Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia: Reconfiguring Local Ties and Enacting Global Relationships (Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications) 9402417893, 9789402417890

Table of contents :
Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Contributors
About the Editors
Editors and Contributors
Chapter 1: Mobile Media and the Rise of ‘Glocal Intimacies’ in Asia
1.1 Introduction
1.2 On Mobile Mediated Asian Intimacies as Social
1.3 On Mobile Mediated Asian Intimacies as ‘Glocal’
1.4 Reconfiguring the Local
1.5 Enacting the Global
1.6 Challenges and Future Directions
References
Part I: Reconfiguring Local Ties
Chapter 2: ‘Now You Can See Who’s Around You’: Negotiating and Regulating Gay Intimacies on Mobile Media in the People’s Republic of China
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Sexualities and New Media
2.3 Finding Selves, Others, and Sex Online
2.4 Mobile, Locative Media and Embodied-Spatial Intimacies
2.5 Mobile Media and Contested Sexual Intimacies
2.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Networked Individualism and Networked Families in Malaysia
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Networked Individualism and ‘Doing Family’
3.2.1 Networked Individualism and Families
3.2.2 Doing Family
3.3 Method
3.4 Multigenerational Networked Families
3.4.1 Family Adoption of Social Media and Messaging Apps
3.5 WhatsApp Groups and Facebook Profiles
3.6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 4: Torture and Love: Wives of Chinese Gay Men and Their Cyber Communities
4.1 Introduction
4.1.1 Marriage in Chinese Society and the Tongqis
4.1.2 Mobile Media and Marginalized Communities
4.1.3 Data Collection and Analysis
4.1.4 The Lived Experiences of the Tongqis
4.1.5 Tongqis and their Use of Mobile Media
4.2 Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: The Digital Wash Place: Mobile Messaging Apps as New Communal Spaces for Korean ‘Smart Ajummas’
5.1 Introduction
5.2 The Korean Ajumma
5.3 Ajummas and Social Intimacy
5.4 Smart Ajumma
5.5 Method
5.6 KakaoTalk as Digital Ppal-let-ter (Digital Wash Place)
5.6.1 A Space to Nurture and Build Friendships
5.6.2 A Bridge Between Face-to-Face Meetings
5.6.3 A Women’s Space
5.7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Fandom in My Pocket: Mobile Social Intimacies in WhatsApp Fan Groups
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Fandom Online
6.3 Mediated Intimacies, Mediated Affect
6.4 Method
6.5 Fans on WhatsApp Groups
6.5.1 Building Personal Relationships
6.5.2 Managing Boundaries and Ambivalence
6.5.3 WhatsApp as a Private Archive
6.5.4 Membership and Status
6.6 Conclusion
References
Part II: Enacting Global Relationships
Chapter 7: Dating Apps as Digital Flyovers: Mobile Media and Global Intimacies in a Postcolonial City
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Conceptualising the Mediation of Global Intimacies in a Postcolonial City
7.2.1 Global Intimacies and the Postcolonial City
7.2.2 Global Intimacies, Dating Apps, and Other Mobile Media
7.3 Methodology
7.4 Cosmopolitan Connections
7.5 Postcolonial Foundations
7.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Visualizing Birth Tourism on Social Media: Taiwanese Expectant Mothers in the United States
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Mobile Photography, Social Intimacy and Surveillance
8.3 Intrinsic Norms: Photo Sharing on Mobile Media
8.4 Extrinsic Norms: Transnational Expectant Motherhood
8.4.1 The Morality of Expectant Motherhood
8.4.2 Borders, Reproduction, and Gender
8.4.3 Class and Multiple Citizenship
8.5 Methods
8.6 The Spatiality of Birth Tourism
8.7 (Semi-)Public Spaces, Consumerism, and Facebook
8.8 People Who Did Not Share on Facebook
8.9 Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: Left-Behind Children as Agents: Mobile Media, Transnational Communication and the Mediated Family Gaze
9.1 Introduction
9.2 The Children Left Behind
9.3 Transnational Families in the Digital Age
9.4 Research Context and Empirical Data
9.5 The Perception of ‘Mediated Family Gaze’
9.5.1 Embracing the Technology: ‘They Are Back’
9.5.2 Detesting the Technology: ‘I Don’t Need the Unnecessary Care’/ ‘It Deprives Me of Them’
9.6 Children as Actors: ‘Mediated Family Gaze’ as Strategies
9.6.1 Left Behind but not Left Forgotten: Craving for the Parents’ Gaze
9.6.2 Achieving Autonomy or Showing Consideration? Negotiating Parents’ Gaze
9.6.3 ‘It’s My Turn to Take Care of You’: Reversing the ‘Gazed-Upon’ Status
9.7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Transnational Mobile Carework: Filipino Migrants, Family Intimacy, and Mobile Media
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Conceptualizing Mobile Carework
10.2.1 Intimate Carework in Transnational Households
10.2.2 Mobile Media in Everyday Transnational Life
10.3 Methods of Investigation
10.4 Transnational Mobile Carework
10.4.1 Everyday Routinized Carework
10.4.2 Microcoordination of Care
10.4.3 Management of Tensions and Conflicts
10.4.4 Performing and Curating Carework
10.5 Conclusion
References
Chapter 11: Mobile Media and Kirogi Mothers: Place-Making and the Reimagination of Transnational Korean Family Intimacies
11.1 Introduction
11.2 Kirogi Families and Transnational Korea
11.3 Transnational Family Intimacy, Place-Making, and Mobile Media
11.3.1 Sense of Place and Sense of Belonging
11.3.2 Social Capital
11.3.3 Technology Domestication
11.4 Method
11.5 Kirogi Families and Mobile Media
11.5.1 Achieving Familial Goals
11.5.2 Transforming Conceptions of the Family
11.5.3 Cultivating Belonging for Kirogi Mothers
11.6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 12: K-Pop Male Androgyny, Mediated Intimacy, and Vietnamese Fandom
12.1 Introduction
12.2 Passionate Fandom – Mediated Fandom
12.3 Facebook-Based Fan Communities and Mediated Intimacy
12.4 ‘Pretty/Flower Boy’ and Androgyny
12.5 Methodology
12.6 Androgynous G-Dragon and Mediated Intimacy
12.7 Participatory Fandom and Perpetuated Intimate Feelings
12.8 Androgynous G-Dragon and the Affective Fan Community
12.9 Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications

Jason Vincent A. Cabañes Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco  Editors

Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia Reconfiguring Local Ties and Enacting Global Relationships

Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications Series editor Sun Sun Lim, Head of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore City, Singapore

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13350

Jason Vincent A. Cabañes  •  Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco Editors

Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia Reconfiguring Local Ties and Enacting Global Relationships

Editors Jason Vincent A. Cabañes Department of Communication De La Salle University—Manila Manila, Philippines

Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco Department of Communication California State University San Marcos San Marcos, CA, USA

ISSN 2468-2403     ISSN 2468-2411 (electronic) Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications ISBN 978-94-024-1789-0    ISBN 978-94-024-1790-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature B.V. The registered company address is: Van Godewijckstraat 30, 3311 GX Dordrecht, The Netherlands

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to our contributors, who shared with us their exciting and cutting-­ edge work on mobile media and social intimacies in Asia. We especially appreciate the intellectual conversations we had with them and the insights we learned from them during our editorship of their contributions. We are grateful to Sun Sun Lim, who saw merit in our proposal and was generous both in her scholarly advice and in her moral support throughout the time we were putting this volume together. We are also grateful to Alexandra Campbell and Ameena Jaafar at Springer for happily guiding us through the publication process. Jason would like to thank his new colleagues at the Department of Communication at De La Salle University—Manila as well as his former colleagues at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds for being supportive interlocutors about his nascent ideas, some of which eventually made its way to this book. He would also like to acknowledge his Media and Intimacy 2019 students at De La Salle University—Manila, for their energetic engagement with some of these very same ideas. Above all, he is happy that his partner Leslie was willing to evaluate the probable cause behind the arguments he contributed to this book but, more importantly, to collaborate in ensuring a steady supply of Asian food during the course of his writing. Cecilia would like to thank her colleagues at California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), especially those at the Department of Communication and the Global Studies Faculty Advisory Committee for their support and encouragement. She would also like to acknowledge the Office of Graduate Studies and Research at CSUSM for awarding her a Research, Scholarly and Creative Activities (RSCA) grant that funded a course release in Fall 2018 in order to work on this book. She would also like to thank her George Mason University Cultural Studies community for their camaraderie and continuing support for her research ideas and projects. Most of all, she is grateful for the “connected presence” of her transnational family and friends through mobile media technologies.

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Contents

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 Mobile Media and the Rise of ‘Glocal Intimacies’ in Asia ������������������    1 Jason Vincent A. Cabañes and Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco

Part I Reconfiguring Local Ties 2

‘Now You Can See Who’s Around You’: Negotiating and Regulating Gay Intimacies on Mobile Media in the People’s Republic of China����������������������������   15 James Cummings

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 Networked Individualism and Networked Families in Malaysia��������   31 Julian Hopkins

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Torture and Love: Wives of Chinese Gay Men and Their Cyber Communities ��������������������������������������������������������������   47 Wenjing Liu

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The Digital Wash Place: Mobile Messaging Apps as New Communal Spaces for Korean ‘Smart Ajummas’��������������������   63 Jung Youn Moon

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Fandom in My Pocket: Mobile Social Intimacies in WhatsApp Fan Groups������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 Hattie Liew

Part II Enacting Global Relationships 7

Dating Apps as Digital Flyovers: Mobile Media and Global Intimacies in a Postcolonial City����������������������������������������   97 Jason Vincent A. Cabañes and Christianne F. Collantes

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Visualizing Birth Tourism on Social Media: Taiwanese Expectant Mothers in the United States������������������������������  115 Tingyu Kang vii

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Contents

 Left-Behind Children as Agents: Mobile Media, Transnational Communication and the Mediated Family Gaze����������������������������������  133 Hong Chen

10 Transnational  Mobile Carework: Filipino Migrants, Family Intimacy, and Mobile Media������������������������������������������������������  153 Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco and Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto 11 M  obile Media and Kirogi Mothers: Place-­Making and the Reimagination of Transnational Korean Family Intimacies ����������������������������������������������������������������������  171 Young A Jung 12 K-Pop  Male Androgyny, Mediated Intimacy, and Vietnamese Fandom�������������������������������������������������������������������������  187 Ha Hoang Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  205

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Jason  Vincent  A.  Cabañes  is an Associate Professor in Communication and a Research Fellow at De La Salle University—Manila, Philippines. He has a PhD in Communications Studies from the University of Leeds, UK. He researches primarily on the mediation of cross-cultural intimacies and solidarities, with a particular focus on postcolonial multiculturalism. He also does work on digital labor in the Global South. His publications have appeared in top-tier journals such as New Media & Society, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies as well as in edited collections in the field of media and communications studies. Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at California State University San Marcos, USA.  She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, USA. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her research is primarily engaged in interrogating the relationships between media, culture, and globalization. In particular, she studies the Philippine telecom industry, digital inequality, and the reproduction of power and digital media and transnational Filipino migrants. Her work has been published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Communication Research and Practice, and various edited books.

About the Contributors Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto is a Lecturer in Communication in the School of Communication and Creative Arts (SCCA) at Deakin University, Australia. His research interests include migration, transnational communication, mediated intimacies, caregiving at a distance, and the politics of mediated mobilities. He has published in top-tier international journals such as Mobile Media & Communication;  

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Editors and Contributors

International Journal of Communication; Media, Culture & Society; and Information, Communication & Society as well as in edited book collections. He is currently writing a manuscript about family life at a distance in the age of mobile media. Hong Chen is a PhD researcher in the Department of Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. His research interests are in the areas of information and communication technologies, gender, and migration studies. His Chinese language publication includes articles in Communication & Society and Journal of Communication Research and Practice. Meanwhile, his English language publication appears in the International Journal of Communication.  

Christianne  F.  Collantes is an Associate Professor in Political Science and a Research Fellow at De La Salle University—Manila, Philippines. She obtained her PhD in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. Her research interests include gender politics, reproduction, globalization, and global political economy. She is author of the book Reproductive Dilemmas in Metro Manila: Faith, Intimacies, and Globalization. Her recent journal publications can be found in Critical Asian Studies and South East Asia Research.  

James Cummings received his PhD in Sociology from Newcastle University, UK, where he currently works as a Chinese Language Instructor and Teaching Assistant in Sociology. His research focuses on the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China, and explores themes of subjectivity, identity, and community. He has a special interest in new spaces generated by mobile media for the embodiment and performance of sexual identities. His doctoral thesis was based on 18 months of ethnographic research with gay men in Hainan and his long-standing involvement in activism and community organisation in the region.  

Ha  Hoang is a PhD researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia. She is also a Lecturer (on leave) at Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam. Her research is on transnational television drama and popular music, fandom, and social media. Her current work examines the interplay between the affective dimensions of South Korean popular culture and its idols, the emotional and intimate sphere of Vietnamese fans, and the affective fabrics afforded by social media such as Facebook.  

