Queering consumption: The discursive construction of sexual identity among gay fashion consumers in Hong Kong
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate how sexual identity is constructed among gay fashion consumers in Hong Kong through myriad consumption practices. We employed ethnographic research methods and conducted thirteen in-depth interviews with gay male consumers in Hong Kong to examine the relationship between identity and lifestyle consumption, as well as symbolic consumption and tribal behaviour, within a ‘gay’ community. The findings captured four stages of gay consumers’ identity construction, which began with (1) negotiating one’s sexual identity and changing their perception of gay identity, (2) tremendous identity change, (3) consumption behaviour change and eventually (4) full acceptance of one’s sexual identity. The construction and the expression of sexual identity among gay men in Hong Kong were found to be associated with Confucian-oriented social structures and various marketplace ideologies. This study contributes to the existing discussion of gay consumption literatures by offering a non-western context where the discursive construction of sexual identity – and the negotiations involved in its representation – reflects the multitude of tensions between Chinese culture, on the one hand, and ideas of modernity and cosmopolitanism, on the other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".