Negotiating Gender : Masculine Women in Hong Kong

L. Kam

The research project aims to provide a qualitative account of the life experiences and gender identifications of masculine women in Hong Kong. It is based on the life experiences of 18 women informants (aged from 21 to 48,all ethnically Chinese) who have been mistaken as males by other social members in local public. They are recruited to this project based on the shared experience of public gender mis-recognition. The term "masculine women" is made up by the researcher as an attempt to identify women with similar experiences or culturally recognised masculine attributes. Information about the informants is collected by individual in-depth interviews. The interactions between individual gender configurations of informants and different kinds of collective gender discourses prevalent in local society are studied. These include the ways informants apply to cope with everyday public or private gender scrutiny, to negotiate with mainstream gender discourses, and to