Julian Hopkins is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia, Malaysia. He has been researching the social and cultural implications of social media since 2001, using a combination of ethnographic and sociological research methods. He has taught classes on social media literacy, global digital media, internet studies, and research methods. He is currently focused on developing digital learning at the City of Glasgow College.  

Editors and Contributors

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Young  A  Jung is Director of Korean Studies and Assistant Professor of Korean Language, Literature, and Culture at the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, George Mason University, USA.  Her research interests are evolving towards a folkloric approach to migration studies, migration history related to placemaking, the relationship between migrant belonging and adjustments, translation and adaptation, and fandom studies. She is currently working on two book projects: Emplacing Parenting, based on her research on kirogi families in Northern Virginia, and Canons and Parodies in Korean Literature, which examines the canonization and adaptation of traditional stories of both North and South Korean literature.  

Tingyu  Kang is an Associate Professor at the College of Communication at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. She holds a DPhil in Geography from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics, UK. She is currently pursuing research on gender, communication technologies, and transnational flows. She has published in Global Networks; Information, Communication & Society; Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, Media, Culture & Society, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and many other journals and books in the fields of migration, communication, and gender studies.  

Hattie  Liew is currently a PhD researcher at the School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR. She previously received her BA and MA degrees in Communication Studies at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her current research interests include Internet cultures and fan studies.  

Wenjing Liu is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture Program at Michigan Technological University. Her research interests include science and technology studies, gender and communication studies, Chinese studies, and cultural studies theory and practice. Her research primarily deals with the implications of science and technology for women in contemporary China. She has published several journal articles and presented her research at international conferences.  

Jung Youn Moon is a Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at Seoul Women’s University, Korea, where she teaches visual communication, visual storytelling, visual language for beginners and digital media editing. She is an adventurous scholar who is interested in interdisciplinary research that combines academic and creative practices. Her research focuses on mass media, communication, and contemporary popular culture in Korea and the Asian region.  

Chapter 1

Mobile Media and the Rise of ‘Glocal Intimacies’ in Asia Jason Vincent A. Cabañes and Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco

Abstract  Although ‘intimacy’ has been often construed as the relationship between two individuals, we contend that these are also ‘social’ and are always imbricated in broader social dynamics. In Asia, the social dimension of intimacies, whether romantic, familial, or communal, is very much pronounced. Crucially, it is also increasingly enacted through mobile media. We argue that these ubiquitous mobile technologies have contributed to the transformation of intimate social relationships in the region. We underscore especially that they have become central to people’s experiences of what we call ‘glocal intimacies’. By this we mean that such technologies have both normalised and intensified how people’s interpersonal relationships are entangled in the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. This is particularly evident when they seek to use mobile media to reconfigure their local ties and to enact global relationships. These experiences powerfully exemplify how their mediated intimacies are caught between the homogenising influence of the global and the persistent grounding of the local. Keywords  Mobile media · Social intimacy · Glocal · East Asia · Southeast Asia

1.1 Introduction The East/Southeast Asian (henceforth Asian) region has been the site of many recent innovations in mobile media. It has seen the rise of giant mobile technology developers like China’s Huawei and South Korea’s Samsung as well as smaller mobile

J. V. A. Cabañes (*) De La Salle University—Manila, Manila, Philippines e-mail: [email protected] C. S. Uy-Tioco (*) California State University San Marcos, San Marcos, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_1

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phone brands like The Philippines’ MyPhone and Malaysia’s M.Mobile. The region has also seen the proliferation of its ‘homegrown’ mobile messenger apps like QQ, WeChat, KakaoTalk, and LINE. Coupled with Asia’s increasing access to global mobile technologies—from Apple to Android to Facebook to Instagram—it is no surprise that, the continued asymmetrical access and use notwithstanding, mobile media have become ubiquitous for many people in the region (see GSMA 2018; see also Chan et al. 2017; Park and Lee 2015). That said, there has yet to be sustained programmatic research on what the ubiquity of mobile media might mean for the contemporary transformation of social intimacies in Asia. What role do such technologies play in the myriad ongoing shifts to the ways that people in the region build and experience diverse forms of what Lynn Jamieson (2011) calls a ‘close connection between people’ (p. 1)? How might mobile media matter, for instance, in the changes to how, in the different contexts of Asia, women imagine and practice intimate relationships of love, romance, and sex (for example, Blackburn 2001; Jackson et al. 2008)? or parents and children cope with the normalisation of transnational families (for example, Hoang and Yeoh 2015)? or cultural minorities seek and build communities of support and activism (for example, Luther and Ung Loh 2019)? This volume contributes to establishing a robust research agenda precisely about its title: Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia. Collectively, its chapters attend to how mobile technologies matter in the region’s different kinds of intimacies, particularly the romantic, the familial, and the communal.

1.2 On Mobile Mediated Asian Intimacies as Social At this early juncture, we want to clarify our use of the term ‘social intimacies’ in exploring the relationship between mobile media and the different kinds of close connection between people in Asia. It might seem paradoxical that this volume puts the concepts of ‘intimacy’ and the ‘social’ together, as the former often evokes the idea of a relationship between two individuals. But in doing so, we are deliberately signalling that even the most private forms of intimacy are always imbricated in broader social dynamics. This volume connects with other extant works that also aim to re-emphasise the social nature of intimacy, such as Lauren Berlant’s (1998) ‘institutions of intimacy’, Michael Herzfeld’s ‘cultural intimacy’ (1996), and Ken Plummer’s ‘intimate citizenship’ (2003). At the same time, it also connects with the existing scholarship on media and intimacy that attend to the social, like Sue Barker et al. (2018) ‘mediated intimacies’, Chris Rojek’s (2015) ‘presumed intimacy’, and, closest to our concern, Larissa Hjorth and Sun Sun Lim’s ‘mobile intimacies’ (2012). Like the works above, we push back on approaches that valorise the ‘individualisation thesis’ to intimacy (Giddens 1992). We seek to nuance claims that in modern society, individuals are increasingly released from their social scripts and have become free to make up their own rules (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995) and that human relations are increasingly characterised by a profound weakening of social

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ties (Bauman 2003). Asia is an especially productive region to think through such claims, what with its long, rich, and diverse histories as well as its digitally and technologically innovative future trajectories (Lim and Soriano 2016). In many parts of the region, the social dimension of intimacies is actually very pronounced and, crucially, the enactment of many of these intimacies now often involves using mobile media. These intensely social mobile media intimacies are manifested in different forms of relationships in Asia. Take for instance how mobile spaces often become sites where people strongly articulate shared ideals about and police the boundaries around marriage (see Chap. 4), motherhood (see Chap. 8), and filial piety (see Chap. 10). Equally important, this social dimension of mediated intimacies is made evident in how different individuals use mobile technologies in their struggle to challenge these different ideals and practices of relationships. This can be seen in how young women might desire dating experiences that are more in line with Western ideas of modern romance (see Chap. 7) or how urban families attempt to incorporate modern conceptions of familyhood (see Chap. 3). What we want to do in this volume, therefore, is to capture how interpersonal relationships are always-already linked to the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows of global modernity. We also want to explore how mobile media have become a crucial site where such social intimacies are enacted, reinforced, and transformed. In the next section, we flesh out our approach for accomplishing this.

1.3 On Mobile Mediated Asian Intimacies as ‘Glocal’ We contend that the most salient conceptual insight that runs across all the chapters in this volume is that there is a distinct kind of relationship between mobile media and social intimacies that seems to be emerging from the diverse contexts of Asia. It is that these technologies are simultaneously normalising and intensifying what we would like to call ‘glocal intimacies’. This argument is comprised of two entwined points. The first point is that there is such a phenomenon as ‘glocal intimacies’. We use this term to refer specifically to those imaginaries and practices surrounding different social intimacies that have emerged from the negotiation between global modernity and local everyday life. This concept builds on the cultural sociologist Roland Robertson’s (1994) notion of ‘glocalisation’. Similar to Robertson, we do not use the notion of ‘glocal’ in its popular sense, that is, as a micro-marketing buzzword that pertains to crafting a product with a ‘global outlook adapted to local conditions’ (p. 36). We instead use it to challenge the idea that globalisation is just about cultural homogenisation and to emphasise that it always involves ‘the simultaneity and inter-penetration of what are conventionally called the global and the local—or in more general vein—the universal and the particular’ (Robertson 1994, p. 38). Going beyond Robertson, however, we do not just want to say that there is an element of the global in the local and vice versa. To be sure, much of what is called local in the Asian region is also a byproduct of negotiations with the global forces

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from its colonial past and from its neo/postcolonial present. But at the same time, there is a distinct socio-cultural power dynamic at work in the region. As the ­subsequent chapters show, the undeniably homogenising influence of global modernity notwithstanding, local everyday life strongly persists in Asian social intimacies. This is evident in how people in the region seek either to reconfigure their local ties (see Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in Part I of this volume) or to enact global relationships (see Chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 in Part II of this volume). The second point is that mobile media are both normalising and intensifying glocal intimacies. Here we are referring to how such technologies have become central to people’s experiences of being entangled in both the influence of global modernity and the persistence of local everyday life. It is important to point out, however, that there is tremendous variation in the quality of information and communication technology (ICT) access across the Asian region and within Asian countries: from ‘deprived contexts’ (Arora and Scheiber 2017) to places of ‘good enough access’ (Uy-Tioco 2019) to ‘information societies’ that continue to have internal digital divides (Wong et  al. 2010). What this means is that even if most people in Asia experience mobile mediated ‘glocal intimacies’, they do not do so in the same way. The chapters in the volume, for instance, gravitated towards those people who are at the forefront of this phenomenon. This is because their mobile media use is closest to what Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller (2012) call ‘polymedia’, where ICTs function as an integrated structure that offers a communicative environment of affordances. These polymedia-enabled people include, amongst others, the gay males in China’s own gay dating app Blued (Chap. 2), the ‘smart ajummas (아줌 마)’ or middle-aged women in South Korea’s messaging app KakaoTalk (Chap. 5), and the K-Pop ‘passionate fandom’ in Vietnamese Facebook (Chap. 12). Mobile media have normalised glocal intimacies for the polymedia-enabled Asians in this volume because of the portability and, as such, the availability of these technologies (see Schrock 2015). These people literally carry the tensions between the globality and locality of their social intimacies ‘in [their] pocket’ (see Chap. 6). At the same time, mobile media have intensified glocal intimacies for these Asians because of how these technologies are all at once the most personal and individual but also the most social and global of ICTs (Hjorth and Lim 2012; Miller et al. 2016). So even in these people’s most private one-to-one mobile mediated social intimacies, they are still caught up in the broader social frictions between globality and locality and, as such, are continually confronted by the ‘translocal’ (see Chap. 9). By framing the chapters in this volume as different cases of how mobile media both normalise and intensify glocal intimacies, we hope that the readers become more attentive to the complex manifestations of such kinds of mediated social intimacies in the diverse contexts of the Asian region. As a heuristic frame, we have divided these manifestations of mediated social intimacies into two themes: one about the reconfiguration of the local and the other about the enactment of the global.

