amongst Same-Gender-Attracted Men in Chengdu, China . Journal of Language and Sexuality, 12(2), 200–226. https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.21009.fre

Kong, T. S. K. (2023). Sexuality and the Rise of China: The Post-1990s Gay Generation in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. Duke University Press.

Samuels, E. (2017). Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(3). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824

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Jade Hui (they/them) is a research assistant at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's Division of Humanities working on the project, "Doing diversity in Hong Kong universities: discourses of queer belonging in a cosmopolitan, Confucian context." They hold an MA in Religion with a Collaborative Specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto and a BA in Comparative Literature and Philosophy with a minor in Counselling from the University of Hong Kong. In the past, they have been awarded the Buddhist Studies Research Traineeship by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies. They have written academic papers on Lesbianism, produced ethnographic songs, and curated multimedia book clubs. 

Phil Freestone is a Research Assistant Professor at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology with a focus on sociolinguistics and sociocultural approaches to discourse analysis. I have carried out research projects in discourse analysis, anthropological linguistics and language, gender & sexuality, including extended ethnographic projects in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. I take a qualified deconstructive approach to identity and culture and consider how everyday narratives and ideological influences shape sociolinguistic identity work, especially amongst marginalised communities. In 2024, I was awarded a major Hong Kong GRF research grant to study discourses of diversity in Hong Kong universities.

To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:

Jade Hui, Phil Freestone, “Crip-Queer Intersections in Hong Kong,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, May 15, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/IIAY2928.