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1.4 Reconfiguring the Local The first five chapters in this volume centre on the notion of local social intimacies being reconfigured by mobile media. Amongst these, the first two focus on the possibilities and challenges that individuals are confronted with when there is a strong tension between the transformations in social intimacies offered by mobile media and persistence of ideal social intimacies grounded in local Asian contexts. In his chapter, ‘“Now You Can See Who’s Around You”: Negotiating and Regulating Gay Intimacies on Mobile Media in the People’s Republic of China’ (Chap. 2), James Cummings explores relationships between mobile media and social and sexual intimacies for gay men in China by focusing on the location-aware gay dating app Blued. His extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Hainan, an island province in southern China, reveals that, on one hand, mobile media apps offer Chinese gay men access to each other. The welcomed visibility provided by the app allows them to find a sense of community, belonging, and authenticity. But at the same time, this visibility becomes entangled in the still conservative dynamics of broader Chinese society in ways that can endanger them. The Chinese gay men raise fears of being ‘outed’ and being called out for ‘in−/appropriate’ forms of social and sexual intimacy. Cummings consequently argues that while mobile media have allowed for shifts that enable Chinese gay men experiences that are in line with other gay man in global Western contexts, their experiences are also still shaped by the local socio-­ cultural and political specificities of everyday life in China. In a similar vein, Julian Hopkins attends to the dynamics of the local in his chapter, ‘Networked Individualism and Networked Families in Malaysia’ (Chap. 3). Here, he examines the local uses of social media and messaging apps in Malaysian families, contrasting these with social media’s transnational global forms, genres, and practices. To do this, Hopkins draws on the theory of ‘networked individualism’ and argues that modernising changes brought about by economic development including the adoption of ICTs results in the displacement of family, local community, and the workplace as central forces in the lives of people. At the same time, he argues that while ‘networked individualism’ suggests a shift away from family cohesiveness and solidarity, digital media can also be used to sustain and maintain family networks. Despite the trend towards individualism brought about by global modernity, Hopkins’ research on multi-generational Malaysian family households finds that Malaysian families use social media to maintain and even strengthen ties, once again emphasising the persistence of local practices. The next three chapters present cases that are illustrative of what happens when the persistence of particular kinds of ideal social intimacies rein in the reconfigurations afforded by mobile media or, vice versa, when mobile media affordances strongly reconfigure local social intimacies. Wenjing Liu’s chapter, ‘Torture and Love: Wives of Chinese Gay Men and Their Cyber Communities’ (Chap. 4) is a

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clear example of how the local, while shifting and changing due to the proliferation of mobile media technologies and global influences, continues to limit the possibilities for social change. In her research on the cybercommunities of the tongqis (同 妻), or wives of Chinese gay men, Liu finds that digital media provide a space for support and communiuty building for tongqis, as well as platforms to educate the public (both locally and globally) and advocate for social and political change. However, her research also shows that until laws and societal attitudes about intimate relationships and censorship in China change, the tortured lives of the tongqis will continue to exist. Nonetheless, Liu argues that the solidarity and empowerment that tongqis experience through cybercommunities should not be ignored or minimized. She contends that such solidarities are essential in navigating the hardships and loneliness of everyday married life to gay men and provide hope for eventual structural and cultural change. Meanwhile, the reconfiguring of the local as influenced by the forces of global modernity is evident in Jung Youn Moon’s ‘The Digital Wash Place: Mobile Messaging Apps as New Communal Spaces for Korean “Smart Ajummas”’ (Chap. 5). Through surveys and online focus groups with the so-called ajummas— middle-­aged, married women belonging to the most misunderstood and most stigmatized demographic group in contemporary South Korea—Moon examines their use of smartphones. She pays particular attention to how their group chats in the mobile app KakaoTalk have provided a space for them to build community. Moon posits that for the ajummas, KakaoTalk group chat rooms have become a ‘digital ppal-let-­ter (빨래터)’ or a digital washplace, that is, a modern-day version of the traditional brooks and streams where women congregated to do their laundry and share stories of their everyday lives. In conceptualising them as ‘smart ajummas’, Moon’s study challenges dominant research on the youth as new media ‘digital natives’ and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how gender and age shape new media practices, highlighting the local specificities of social intimacies in Korean society. This strong reconfiguration of the local is also the focus of the closing chapter of part one, Hattie Liew’s ‘Fandom in my Pocket: Mobile Social Intimacies in WhatsApp Fan Groups’ (Chap. 6). Here, she investigates how Singaporean fan groups of popular music singers on the closed-group mobile messaging app shape fan experiences. Liew sheds light on WhatsApp fan chat groups, those private mobile fan spaces where fans are able to participate in fandom in plain sight while, crucially, avoiding ridicule and mockery from the judgmental others around them. She contends that these mobile mediated fan spaces serve as public private spaces that facilitate the mobility of social intimacy between fans in ways that circumvent their other local relationships. ‘Doing fandom’ on WhatsApp, then, becomes shaped primarily by the specific characteristics of a mobile media app that is used by many fans the world over as well as the meanings that fans make from using the platform.

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1.5 Enacting the Global The second part of this volume is comprised of six chapters that illustrate the ways in which mobile media contribute to the enactment of global social intimacies. Here we see that while mobile media enable global and transnational connections, the specificities of local environments continue shaping these mediated intimate relationships. Part two opens with Jason Cabañes and Christanne Collantes’ chapter, ‘Dating Apps as Digital Flyovers: Mobile Media and Global Intimacies in a Postcolonial City (Chap. 7)’. They examine how middle-class millennial Filipino women use mobile dating apps as ‘digital flyovers’ to find foreign romantic partners, bypassing what they think to be ‘uncosmopolitan’ Filipino men. Drawing from 18  months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Philippines capital of Manila, Cabañes and Collantes show that these women are able to access digital spaces that pave the way for the cosmopolitan global intimacies that they desire. They also emphasise, however, that these digital flyovers do not remove them from the distinct social dynamics of the capital city’s middle class. Despite the desire of these women to be global cosmopolitans then, they remain embedded in predominantly conservative Roman Catholic and class-divided postcolonial city. In the succeeding two chapters, there is a special emphasis on how the social intimacies that mobile media allow become subject to a transnational form of surveillance brought about by the ubiquity of the same technologies. Tingyu Kang’s chapter, ‘Visualizing Birth Tourism on Social Media: Taiwanese Expectant Mothers in the United States (Chap. 8)’ examines how Taiwanese expectant mothers used mobile media to negotiate the surveilling gaze of family and friends in the homeland while they awaited the birth of their child in Los Angeles. Kang uncovers how their choice of photos and social media apps were linked to how they wished to be perceived and how they used various photo-sharing strategies to avoid the digital gaze on their reproductive bodies. On more public sites such as Facebook, these expectant mothers digitally visualized their spatial experiences through photos of white consumerist locales outside their Chinese-speaking neighborhoods to signify an upper–middle-class status. However, private mobile apps such as LINE were used to keep in touch with spouses, parents, and the extended family who wanted to monitor their reproductive bodies. Here expectant mothers shared photos of ultrasounds, their ‘bump’, and the newborn. Kang points out that not all expectant mothers were happy to share photos as ‘spatial mobility and consumerist pleasure are considered excessive in the medical-moral imagery of ideal expectant motherhood’. Parallel to this is Hong Chen’s research on left-behind children of migrant parents in China. His chapter, ‘Left-Behind Children as Agents: Mobile Media, Transnational Communication and the Mediated Family Gaze’ (Chap. 9) examines how left-behind children from Fuqing, a major illicit migrant-sending area in China perceive the use of mobile media during transnational communications with their migrant parents. Here, Chen develops the concept of the ‘mediated family gaze’ to describe the familial power dynamics and emotional circulation in a technologically mediated context. With data from in-depth interviews with 38 left-behind children

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in Fuqing, China, Chen argues that they are not mere passive objects of migration dominant in most studies. Rather, left-behind children use mobile media to enact agency in shaping the intergenerational transnational relationship with parents working and living in the UK.  The affordances of mobile media enable the leftbehind children to strategize their responses to far-away parents and manage their surveilling gaze. The following two chapters carry on with a concern with transnational families. Their focus, however, moves away from surveillance and is more about the broader implications of mobile media on the relationships of people who try to ‘do family’ in a global context. Cecilia Uy-Tioco and Earvin Cabalquinto’s chapter, ‘Transnational Mobile Carework: Filipino Migrants, Family Intimacy, and Mobile Media’ (Chap. 10) looks at how mobile media facilitate intimacies between elite migrant Filipino adult children in the United States and their aging left-behind parents in the Philippines. Using the concept of ‘mobile carework’ to articulate the intimate, personalised, mobile, and negotiated care practices of transnational family members shaped by the merging of socio-cultural and technological forces, they argue familial intimacy can be forged and embodied through transnational caregiving practices. Because elite Filipino migrants live in polymedia-rich environments, mediated mobile carework is carried out through in the everyday and routinized expressions of care, the microcoordination of care, the management of tensions and conflicts, and the performance of care. Here, we see that familial intimacies in the form of filial piety is enacted despite physical distances. Young A Jung’s chapter ‘Mobile Media and Kirogi Mothers: Place-making and the Reimagination of Transnational Korean Family Intimacies’ (Chap. 11) considers the flipside of transnational families. While scholarship on migration tend to focus on the ways mobile media enable transnational families to flourish, Jung attends to the role ICTs play in the emplacement of migrant families. She examines Korean kirogi (기러기) families, that is, transnational migrant families who split their household for a temporary period so that the children can be educated in an English-speaking country. In particular, she looks at Korean mothers and children living in the Northern Virginia communities of Centreville and McLean with fathers who remain working in South Korea. Although she initially hypothesized that there would be differences between the working-class Centreville and middle-class McLean families, her extensive fieldwork revealed that both groups utilise mobile media technologies to create a sense of belonging and place-making in the United States. In particular, both groups of kirogi mothers use mobile media to navigate the challenges that come with migrant life such as the fulfillment of familial goals, the changing conceptions of family, and the need to cultivate a sense of belonging and community in the place of settlement. To close out the second part and the volume, Ha Hoang looks at the enactment of global social intimacies in a community context. Her chapter, ‘K-Pop Male Androgyny, Mediated Intimacy, and Vietnamese Fandom’ (Chap. 12), focuses on a case of transnational fandom: the Facebook-based ‘passionate’ Vietnamese fan communities of K-Pop star G-Dragon and their responses to his androgynous look. Hoang argues that enabled by mobile media, such as mobile phones, fans are now

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able to seamlessly participate in Facebook fan pages. Through their constant sharing and circulating of idol-related texts and their creation of fan-made media products through mobile phones, their fan-feelings become increasingly intensified and contagious, pulling them emotionally ever closer to the wider K-Pop fandom in the digital world.

1.6 Challenges and Future Directions As part of the Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications series, this volume brings to the forefront new and innovative research by emerging scholars in the field who seek to understand how the popularity of mobile media might shape and transform social intimacies across the region. Although this volume presents a diverse set of perspectives on what we have earlier posited as mobile media and the rise of glocal intimacies in Asia, it is by no means comprehensive. There is still much work that needs to be done, particularly as mobile media become more and more imbricated in the region’s rich and varied forms of everyday social intimate relationships. We would like to end this introductory chapter with four points for reflection that emerged towards the end of the process of putting together this volume. First is that while we opened up our search for contributors to all countries in East/Southeast Asia, it seemed that there was a lack of scholarship, particularly English-language scholarship, in several countries. This was especially the case in Southeast Asia. Research on mobile media and social relationships appears to have concentrated on technologically advanced countries such as South Korea, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan or countries with a history of innovative uses of mobile media technologies such as the Philippines. We of course wanted to receive contributions from countries that are not often written about in global scholarship, such as Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Timor-Leste. But we were also realistic about this because of how these countries have low mobile connectivity. What was more surprising though was that there were very few submissions, if any, on Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Brunei, where mobile penetration rates are over 100% (We Are Social 2019). We are cognisant, however, that this might partly have to do with the limits of our own scholarly networks as the volume editors. This highlights the pressing need to sustain and further strengthen existing transnational linkages amongst mobile media researchers working across the East and especially Southeast Asian regions. One excellent example of this is the Digital Transactions in Asia (DTA) network led by scholars from Australia, Malaysia, and The Philippines (https://digitaltransactionsinasia.home.blog/). At the time of this volume’s publication, DTA would have had its third annual conference of scholars from across the Asia-Pacific. A second reflection point is about how the chapters in this volume converged on a set of qualitative methods meant to explore social intimacies in the context of the everyday, namely in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and ethnographic

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research, including digital ethnography. We contend that this methodological convergence is but apt for a book that showcases the richness in which mobile media have become part of the many ongoing shifts in the social intimacies in Asia. Such qualitative approaches to the everyday are helpful not only in situating people’s mediated relationships within the complex social dynamics that distinguish various social contexts (Miller et al. 2016), but also in revealing what in specific circumstances people take to be common sense or, to put it more clearly, their sense of the common (Silverstone 2007). There are, of course, other methodological approaches that are equally worth pursuing. For example, going against the grain of contemporary interest in big data analytics, one can do small data analytics (see Mayer 2018). This means focusing on digital data sets that subvert the phenomenological logics of big data, such as the intimate archives of families, fans, and marginalised communities mentioned in the contributions in this volume. Doing so will allow for an exploration of how socially intimate relationships can generate data with use values, organisational controls, and ethics of consent that serve as an alternative to those associated with big data. One can also take a critical approach to visualisation techniques, both as regards making sense of and presenting the emerging data on mobile media and social intimacies in Asia (see Kennedy and Hill 2016). Making the data about these changing intimacies potentially more understandable to the broader public opens up the possibility of reshaping how, among other things, counsellors attend to young people and families, policymakers push for legislation protecting women and the LGBT community, and NGOs support the organisation of marginalised groups. Thirdly, we limited our scope to the geographical areas of East and Southeast Asia. As Asia is incredibly diverse in its character and its engagements with mobile media (Lim and Soriano 2016), we thought that this delimitation would make it easier to draw thematic threads across the chapters. Together with East Asia and Southeast Asia, however, South Asia is also one of the three regions in the world with the highest mobile connectivity (We Are Social 2019). Bringing into the discussion South Asia as well as the geographically proximate Pacific Islands would really demonstrate how varied the relationship between mobile media and social intimacies can be in the broader Asian and even Asia-Pacific region. It would also shed light on the many interesting and innovative uses of mobile media in forging intimate relationships happening in the Global South. This should contribute to challenging the idea that the West is that norm and, consequently to the project of decentring media and communications scholarship from the West (Curran and Park 2000). Finally, the populations studied in the chapters in this book have naturally gravitated toward polymedia-enabled users. Yet we know that even the most basic of mobile phones and other ICTs have transformed everyday life among people as evidenced by research on the use of Facebook for finding online friendship and romance in lower class, lower caste India (Arora and Scheiber 2017) or coin-­ operated computers in the slum areas of the Philippines (Soriano et  al. 2018) or working class ICTs such as Little Smart in China (Qiu 2009). Although the smartphone is rapidly being adopted across the Asian region, many places, especially in

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rural areas in developing or underdeveloped countries, continue to be on the wrong side of the digital divide. Despite this, mobile media has already transformed how everyday life and social intimacies are carried out despite ‘good enough access’ (Uy-Tioco 2019). Research on these ‘low tech’ connectivities and how they have transformed social intimacies would allow for comparative studies on the differences and similarities between the information ‘haves’ and ‘have-less’ (Qiu 2009).

References Arora, P., & Scheiber, L. (2017). Slumdog romance: Facebook love and digital privacy at the margins. Media, Culture & Society, 39(3), 408–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717691225. Barker, S., Gill, R., & Harvey, L. (2018). Mediated intimacy: Sex advice in media culture. London: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (2003). Liquid love: On the frailty of human bonds. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (1995). The normal chaos of love. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berlant, L. (1998). Intimacy: A special issue. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 281–288. https://doi. org/10.1086/448875. Blackburn, S. (Ed.). (2001). Love, sex and power: Women in Southeast Asia. Monash: Monash Asia Institute. Chan, M., Chen, H.-T., & Lee, F. L. F. (2017). Examining the roles of mobile and social media in political participation: A cross-national analysis of three Asian societies using a communication mediation approach. New Media & Society, 19(12), 2003–2021. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444816653190. Curran, J., & Park, M.-J. (2000). De-westernizing media studies. Oxon: Routledge. Giddens, A. (1992). The transformation of intimacy: Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. GSMA. (2018). The mobile economy Asia Pacific 2018. Retrieved from: https://www.gsma.com/ asia-pacific/resources/the-mobile-economy-asia-pacific-2018/ Herzfeld, M. (1996). Cultural intimacy: Social poetics in the nation-state. New York, NY: Routledge. Hjorth, L., & Lim, S. S. (2012). Mobile intimacy in an age of affective mobile media. Feminist Media Studies, 12(4), 477–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.741860. Hoang, L. A., & Yeoh, B. (2015). Transnational labour migration, remittances and the changing family in Asia. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, S., Liu, J., & Juhyun, W. (2008). East Asian sexualities: Modernity, gender, and new sexual cultures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jamieson, L. (2011). Intimacy as a concept: Explaining social change in the context of globalisation or another form of ethnocentricism? Sociological Research Online, 16(4), 1–13. https:// doi.org/10.5153/sro.2497. Kennedy, H., & Hill, R. (2016). The pleasure and pain of visualising data in times of data power. Television and New Media, 18(8), 769–782. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476416667823. Lim, S. S., & Soriano, C. R. (Eds.). (2016). Asian perspectives on digital culture. Emerging phenomena, enduring concepts. London/New York: Routledge. Luther, D., & Ung Loh, J. (2019). Queer Asia: Decolonising and reimagining sexuality and gender. London: Zed Books. Madianou, M., & Miller, D. (2012). Migration and new media: Transnational families and polymedia. Abingdon: Routledge. Mayer, V. (2018). Towards a theory of small data: Notes from the field. Paper presented at the School of Media and Communication research seminar series, University of Leeds.

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Miller, D., Costa, E., Sinanan, J., & Haynes, N. (2016). How the world changed social media. London: UCL Press. Park, E., & Lee, S. (2015). Multidimensionality: Redefining the digital divide in the smartphone era. Info, 17(2), 80–96. https://doi.org/10.1108/info-09-2014-0037. Plummer, K. (2003). Intimate citizenship: Private decisions and public dialogues. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Qiu, J. L. (2009). Working class network society: Communication technology and the information have-less in urban China. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Robertson, R. (1994). Globalisation or glocalisation? Journal of International Communication, 1(1), 33–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/13216597.1994.9751780. Rojek, C. (2015). Presumed intimacy: Parasocial interaction in media, society and celebrity culture. Cambridge: Polity. Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and morality: On the rise of the mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity. Schrock, A. R. (2015). Communicative Affordances of Mobile Media: Portability, Availability, Locatability, and Multimediality. International Journal of Communication, 9. 1229–1246. Soriano, C. R., Cao, R. J., & Sison, M. (2018). Experiences of ICT use in shared, public access settings in Philippine slums. Development in Practice, 28(3), 358–373. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09614524.2018.1430122. Uy-Tioco, C. S. (2019). ‘Good enough’ access: Digital inclusion, social stratification, and the reinforcement of class in the Philippines. Communication Research and Practice, 5(2), 156–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2019.1601492. We Are Social. (2019). Digital in 2019. Retrieved from https://wearesocial.com/ global-digital-report-2019 Wong, Y. C., Law, C. K., Fung, J. Y. C., & Lee, V. W. P. (2010). Digital divide and social inclusion: Policy challenge for social development in Hong Kong and South Korea. Journal of Asian Public Policy, 3(1), 37–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/17516231003634161.

Part I

Reconfiguring Local Ties

Chapter 2

‘Now You Can See Who’s Around You’: Negotiating and Regulating Gay Intimacies on Mobile Media in the People’s Republic of China James Cummings

Abstract  This chapter explores relationships between mobile media and social and sexual intimacies for gay men in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I pay particular attention to the location-aware gay dating app Blued and what gay men perceive to be its impacts on their self-understandings and intimate relationships. On one hand, mobile media offer gay men in the PRC pervasive access to one another, engendering feelings of community, belonging, and authenticity. On the other hand, the newfound visibility of gay men online raises fears of being ‘outed’ and the uses to which mobile media are put are the subject of intense debates amongst gay men about ‘in-/appropriate’ forms of social and sexual intimacy. These contradictory dynamics highlight the paradoxical function of mobile media for gay men in the PRC as a space within which intimacies are both negotiated and regulated. Keywords  Sexuality · Gay identities · Same-sex intimacies · Mobile media · China

2.1 Introduction One evening in February 2015, while I was in the natal village of my good friend Xiaomai, we decided to visit a roadside bar that we had spotted earlier in the day on the outskirts of a nearby town. We were both curious about what a ‘night out’ in rural northwest Hainan would entail. At around 10 pm we arrived at the bar and took

J. Cummings (*) Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_2

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a table in the middle of the room. A spinning disco ball shed blue light onto a bare cement floor and white walls flanked by six leatherette booths. We had only been sitting there for around 20  minutes and Xiaomai was already looking bored and agitated. He sat back in his chair, looked around the room, tilted his head towards a group of men standing around a nearby table, and said, ‘Look at him over there, that guy with the tattoo is pretty sexy, but there’s no way any of them are gay’. He surveyed the room once again and began to complain, ‘It’s so boring here. We need some gays!’ Xiaomai pulled out an iPhone 4 with a badly-cracked screen from his pocket and opened his Blued profile. ‘Let’s get some gays to come here, you look too’. I did as I was told. After a five second pause for the app to load, an endless stream of men appeared in the palms of our hands, illuminated, and arranged by their distance from our current location. Our roadside bar was now at the centre of a ‘gay universe’ extending as far as our fingers cared to scroll. As luck would have it, I had already received a message from someone nearby. ‘Ejaculate’, read the message. I showed it to Xiaomai; ‘Ergh! Not him!’ ‘Do you know him?’ I asked, ‘I met up with him once, he took me to a hotel and wanted to fuck me, but I wouldn’t let him; he showed me his cock, but I never touched it’. This vignette highlights the ways in which smartphone apps have become a primary route by which gay men in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) find one another and engage in social and sexual interactions and intimate relationships.1 The use of smartphone dating and social networking apps has become commonplace amongst gay men in the PRC since the emergence of Blued in 2012, a location-­ aware app that boasts 28  million PRC-based users (Blued 2018). This chapter explores the impacts that gay men in the PRC perceive mobile media to have on their everyday lives and intimate relationships with other men. I ask: To what extent are new forms of social and sexual intimacy emerging in relation to mobile media? And how are these negotiated and contested? I argue that information communication technologies (ICTs) play a central role in the construction and performance of gay identities in the PRC. I highlight the way in which Blued’s locative function renders gay men visible to one another offline on the basis of assumed shared sexual identities and suggest that this presents novel opportunities for the formation of intimate relationships. At the same time, this visibility can leave users open to risks of being ‘outed’ in offline contexts in which they otherwise maintain the pretence of heterosexual identities. Additionally, many gay men debate the extent to which Blued should be used in pursuit of casual sexual

 I use ‘gay men’ throughout this chapter to refer to men who describe themselves as ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’ (tongxinglian/同性恋), ‘tongzhi (comrade/同志)’, and ‘in the scene (quannei ren/圈内 人)’. While this risks collapsing nuanced self-categorisations into a single term, for the majority of the men I worked with in Hainan, these terms were perceived as interchangeable. Moreover, most men I worked with in Hainan noted ‘gay’ as their preferred term of self-description (see Bao 2018, pp. 28–32, for more on the politics of terminology in Chinese sexualities research). 1

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encounters or lasting social and emotional-romantic relationships. As such, this chapter highlights the paradoxical nature of mobile media as, at once, a site for the negotiation and regulation of social and sexual intimacies. Data for this chapter was generated during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Hainan, an island province off the south coast of the PRC, from September 2014 to May 2016. The fieldwork included in-depth, qualitative interviews with 31 men aged 18–63 who identified as gay (amongst other terms). These interviews were conducted in both cities and smaller towns, and participants discussed a wide range of issues regarding their self-understandings and everyday lives.2 During my fieldwork, it became evident that mobile media played an important role in participants’ social and sexual interactions with other gay men.

2.2 Sexualities and New Media Over the past three decades, the interrelation of ICTs and sexualities has become an established field of sociological inquiry (Döring 2009). Some scholars have gone so far as to claim that new media ‘appear to be fomenting a new “sexual revolution”, one that is rewriting how we understand what our bodies can “do” and how we comprehend ourselves as sexual beings’ (Nash and Gorman-Murray 2016, p. 353). Scholars working on the intersections of ICTs and same-sex desires, practices, and identities have attested to the proliferation of diverse sexual discourses online and the increased ability of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to find one another and construct myriad forms of intimate social and sexual relationships (Pullen and Cooper 2010). Scholars have documented processes whereby gay bars have been superseded by computer screens as primary sites of social connection and community formation, only for the computer to be side-lined by location-aware smartphone technologies (Gudelunas 2012). As such, sexual identities have become increasingly mobile, no longer confined to the spatial-temporal nexus of night-time leisure spaces or particular urban districts but integrated into itineraries of everyday life (Cockayne and Richardson 2017). For some scholars, this represents the normalisation of dissident sexualities and their integration into cultural mainstreams oriented by neoliberal capitalism (Nash 2013). For others, this is seen to disrupt the naturalised heterosexuality that has historically characterised spaces such as the workplace or public spaces (Roth 2014); it is also seen as signalling the return of a subversive cruising culture amongst gay men (Mowlabocus 2010). This literature has largely focused on Anglophone and European contexts (Szulc 2014). A paucity of work beyond ‘the West’ perpetuates orientalist conceptions of ‘non-Western’ contexts as both technologically and sexually ‘stunted’ (Kuntsman and Al-Qasimi 2012). In reality, the importance of ICTs as tools for information  This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom.

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sharing and community formation is often redoubled in sites beyond the liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America, where heteronormative mainstream media may be heavily censored and hostility towards same-sex desires, practices, and identities may be an everyday reality (Berry et al. 2003; Ong 2017). This can be seen to be the case in the PRC. Despite the 1997 removal of legal stipulations that rendered same-sex sexual activities punishable under the crime of ‘hooliganism’ (liumangzui/流氓罪), and the 2001 de-classification of ‘homosexuality’ (tongxinglian/同性恋) as a mental illness (Wu 2008), state censorship continues to limit mainstream media representations of gender and sexuality to cisgendered, heterosexual relations and activist organisations are closely monitored by the state (Wan 2001). In this context, ICTs operate as privileged sites for the representation of sexual diversity and for the progress of community-building activities (Ho 2010). This said, online content is not beyond the reach of government censors (Shaw and Zhang 2017) and, in recent years, censorship of online media has increased in line with the socially and morally conservative agenda of the current Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping (Ringen 2016). While scholars have recognised the role played by ICTs in the PRC as spaces for the representation of sexual diversity, less attention has been paid to the ways new media are engaged and understood by users themselves, especially mobile media. This chapter contributes to research on the interrelations of sexualities and ICTs by exploring the impacts that gay men in the PRC perceive mobile media to have on their everyday lives and intimate relationships. Exploring these issues offers insights into wider questions concerning paradoxical relationships between technology and power, highlighting the ways in which ICTs enable certain modes of social existence and empowerment while also giving rise to new forms of social regulation and exclusion (Dyer-Witherford 1999). This chapter suggests that mobile media both open up and delimit possibilities for the negotiation of gay identities and intimacies in the PRC.

2.3 Finding Selves, Others, and Sex Online The recent uptake of mobile media by gay men in the PRC is situated within a broader history of interrelations between ICTs and gay identities and intimacies. As a precursor to discussion of mobile media in the following sections, this section offers a brief account of this history as told by participants. Many participants celebrated the way in which the internet offered pervasive access to other men recognisable as ‘gay’. At the same time, it was also through internet searches and online interactions that many participants arrived at understandings of themselves as ‘gay’. As such, this section describes what, in other sociocultural contexts, has been referred to as ‘a technologically mediated reorganisation of the social relations of sexuality’ (Garlick 2011, p. 223)—one in which ICTs are seen to figure sexual identity as a framework for self-understanding and social and sexual interaction.

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The unprecedented access the internet offered to diverse sexual discourses and other men was most clearly articulated by participants old enough to have witnessed the rapid popularisation of the internet in Hainan, and the PRC more broadly, in the late 1990s. This was often narrated as a sexual watershed. As 45-year-old Lu Ge noted while recalling his early social interactions with other gay men: It wasn’t until 1999 that there was internet. I’d already been in Sanya for many years, but I had never met a single person, nor had I gone looking […], there was nothing.3 Later, when the internet arrived, I could get online and I’d often go to an internet café. So, through the internet, I contacted someone else. This was how I met the first person in Sanya. Then, slowly, there were a few more people; slowly, we started meeting up, going out for drinks, chatting, going for food in the evenings; slowly, we got to know each other. This was how it all started.

For Lu Ge, the arrival of the internet marked a fundamental transition from having ‘never met a single person’ and having no means to ‘go looking’ to having relatively easy access to other men seeking men. This access was seen as the catalyst for the emergence of offline social networks and forms of community. This account highlights the ways in which the internet was understood to play a vital role in both the dissemination of diverse sexual discourses and the facilitation of social interactions between gay men. The internet was perceived as opening up an alternative world of sexual and social possibilities, knowledges, and interactions in contrast to an offline context in which discourses of gender and sexuality were largely limited to heterosexual marriage and reproduction. The pivotal role of the internet in facilitating social and sexual interactions between gay men was attested to by both older and younger participants, though with slightly differing emphases.4 While older men tended to narrate the emergence of social networks of gay men both on- and off-line, younger men, having grown up with the internet, emphasised their ‘discovery’ of these networks and their processes of self-labelling as ‘gay’ and/or ‘homosexual’ through their searches for information online. Many of these young men noted feelings of confusion, isolation, and difference in relation to their desires for men during adolescence. In search of guidance, many turned to the internet. 21-year-old Sha Sha recounted: At first, I didn’t know, at first, I used Baidu.5 I felt like I was different from other boys, so I searched on Baidu to see what this inclination meant. So, I looked on Baidu and it came up with ‘homosexual’. So, just like this, I found out that there were other people who were the same as me.

Such accounts were typical amongst younger men, many of whom first engaged with sexual discourses beyond heterosexual marriage and reproduction following fear-driven internet searches for the meanings of their desires for men. Through

 Sanya is a city on Hainan’s south coast.  I place the dividing line between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ participants roughly around age 30. This is not intended as an arbitrary division. Rather, it is based on the disparate experiences these older and younger men had of using ICTs to find and interact with other gay men. 5  Baidu is China’s most popular search engine. 3 4

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these searches, vague notions of sexual ‘inclination’ were reconceptualised as matters of belonging to a collective sexual category: a matter of ‘being homosexual’ or ‘being gay’. In this sense, sexual desires were refigured as sexual identities. These processes can be seen to constitute what Ken Plummer (1995) has called ‘the textual search: a scanning of the stories available to help see who one is’ (p. 8; emphasis in original). In common with accounts offered by older men, here too, the internet was seen as offering access to other men; these others were recognised as ‘the same’— as also belonging to the collective category ‘homosexual’. This identification of others as belonging to shared sexual categories also served to position others as potential sexual partners. Many participants had their first sexual experiences with men following the sorts of internet searches and online interactions described above. Some, however, had engaged in sex with men prior to the popularisation of ICTs. In a group interview, 29-year-old Ah Gang and 26-year-old Xiao Pang contrasted pre-internet sexual encounters with the contemporary ability to find partners online: Ah Gang: Even at High School, I found that some of my classmates… back then I wasn’t certain about myself, but I could sense them. Before there were these softwares, no apps, these things, you could only go by your senses. […] I had a classmate, neither of us was sure, but one night we had bodily contact, we kissed; the next day we just went to class. […]. Xiao Pang: I’ve spoken to some middle-aged men, they said that in the past they thought that they were just interested in men’s bodies; it was only after they started to use the internet that they would search…

This discussion suggests the ways in which the ability to find sexual partners through ICTs not only enabled sexual encounters but altered the meanings of sex between men and the identities that men brought with them to their sexual encounters. Prior to the arrival of ICTs, sex between men appeared to be characterised by various forms of ambiguous knowledge based on bodily perceptiveness. Ah Gang described this as ‘going by your senses’. These sexual encounters were figured as coincidental and circumstantial, not necessarily as conferring sexual identities. As Ah Gang recalled, when he and his classmate shared ‘bodily contact’ ‘neither of [them] was sure’. Xiao Pang reiterated this sense of uncertainty as he contrasted being ‘just interested in men’s bodies’ with forms of knowledge acquired through internet searches. Today, as men meet one another through ICTs, their experiences contrast with pre-internet narratives of ambiguous sexual encounters. For these men, the mere fact of presence on a particular website or app allowed for the seemingly self-­ evident identification of others as ‘gay’. As 32-year-old Da Zhu commented: If you meet someone in real life, in daily interactions, then at first you don’t know if they are gay, but if it’s on some sort of software then it’s already very clear, they just are […] If you meet someone through software then, to put it simply, from the first time you see them you’re like, ‘ok, I know that this person is gay’ and you will think about this person from a gay perspective.

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Da Zhu understood ‘softwares’ as digital spaces within which presence conferred sexual identity. Noting the similar function of the UK-based app Gaydar, Sharif Mowlabocus (2010) comments that ‘the user profile represents […] a space where the natural assumption is that you are gay’ (p. 93, emphasis in original). For Da Zhu, the mere fact of having met someone ‘on some sort of software’ allowed you to ‘know that this person is gay’—being online, here, was equated with ‘being gay’. It is difficult to overstate the central role that most participants attributed to the internet and ICTs in their arrival at understandings of themselves and others as ‘gay’, in facilitating their access to other gay men, in allowing for the emergence of offline social networks and forms of community and in enabling sexual encounters in which the identification of sexual partners as ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ was an a priori assumption. These more general impacts of ICTs on participants’ everyday lives and self-understandings can be seen to frame relationships between mobile media and social and sexual intimacies. These are discussed over the following sections.

2.4 Mobile, Locative Media and Embodied-Spatial Intimacies It is implicit in the above discussion that when participants discussed ‘the internet’ (wangluo/网络), they often referred to both earlier computer-based websites and contemporary smartphone apps. As such, the arrival of mobile media did not mark a radical break with the forms of social and sexual intimacy understood as more generally facilitated by the ability to find other gay men online. However, mobile, location-aware apps, such as Blued, differed from computer-based technologies in that other gay men are shown to exist not only online but also within one’s immediate offline vicinity. Discussing transitions from computer-based to mobile media, Jason Farman (2012) suggests that ‘[s]ince a sense of intimacy has been produced in online social media, the move to locative social media transforms the metaphor of closeness into a geographical actualization’ (p. 67). Such processes of ‘geographical actualization’ can be seen to have produced new forms of social and sexual intimacy. At the same time, this has raised new risks of being ‘outed’ within offline contexts. Recalling his transition from computer-based to smartphone interactions, 27-year-old Xiao Lei noted: Xiao Lei: I went to an internet cafe to log on to this website, so slowly, I learned that: ‘oh, this is gay’. At first it was very difficult; I felt like I was a pervert. […] Before I found out that there were so many people like this all around me, I thought that there was only me […] I hadn’t found out that anyone around you might potentially be… James: What sort of information did you find on that website? Xiao Lei: […] I can’t remember exactly; it’s been a long time since I’ve logged on. James: Why is that?

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Echoing accounts in the previous section, Xiao Lei described a shift, facilitated by his online searches, from feelings of isolation and ‘perversion’ to ‘learn[ing] that … this is gay’. This process centred on his realisation that there ‘were so many people like this all around [him]’. In his transition from computer-based websites to the mobile, locative app Blued, the spatiality and perceptibility of other gay men ‘all around’ was fundamentally altered. Whereas computer-based technologies could be seen to garner social intimacies invested in a shared sense of ‘being gay’, and to enable the perception that ‘anyone around you might potentially be [gay]’, through Blued, this potential presence of other gay men was realised as the concrete ability to ‘see who’s around you’. Xiao Lei’s account evidences the ways in which, through mobile locative media, gay men become visible to one another as embodied subjects—actual individuals occupying physical, offline spaces and situated in relations of geographic proximity. Blued not only allows users to perceive one another’s offline geographic locations but also offers various additional forms of information that many participants saw as enabling social and sexual intimacies both on- and off-line. Through a combination of visual and textual data, the app’s users provide one another with information concerning their appearance, height, weight, and preferred sex role. Some participants celebrated the availability of this information on Blued, in contrast with the earlier exchange of information through computer-based technologies and interactions. Echoing this celebratory stance, 39-year-old Xi Peng said, Blued is a wonderful invention! In the past in chatrooms you had to chat, like: ‘hello’, ‘oh, hello’, ‘where are you?’, ‘what do you look like?’ You couldn’t send photos in chatrooms, you could ask, ‘what do you look like?’ and they’d say, ‘I’m not bad’. What an evasive expression! […] In the past you would ask about someone’s ‘situation’,6 […] but now everything is there on your profile.

Blued’s locative function situates users in relations of proximity in offline, physical spaces. As Xi Peng suggested, it circumvents the need for users to ask one another ‘where are you?’ Additionally, Blued was seen to circumvent the need to ask, ‘what do you look like?’ The user profile, with its thumbnail image, brings the visible body into online interactions, rendering physical appearance immediately evident. Indeed, along with the transition from computer-based technologies to mobile media, visual images can be seen to have become central to the negotiation of social and sexual intimacies (Blackwell et al. 2015). Some participants even claimed that their willingness to interact with others on Blued was dependent on whether these others used profile pictures. For 36-year-old Ah Ben,

 ‘Situation’ is generally used to refer to appearance, height, weight, body type, preferred sexual role, and geographic location. 6

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The only thing you have is that one photo; if you don’t have a photo then people won’t even look at you. This is a necessity, […] If they don’t have a profile picture then I’m not willing to talk with them.

The forms of geographic and visual information that Blued provides are intimately intertwined, and the dynamics of embodied-spatial intimacy that the app opens up can be seen to depend upon particular forms of online self-­presentation. In order to ‘see what handsome guys are in the area’, to quote Xiao Lei earlier, images visible on Blued’s profile grid must correspond to the offline appearances of profile owners. Put simply, for Blued to operate as a ‘map’ of gay men in the local area, users must use their own photos. The question of whether or not participants used their own photos on their Blued profiles, and whether or not they expected others to do so, was highly contentious and there were both perceived benefits and dangers involved in doing so. 23-year-old Ah Run exemplified these issues: Ah Run: Now that I’ve changed my profile picture to my own photo, I feel very happy. If someone messages me, it means that they’ve seen my photo and think I’m ok, that’s why they’re chatting to me, they not just randomly messaging. James: Why didn’t you use your own photo in the past? Ah Run: I was afraid that someone might see my photo and then recognise me. […] A lot of people are really afraid of using their own photo. [Where I work], a lot of us are gay, there must over 20 gays. But they are all very afraid of using their own photo. I find it really depressing now because they can see me, but I can’t see their existence; they could be the person sitting right next to you. I do feel really uncomfortable.

Ah Run suggested that using his own photo on Blued facilitated forms of authentic intimacy, as he saw his online interactions with other men as unfolding on the basis of genuine attraction. However, he also recognised that using his own photos on the app rendered him visible to others as ‘gay’ within the offline space of his workplace. Many participants feared such a potential ‘outing’ and the damage this could cause to their professional, social, and familial relationships. While Ah Run’s visibility as ‘gay’ to other men, who remained unidentifiable to him, left him feeling ‘depressed’ and ‘uncomfortable’, the benefits of using his own photo on Blued were seen to outweigh the risks. Many other men, however, cited such fears of exposure as the primary reason for choosing not to use their own photos on the app. As 24-year old Liang Zongwei noted: There are people who don’t put their own photos on there, they will threaten you. I have a friend who has been threatened, someone threatened to expose him in his work. It was one of his colleagues.

The uneven use of images on Blued that renders men visible offline as ‘gay’ leaves those who do use their own photos open to exposure and blackmail. It is important to note, therefore, that while many participants celebrated the shift to mobile media as a matter of rendering gay men visible to one another within offline spaces, many were also fearful of the potential repercussions of this visibility. Poignantly, only 12 out of 31 participants presented themselves on Blued using their own photos.

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This section has highlighted some impacts that the shift from computer-based technologies to mobile media had on participants’ intimate social and sexual relationships. To an extent, these represent a continuation of dynamics instigated by the popularisation of ICTs more broadly, centring on increasing connectivity between men recognising one another as ‘gay’. However, as mobile, locative media disrupt the division of virtual and physical spaces, gay men become able to recognise one another as co-present and ‘close’ with everyday offline spaces. This co-presence can facilitate new forms of social and sexual intimacy invested in a sense of geographic ‘closeness’; however, this also generates fears of being ‘outed’. In addition, as new forms of proximity and connectivity are established between gay men, new points of conflict also arise concerning ‘in-/appropriate’ sexual and social conduct. These are discussed in the following section.

2.5 Mobile Media and Contested Sexual Intimacies Mobile media can be seen to locate gay men on-and-off-line within a world in which other gay men are present, visible, and readily accessible. Many participants, however, contested the meanings of this presence, visibility, and access. They voiced concerns about the ‘in-/appropriateness’ of various intimate relationships that were seen as facilitated by mobile media. In other cultural contexts (largely in the UK and in the USA), scholars have pointed to the ways in which discourses of sexual ‘conservatism’ have, at times, been appropriated by gay men and lesbians in order to construct sexual identities that are aligned with dominant standards of sexual ‘morality’ (Duggan 2002; Klesse 2007). Similar dynamics could be seen to be at work as participants expressed concerns over the extent to which Blued facilitated casual sexual encounters. These were often denigrated in contrast to what were seen as more ‘meaningful’ social and romantic-emotional relationships. 31-year-old Jiang Quan exemplified distinctions between social and sexual interactions as he discussed uses of Blued: For most people, that app is used for hook ups […]. There are few people who are looking to chat and make friends, more sincere people, because it seems that it hasn’t really become a sort of culture, it is just more about finding a release for your desires.

Jiang Quan distinguished between the use of Blued ‘for hook-ups’ (yuepao/约炮) and ‘to chat and make friends’, valorising the latter as the preference of ‘more sincere people’, and as indicative of the emergence of ‘a sort of culture’. ‘Hook-ups’, in contrast, were figured as ‘just more about finding a release for your desires’ and were reduced to a solely sexual interaction driven by assumed innate ‘desires’. This sexual/social binary and the rejection of ‘hook ups’ as lacking social meaning were characteristic of the ways that many participants discussed the pervasive access to other gay men offered by mobile media. These discourses represented struggles to establish the primary meanings and functions of mobile media for gay men.

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For many participants, the dominant uses to which Blued was put were seen to reflect a general state of affairs within the gay community. 18-year-old Xiao Qiao described these issues as he discussed coming into ‘the gay scene’ through ‘softwares’: James: So, after you came into this scene, what impression did you have of it? Xiao Qiao: Really messed-up, messed-up because software and the internet are very developed now, there are a lot of people hooking up there. But, of course, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some people who are really serious about these things. But overall, because those guys that hook up often, they’re more active, so it makes you feel that this scene is pretty messed-up. It’s like, for those guys, in their minds, it’s just a kind of fun.

While Jiang Quan’s earlier valorisation of the use of Blued ‘to chat and make friends’ was implicit, many participants more resolutely condemned the use of mobile media in pursuit of ‘hook ups’. Such condemnation of ‘hook ups’ often took the form of their definition as ‘messed up’ (luan/乱), a pervasive term that scholars have also translated as ‘chaotic’ (Latham 2000). This notion of ‘chaos’ has its roots in Communist Party political discourse and ideology (Latham 2000). ‘Messed-up’ is used extensively by gay men in the PRC to lambast what are seen as sexually ‘excessive’ practices (Jones 2007). As Xiao Qiao continued, he highlighted the socio-political undertones of the concept of ‘messed-up’, suggesting that the ways in which gay men use mobile media could contribute to either the regulation or ‘pollution’ of ‘society’: [Blued] allows me to make more friends in the scene, and for the sake of finding a boyfriend I will continue using it. I think there are positives and negatives to this app. The positive thing is that you can make a lot of friends on it, and maybe you’ll meet your boyfriend. But you also ease your loneliness though hook-ups, through sexual means, so it pollutes society. […] Polluted is like really messed-up.

The dominant uses of Blued, which for Xiao Qiao, as for many participants, appeared a matter of choice between the pursuit of ‘friends’ and/or a ‘boyfriend’ or the pursuit of ‘hook-ups’, were seen to reflect the position of gay men within ‘society’. Xiao Qiao deployed popular discourses that associate sexual ‘conservatism’ with social order (Sigley 2006) as he suggested that ‘hook ups … pollute [...] society’. In contrast, the use of Blued to find ‘friends’ and/or a ‘boyfriend’ becomes associated with social stability and ‘cleanliness’. Other participants used similar discourses to condemn the use of Blued to facilitate ‘hook ups’. As 63-year-old Da Jun put it, I know two or three guys, they’re just online every day, on Blued, fishing for people. Sometimes when they’ve finished work and had dinner, they arrange to meet one, two, three, even four people! […] I think it’s scary, it’s pretty terrifying. This kind of life, I think it’s like living in a sewer, a dustbin.

The use of discourses of ‘dirt’ and ‘pollution’ to describe the ways in which Blued was seen to facilitate casual sexual encounters constructs ‘hook ups’ as a form of ‘inappropriate’ and ‘anti-social’ behaviour (Douglas 2002 [1966]). Such accounts can be seen to draw on broader fields of sexual discourses, including those of AIDS prevention, the delimitation of sex to private spaces, and the denigration of sex

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work. Scholars have noted that these discourses serve to construct and regulate ‘in−/ appropriate’ sexualities in the contemporary PRC (Jones 2007; Rofel and He 2010). It is important to note that these contestations concerned the primary meanings and functions of mobile media for gay men; participants who valorised the use of Blued as a tool for seeking ‘friendships’ and ‘emotional relationships’ did not necessarily argue that the app should not also facilitate casual sexual relationships. Rather, it was argued that ‘hook ups’ should be kept to a minimum and should be one facet of a more diverse range of social and sexual relationships facilitated by mobile media. Later on in our interview, Xiao Qiao added: When you’re lonely you can hook-up with someone, but you shouldn’t make it too often, like hooking-up every day, that’s really messed up.

This notion of maintaining an ‘appropriate’ balance between various ways in which Blued was used was elaborated by Lu Ge as he contrasted men whose use of ‘software’ was limited to the pursuit of ‘hook ups’ with men who engage in diverse social interactions: In this scene, there are those who often hang out at the club, they come and hang out, they have a public life […], they meet people, meet friends, go on dates, this is all normal […]. Then there are some who are invisible, we jokingly call them ‘hidden whores’, it means someone who is also looking for men, but they don’t hang out and live publicly, they just sneak around contacting people individually online, they’ll contact you through the internet, maybe meet up and have a one night stand […] Of course, everyone does these things, but some guys don’t come and hang out, they just use those softwares to hook-up with people, they don’t use them to make friends.

Lu Ge conceded that the facilitation of ‘hook ups’ was an important function of mobile media for many gay men. He himself admitted that ‘everyone does these things’. However, he maintained that this should not be the sole use to which ‘softwares’ are put. He divided men ‘in this scene’ into two groups: ‘those who often hang out’ and those who ‘just sneak around contacting people online’. The former was seen to have ‘a public life’ and their activities were defined as ‘normal’; the latter were referred to as ‘hidden whores’ (anchang/暗娼)—a comical, though derogatory, term also used by other participants. The majority of participants held similar views to Lu Ge, noting that Blued can be used in pursuit of ‘hook ups’, while arguing that this should form one aspect of its use alongside what were seen as ‘normal’ activities, such as the pursuit of friendship and romantic relationships. For most participants, the extent to which Blued was used in pursuit of ‘hook ups’ was seen as a matter of moral-ethical choice. For some, however, the app was seen as a space that fundamentally oriented interactions between men towards sex. Earlier in this chapter, Da Zhu recounted the ways in which ICTs enable men to perceive each other from what he called ‘a gay perspective’. As he continued, he suggested that this ‘gay perspective’ necessarily orients interactions towards sex: I’ve never used softwares to look for a partner […] I’ve thought about why there are people who don’t like to use softwares, it’s because they what to find people who are the same […] but they don’t want to be so clear about who that person is. People like that feeling of having first been friends and then, at some point, finding out: ‘hey, I like you, you like me, we’re

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both the same kind of person’. This feeling is different from knowing that someone is gay from the first time that you meet; that’s too purposeful […] In my opinion, Blued feels more like a hunting ground; you expose yourself on there, you put yourself on there and if someone sees you and thinks you’re suitable then, OK, you can meet up and [have sex].

As discussed earlier, many participants valorised the assumed ‘clarity’ and ‘certainty’ of sexual identities in online interaction. However, here, Da Zhu lamented the assumed self-evidence of ‘being gay’ online, suggesting that interactions on Blued between men aware of the commonality of their sexual identities were curtailed by this knowledge. For Da Zhu, viewing someone ‘from a gay perspective’ oriented interaction towards sex and limited intimacy to a concern for one’s ‘suitability’  – a synonym for ‘attractiveness’. As such, he saw Blued as a ‘hunting ground’ on which ‘you expose yourself’. Twenty-eight-year-old Chen Chen raised similar concerns: Now people really depend on their mobile phones and this has sped-up the rhythm of everything. […] To make things quicker, more efficient, people are in the habit of being like, ‘show me your photo, if you’re suitable let’s get into bed’. If someone isn’t suitable, then they go looking for the next person. It’s already got to the point now that I feel like if you are looking for a boyfriend, other people are just looking to satisfy their sexual desire. I don’t even think there is any way that my soul can attract someone.

For Chen Chen, smartphone technologies did not only facilitate sexual encounters between men. They have also rendered rapid, casual sex a dominant mode of interaction, at the expense of long-term romantic relationships. In common with Da Zhu above, Chen Chen saw the ‘directness’, ‘efficiency’, and ‘purposefulness’ of interactions between gay men on mobile media as orienting interactions towards fleeting and assumed ‘meaningless’ sexual encounters. In both these accounts, there is clearly a lament about ‘the reduction of the virtual gay male body to that of an object of desire […] at the very point at which [gay men] are rendering themselves visible and forming digital self-representations’ (Mowlabocus 2010, p. 94). As a final point, it should be noted that, while disapproval of the use of Blued in pursuit of ‘hook ups’ was pervasive amongst participants, not all men saw ‘hook ups’ as a form of ‘anti-social’ intimacy. Meng Xi, for example, ascribed a sense of cultural value and authenticity to such uses of Blued: Meng Xi: There are people who say on Blued that they’re not looking for hook-ups, ‘I don’t hook up! Don’t hook up!’ If you don’t hook up, what are you looking to do on there? Haha! […]. James: Why do so many people say, ‘I don’t hook up’? Meng Xi: They’re so pretentious! I was chatting about this with some friends and they said I’ve got a vicious tongue, haha! I’m only saying out loud what you want to say in your head. We’ve seen it all; we’re not innocent and we don’t pretend to be. Those that pretend to be innocent, they’re all clean and pure on the outside, but underneath they’re no better than anyone else. In this scene of ours, there’s no such thing as innocence, haha!

In common with excerpts above, Meng Xi defined the primary function of Blued as the facilitation of ‘hook ups’. However, in contrast, Meng Xi celebrated this use of the app as a sexual-cultural practice that conferred belonging to ‘this scene of ours’.

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For him, the denial of having used Blued to ‘hook up’ was a mark of inauthenticity; as he put it: ‘in this scene of ours there is no such thing as innocence’. Men who claimed such ‘innocence’ were seen as ‘pretentious’, while those who a­ cknowledged their use of the app to ‘hook up’—those who ‘are not innocent and don’t pretend to be’—were recognised as authentic members of ‘the scene’. This can be seen to impute a shared sense of social intimacy and group belonging articulated through the construction of ‘hook ups’ as a shared cultural practice. This section has explored the forms of intimacy that the pervasive presence of gay men on-and-off-line was seen to enable and the ways in which such intimacies were differentially valued. Almost all participants recognised the ubiquitous use of Blued in pursuit of ‘hook ups’ and contrasted this with uses of the app to find ‘friendship’ and ‘romantic’ relationships. These latter forms of intimacy were often seen as more ‘meaningful’ and were even said, by some, to signal the emergence of ‘a kind of culture’. ‘Hook ups’, on the other hand, were largely regarded as fleeting, anti-social, and even ‘dirty’. In this sense, to the extent that mobile media was seen to facilitate casual sexual relationships, it was seen as a threat to ‘meaningful’ intimate relationships and to the construction of ‘being gay’ as a cultural and affective, rather than solely sexual, identity.

2.6 Conclusion Research on the interrelationships of mobile media and sexuality has suggested that ‘technology-induced shifts in the notions of “nearby”, “close”, or “intimate” make a difference for the very nature of contemporary intimacy’ (Stempfhuber and Liegl 2016, p. 53). This chapter has explored how these dynamics are unfolding for gay men in the PRC. The negotiation of same-sex intimacies through mobile media in the PRC should be understood in the context of wider historical shifts in same-sex desires, practices, and identities brought about by the popularisation of ICTs more generally. These technologies allow gay men to find one another and offer access to diverse sexual discourses that shape what it means to ‘be gay’. The shift from computer-­based to mobile media both continues and alters these dynamics. Location-aware smartphone apps map the virtual presence of gay men onto physical spaces. As such, sexual and social intimacies become intertwined with geographic proximities. While these processes re-locate gay men from online to offline spaces, they also involve the presentation of bodies online through the use of profile pictures. This visibility of gay men on-and-off-line has broadened the possibilities for social and sexual intimacies. However, along with these emergent possibilities come points of fear, contestation, and regulation concerning the risk of being ‘outed’ and intense debates about what are seen as ‘in-/appropriate’ form of social and sexual conduct. These issues highlight the paradoxical role of mobile media in the lives of gay men as spaces for both the negotiation and regulation of social and sexual intimacies.

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While there is much crossover between these dynamics and those observed in ‘Western’ contexts, it is important to recognise that these processes are shaped by the socio-cultural and political specificities of life in the PRC. This is evident in the fears that many participants expressed regarding the use of their own photos on Blued, the risks of being ‘outed’ that this entailed, and the potential repercussions of this for their social, professional, and familial relationships. Further, many participants drew on discourses of ‘chaos’, ‘social order’ and ‘hygiene’ to articulate ‘in-/appropriate’ forms of intimacy. These discourses are derived from state-­political rhetoric and have particular cultural and affective resonance in the PRC.  Future research should seek to further elaborate the socio-cultural and political specificity of relationships between mobile media and same-sex intimacies in the PRC.

References Bao, H. (2018). Queer commerades: Gay identity and tongzhi activist in postsocialist China. Copenhagen: NISA Press. Berry, C., Martin, F., & Yue, A. (2003). Mobile cultures: New media in queer Asia. Durham: Duke University Press. Blackwell, C., Brinholtz, J., & Abbott, C. (2015). Seeing and being seen: Co-situation and impression formation using grindr, a location-aware gay dating app. New Media and Society, 17(7), 1117–1136. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814521595. Blued (2018, January 11). About Us. Retrieved from https://www.blued.com/cn/aboutus.html#intro Cockayne, D., & Richardson, L. (2017). Queering code/space: The co-production of sociosexual codes and digital technologies. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(11), 1642–1658. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/0966369X.2017.1339672. Döring, N. (2009). The internet’s impact on sexuality: A critical review of 15 years of research. Computers in Human Behaviour, 25(5), 1089–1101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2009.04.003. Douglas, M. (2002 [1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: Routledge. Duggan, L. (2002). The new homonormativity: The sexual politics of neoliberalism. In R.  Castronovo & D.  Nelson (Eds.), Materializing democracy: Toward a revitalized cultural politics (pp. 175–194). Durham: Duke University Press. Dyer-Witherford, N. (1999). Cyber-Marx: Cycles and circuits of struggle in high technology capitalism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Farman, J.  (2012). Mobile interface theory: Embodied space and locative media. New  York: Routledge. Garlick, S. (2011). A new sexual revolution? Critical theory, pornography, and the internet. Candian Review of Sociology, 48(3), 221–239. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-618X.2011.01264.x. Gudelunas, D. (2012). There’s an app for that: The uses and gratifications of online social networks for gay men. Sexuality & Culture, 16(4), 347–365. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-012-9127-4. Ho, L. W. (2010). Gay and lesbian subculture in urban China. Abingdon: Routledge. Jones, R. (2007). Imagined comrades and imaginary protections: Identity, community and sexual risk among men who have sex with men in China. Journal of Homosexuality, 53(3), 83–115. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v53n03_06. Klesse, C. (2007). The spectre of promiscuity: Gay male and bisexual non-monogamies and polyamories. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

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Kuntsman, A., & Al-Qasimi, N. (2012). Introduction: Queering Middle Eastern cyberspaces. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 8(3), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.2979/ jmiddeastwomstud.8.3.1. Latham, K. (2000). Nothing but the truth: News media, power and hegemony in South China. The China Quarterly, 163, 633–654. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741000014594. Mowlabocus, S. (2010). Gaydar culture: Gay men, technology and embodiment in the digital age. London: Routledge. Nash, C. (2013). The age of the ‘Post-Mo’? Toronto’s gay village and a new generation. Geoforum, 49, 243–252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.11.023. Nash, C., & Gorman-Murray, A. (2016). Digital sexualities: Section introduction. In G. Brown & K. Browne (Eds.), The Routledge research companion to geographies of sex and sexualities (pp. 353–357). Oxon: Routledge. Ong, J.  (2017). Queer cosmopolitanism in the disaster zone: ‘My Grindr became the United Nations’. International Communication Gazette, 79(6–7), 656–673. https://doi. org/10.1177/1748048517727177. Plummer, K. (1995). Telling sexual stories: Power, change and social worlds. London: Routledge. Pullen, C., & Cooper, M. (2010). LGBT identity and online new media. Oxon: Routledge. Ringen, S. (2016). The perfect dictatorship: China in the 21st century. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Rofel, L., & He, X. (2010). ‘I am AIDS’: Living with HIV/AIDS in China. Positions, 18(2), 511– 536. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2010-012. Roth, Y. (2014). Locating the ‘Scruff Guy’: Theorizing body and space in gay geosocial media. International Journal of Communication, 8, 2113–2133. 1932–8036/20140005. Shaw, G., & Zhang, X. (2017). Cyberspace and gay rights in a digital China: Queer documentary filmmaking under state censorship. China Information, 32(2), 270–292. https://doi.org/10.117 7/0920203X17734134. Sigley, G. (2006). Sex, politics, and the policing of virtue in the People’s Republic of China. In E. Jeffreys (Ed.), Sex and sexuality in China (pp. 43–61). Oxon: Routledge. Stempfhuber, M., & Liegl, M. (2016). Intimacy mobilized: Hook-up practices in the location-­ based social network grindr. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 41, 51–70. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11614-016-0189-7. Szulc, L. (2014). The geography of LGBTQ internet studies. International Journal of Communication, 8, 2927–2931. 1932-8036/2014BKR0009. Wan, Y. (2001). Becoming a gay activist in contemporary China. Journal of Homosexuality, 40(3– 4), 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v40n03_02. Wu, J.  (2008). From ‘long yang’ and ‘dui shi’ to tongzhi: Homosexuality in China. Journal of Lesbian and Gay Psychotherapy, 7(1–2), 117–143. https://doi.org/10.1300/J236v07n01_08.

Chapter 3

Networked Individualism and Networked Families in Malaysia Julian Hopkins

Abstract This chapter interrogates the theory of networked individualism by focusing on families’ use of social media and messaging apps in Malaysia. In the first instance, networked individualism posits urbanisation, geographical, and social mobility as laying the foundations for the development of ego-centred networks. These factors are said to weaken family and community cohesiveness rooted in shared locality, experiences and social connections. There is a tension in the theory, however, as the same information and communication technologies that are seen to be intensifying the effects of these social changes are also noted to be instrumental in maintaining the relevance of families. This can be seen primarily through their use of the internet and mobile phones to maintain supportive and affective ties. Networked individualism has a respectable history of empirical support, but mostly in a north American context. This chapter draws upon data from Malaysia in order to contribute to the debate. It focuses in particular on the family, noting that patterns of multigenerational households and strong family orientations demonstrate how uses of social media and messaging apps are embedded in sociocultural values that tend to counterbalance the individualistic choices implicit in networked individualism. That said, there are also examples of Malaysians using social media and messaging apps to separate themselves from the influence of their families. Keywords  Family · Networked individualism · Messaging · Social media · Malaysia

J. Hopkins (*) Monash University Malaysia, Subang Jaya, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_3

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3.1 Introduction Recent scholarship has highlighted the early adoption and variety of uses of social and mobile media in Asia (Hjorth and Khoo 2015). Together with this, other works have advised against homogenising ‘Asian’ experiences with these technologies by foregrounding local and regional contexts (Abbott 2015; Lim and Soriano 2016). Such an emphasis on the local and everyday influences on social and mobile media users means considering the sociocultural contexts that they operate in and contrasting these with social media’s transnational global forms, genres, and practices. By paying greater attention to how and why users choose between and engage with different social and mobile media, we can be better informed about the role of mediatised interpersonal relations in forming new sociocultural contexts. This chapter discusses everyday uses of social media and messaging apps (SMMA) by Malaysians with their close family. Malaysia consistently ranks in the top three nations of Southeast Asia in terms of household internet access and mobile subscriptions (ITU/World Bank 2017). In effect, over three-quarters of Malaysians are internet users, of which almost 90% use a smartphone with mobile broadband (MCMC 2017). Most Malaysians thus live in a ‘polymedia’ environment (Madianou and Miller 2013), where personal, emotional and affective factors are more likely to guide users’ media communication choices, rather than financial circumstances or technological access. The cables and masts that form the material backbone of SMMA are part of the rapid infrastructural change that has marked Malaysia’s economic development since its independence in 1957. Rapid urbanisation, increases in car ownership, and social mobility are also features of this development. The theory of ‘networked individualism’ argues that these changes are complemented by information communication technologies (ICT), resulting in family, local community, and the workplace becoming displaced as the centripetal organising force for individuals’ social life (Rainie and Wellman 2012, p. 6). However, there is also a tension in this theory between the ways in which it argues that SMMA can be used to sustain family networks in the face of urbanisation and delocalising, while also suggesting an individualisation and move away from family cohesiveness and solidarity. The importance of locality in the accounts of networked individualism also means that transnational families present an opportunity to explore how these boundaries are challenged by digital media use (Yoon 2016a, p. 106). In effect, these boundaries are increasingly framed by communicative affordances and networked individualism can be interrogated by looking at other contexts apart from the USA and Canada where most of the empirical data supporting it has been collected. There are also differences in the use of social media and messaging apps between countries, and Yu et al. (2017) note the large difference between the use of messaging apps between the USA and China. Such a difference is also present in Malaysia where 96.3% use over-the-top (OTT) messaging platforms such as WhatsApp that are provided by third parties other than mobile operators (MCMC 2017). In contrast, only 22% use WhatsApp in the USA; h­ owever,

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it is relevant to note a large ethnic use gap, with 49% of Hispanics using WhatsApp in the USA compared to 14% of whites and 21% of blacks (Smith and  Anderson 2018). As access to a variety of communication choices increases, more studies on how they are used can illuminate their integration into everyday family practices. Rural Taiwanese were found to be more likely to use mobile phones to communicate with family and relatives, compared to using email and instant messaging for non-kin and close friends (Tseng and Hsieh 2015). Similarly, Wang et al. (2015) found a preference for face-to-face and landline contact by Singaporean students to communicate with their strong ties, concluding that ‘different kinds of communication channels are suited for maintaining different kinds of social ties’ (p. 1199). Since these studies were conducted, uses of social media and messaging apps have increased. The data used in this chapter found that in the case of Malaysia, WhatsApp was preferred for communication with close family by more than 80% of the respondents. There was a tendency, however, to switch to using Facebook for communication with extended family and acquaintances (Hopkins and Tan 2018). In analysing transnational families’ practices, Yoon (2016a) describes the smartphone as an assemblage that involves ‘earlier media forms and experiences and … [is] contextualised in relation to other ICTs’ (p. 95). An assemblage is a dynamic cluster of interlocking mechanisms, with components connected through causal relations, and where agency is distributed across the components and not assumed to lie solely with humans (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 97–98). They are relatively stabilised but subject to change through deterritorialising forces such as those that ‘destabilize spatial boundaries or increase internal heterogeneity [for example…] communication technology … which blur[s] spatial boundaries of social entities by eliminating the need for co-presence’ (DeLanda 2006, p.  13). DeLanda also discusses ‘social assemblages’—such as families—and if we consider smartphones as ‘tools [that] exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 99), we can understand that the relationship of family practices and social and mobile media practices to be mutually constitutive. Many studies of the uses of SMMA in families discuss transnational contexts (e.g. Madianou 2016; Nedelcu and Wyss 2016), perhaps because it is in this context that the value of SMMA to a family are the most evident. The same insights can also be brought closer to home to see how social and mobile media help families on a daily basis to maintain their cohesiveness and to engage in practices that constitute ‘doing family’ (Morgan 2011). This chapter draws upon 19 in-depth interviews to look at intra-family uses of SMMA within Malaysia, although there are some transnational aspects that reflect the role migration plays in many Malaysians’ lives. It shows how interpersonal interactions on social and mobile media provide emotional and practical support, and everyday logistical microcoordination (Ling 2012) is common. Respondents also reported coordinating choices of messaging apps with their family, and there was a process of generational sharing with younger family members passing on their used devices and teaching skills to older generations. The group function in WhatsApp was also important in separating out different family groups, managing weaker and stronger ties and tensions in the family. Regarding

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the use of Facebook, ‘context collapse’ (Boyd 2011; Wesch 2009) was reported and platform group functions were used to exclude families from some areas of participants’ lives in order to manage expectations and social conservatism. These results tend to support the underlying principles of networked individualism but suggest that some of the discussions of networked individualism may overemphasise technical determinism—particularly with regard to the centrality of family in different sociocultural contexts.

3.2 Networked Individualism and ‘Doing Family’ The theory of networked individualism contrasts a pre-WW2 Northern American context where ‘the vast majority of connections were with strong ties with whom [people] had much in common’ (Quan-Haase et al. 2018, p. 62) with the current situation, and places ‘the person [as] the focus: not the family, not the work unit, not the neighborhood, and not the social group’ (Rainie and Wellman 2012, p.  6). It proposes two principle dynamics: the move away from locally, ethnically and socially bounded groups to more diverse and delocalised networks, and the increase in internet and mobile devices enabling the maintenance of geographically dispersed networks, centred on individuals’ interests and preferences. Wang et  al. (2018) outline three defining characteristics of networked individuals who have: ‘multiple, partial, and diverse social networks [with] fluid connections’ that enable them to regularly connect ‘with different people for different purpose[s]; who ‘play an active role in weaving together the social fabrics of their everyday lives’; and who ‘actively use digital media to connect with their social networks’ (p. 683). Malaysia has developed rapidly since independence in 1957, with socioeconomic changes mirroring in some respects those held to have influenced the rise of networked individualism in the global north. However, the change has been more rapid, and areas such as the Klang Valley where the data for this chapter was collected have experienced exponential urbanisation and commercial development and a rapid social mobility between generations. Postill (2011) questions the extent to which the narrative of networked individualism can be applied in different contexts such as Malaysia, arguing that individual practices are ‘inextricable from the social fields in which they take place’ (p. 83). He also reminds us of how the internet and personal media are enabling the flourishing of ‘“sociocentric” formations’ such as fan clubs and activist networks (Postill 2011, p. 71). In another example from an Asian context, Yoon (2016b) shows how users on the Korean social network site Cyworld use the terms ilchon and ichon, respectively kinship terms for parent-child and grandparent-children relationships, to distinguish between close and second-­ level contacts (as opposed to a Facebook ‘friend’, for example) and argues that this ‘familial imagination among Korean internet users appears to be distinctively different from the networked individualism that seems to be reified in interfaces of Western-designed SNSs [social networking sites] such as Facebook’ (p. 91). The need to consider how networked individualism may apply and develop in different

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contexts is also acknowledged by Chua and Wellman (2015) who describe ‘an Asian version of networked individualism, based on close kinship and friendship, hierarchy (in age, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status), diasporic communication, and a strong work ethic’ (p. 1062; emphasis added).

3.2.1 Networked Individualism and Families The theory of networked individualism emphasises the weakening of families and ‘households [that] are often individualized networks rather than solidary groups’ (Kennedy and Wellman 2007, p. 646; see also Rainie and Wellman 2012, p. 47). However, this emphasis is counterbalanced by longitudinal studies by Wellman and others (e.g. Kennedy and Wellman 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Wellman 1979) in Canada which have shown that in spite of the difficulties faced as families delocalise and reshape, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are crucial in maintaining them as meaningful units. A recent study on elder generations in the same location has shown how the rapid expansion of social media and messaging apps have contributed to less isolation and maintaining intergenerational ties (Quan-­ Haase et al. 2018). Wang et al. (2018) also looked at the elderly and suggest a more nuanced development along a spectrum of networked individualism: ‘networked individuals’ who negotiate a variety of social networks; ‘socially connected but not networked individuals’ whose social networks are not diverse; and ‘socially constrained individuals’ with limited social ties (p. 686). This chapter approaches the question of sociocultural differences in networked individualism by looking at how it manifests itself in families in Malaysia. While Rainie and Wellman (2012) argue that although networked families had already begun to form ‘before the internet and mobile phone, the intrinsically personal nature of these technologies has encouraged the transmutation of households into networks’ (p. 147; original emphasis). However, research on transnational families tend to emphasise the ways in which the families maintain their solidarity and continue to engage in reciprocal support (e.g. Madianou and Miller 2013). That this has been made easier with the growth of digital media and internet connectivity is clear, but the patterns of increased divorce, decreasing marriage rate and smaller families (Rainie and Wellman 2012, pp.  149–53) are not as common amongst Malaysian families. In contrast to what is found in studies on family communication in the developed world that tend to concentrate on Anglo-American attitudes towards families, there exist other family arrangements where filial obligations and collective orientations tend to result in multi-generational households. So, while older adults in the developed world use ICTs to keep in contact with their children and grandchildren (Quan-­ Haase et  al. 2018), those in other contexts have a lower adoption of digital communication because of patterns of closer living with their families (Gutierrez and Ochoa 2016). Such households are also widespread in Malaysia where, in common with other Asian countries and compared to North America, there is a greater

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degree of ‘intergenerational solidarity’ characterised by frequent contact, positive affection, consensus, mutual support, performance of familial obligations and structural proximity (Bengston and Roberts 1991, cited in Yu et  al. 2017, p.  126). In China, Yu et al. (2017) suggest that in spite of a dislocation of families due to the single-child policy, increased urbanisation and increased individualism in the younger generation, the family values of harmony (‘hexie’) and filial piety remain strong and mobile messaging (using WeChat) is an important means for maintaining regular affective exchanges and reciprocal support. Nonetheless, it is important not to dichotomise or essentialise putative ‘Western’ or ‘Asian’ cultural practices, as these are in dynamic tension and they argue that ‘individualism blends with collectivistic traits, producing relationships in which harmonies coexist with tensions between the older and younger Chinese generations’ (Yu et al. 2017, p. 127).

3.2.2 Doing Family The concept of ‘doing family’ (Morgan 2011), a practice approach that draws from Bourdieu, has been used to understand the structuring role of practices that maintain and stabilise the family unit. Families are distinguished from other stabilised social assemblages through the practical and symbolic work that is done through reciprocal support, gift giving and affective interactions (Kaur and Shruti 2016), and ‘practices of intimacy’ (Gabb 2008, cited in Morgan 2011). An implication of this approach is that family practices are not restricted to the ‘familiar sites of home and household’ (Morgan 2011), and this helps to explain how the delocalisation that underlies networked individualism can be counter-balanced when families maintain a ‘connected presence’ (Licoppe 2004) through meaningful and regular contact, such as the peripheral awareness of another person through the ‘always-on’ monitoring of online status on Skype contributing to ‘ambient co-presence’ (Madianou 2016), ‘ordinary co-presence’ such as sharing a New Year’s Eve party on Skype (Nedelcu and Wyss 2016), or using Skype to develop ‘intergenerational solidarity’ (Share et al. 2017). There are also ritual aspects in that the content of these regular interactions—enabled by affordable internet connections—may not always be as important as the shared presence (Nedelcu and Wyss 2016; Sinanan and Hjorth 2018). Sinanan and Hjorth’s (2018) proposed framework of ‘digital kinship’ also emphasises the practice of ‘kinwork’ involved when women (typically) engage in the ‘ritual and routine work of maintaining family bonds’ (p. 193) by using digital media to regularly contact, communicate with, and exercise caring through ‘[b]enign social surveillance through social media platforms’ (p. 186). This enables the expression of care, tapping into a wider sociality that ‘moves beyond immediate, dyadic relationships and reinforces a sense of collective solidarity based on shared emotional experiences’ (Sinanan and Hjorth 2018, p.  193). These practices are also noted in transnational ‘mobile parenting’ by Vietnamese (Pham and Lim 2016) and Korean (Yoon 2016a) parents, where they continue to both surveil—sometimes intensively— and provide affective support for their children through the regular use of SMMA.

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Thus, while networked individualism emphasises the importance of locality, it also points to the value of ICT for overcoming this boundary. We can see families as assemblages that integrate social media and messaging apps into their everyday practices, and the ways in which this is done will reflect existing sociocultural norms and values. In the discussion of the data that follows, we will see how the individualistic norms assumed to accompany socioeconomic development and increased use of ICT are not a foregone conclusion and may depend more on existing Anglo-American norms and familial values.

3.3 Method This chapter discusses data from a research project that used an online survey (n  =  279) and 19 in-depth interviews from November 2015 to February 2016  in Malaysia. The survey results have been addressed in another paper (Hopkins and Tan 2018), and this chapter draws mainly from the 19 interviewees who responded to an invitation in the survey, and through snowballing. The semi-structured interviews lasted about an hour, and interviewees were asked to discuss their use of SMMA with their family, friends and work colleagues (where relevant). This chapter focuses on their explanations of how they interact with their close family. The latter was operationally defined as their nuclear family but also expanded to include all of those sharing a household, as Malaysians often live in three-generation households. Table 3.1 summarises interviewee details—there was a roughly equal gender split and age split of over and under-30s. Most (12) were English mother-tongue speakers, and the second largest group (5) were Mandarin and/or dialect speakers. Ten identified as ethnically Chinese, with a variety of others as well as two preferring not to identify with any ethnicity. All apart from three had at least an undergraduate degree, 13 were employed, five were students, and one was unemployed. Overall, the demographics are reasonably representative of middle-class Malaysians living in the Klang Valley, with the significant limitation that Malays are under-­ represented. Their interviews were transcribed, and NVivo 11 was used to carry out emergent coding and identify themes (Punch 2014, pp. 173–4).

3.4 Multigenerational Networked Families Klang Valley is a large conurbation with a total population of more than 7 million, and public transport limitations mean car travel and traffic jams are daily occurrences for most. In this, it resembles much of North America, but familial living patterns are often different. Social media and messaging apps, especially WhatsApp, were used for everyday microcoordination (Ling 2012; Ling and Lai 2016) of mundane tasks

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Table 3.1  Interviewee selected details Pseudonym Chloe Wong James Kwek Jane Chan Kate Chong Kevin Mah Peter Lawrence Faiza Daniel Tan WC Annabelle Ong Chan Teck Yi Jacqueline Foo Zulkifli Ahmad Batman Jonathan Ang Karen Tan Nurul Binti Ahmad Susan Quah Tom Peters

Gender Female Male Female Female Male Male Female Male Male Female Male Female Male Male Male Female Female Female Male

Age 21 23 23 24 24 24 25 29 29 30 30 30 34 35 35 36 42 51 52

Marital status Single Single Single Single Single Single Single Partnership Single Single Married Married Partnership Partnership Married Single Married Married Married

Occupation Student Employed Student Student Student Employed Student Employed Employed Unemployed Employed Employed Employed Employed Employed Employed Employed Employed Employed

and family logistics by most respondents, and most reported close coordination with family to share resources and update each other on daily movements. Kate (female, 24, student) said that WhatsApp was the ‘number one app’ for her family where they have a group to communicate: So, let’s just say I’m not going home for dinner today, I would text on the group, ‘Hey I’m not coming home for dinner. Hey, I’m coming home at eight. Uhh… Hey I would be out tonight.’ So, it’s the tool where you can send everything at once.

Malaysian children tend to live with their family until they are married, and the need to coordinate activities with the household was often mentioned. Like Kate, WC (male, 29, employed) also lives with his parents and siblings, and he explained that they use WhatsApp to coordinate the sharing of family cars and domestic tasks: Asking each other, where are you? Or do you want to buy something some items from the supermarket. … Yeah, sometimes we have to arrange our transport. Because we have five persons in the family … but we only have three cars. So, you have to arrange how to transport going back home

Family holidays are also common, and Faiza (female, 25, student) explained how she was planning a trip to India with her mother, saying, ‘I’m communicating with my mother to plan the details of our trip. … So, I just text her on WhatsApp, where we should go, what’s the price range’. Sharing special occasions such as holidays and celebrations are important structuring family practices, and SMMA can enhance

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these experiences through the ritualised sharing of pictures that instantiate collective identity and provide reference points later on. According to WC they use a WhatsApp group to share pictures ‘when we go on vacation. We usually use one phone to take pictures and then just blast it on WhatsApp, then everyone can download it if they want’. Chloe (female, 21, student) lives with her grandmother, parents and her two siblings, who are younger than her and still at school. For her, Facebook is the ‘place where we put … family memories’ such as photos from holidays and other events, and they use WhatsApp mostly for logistical purposes such as ‘report[ing] what we are doing … Are we going home for dinner,’ rather than more personal communications because they are ‘usually … at home and that’s where [they] communicate, instead of sharing it in social media.’ However, for urgent calls or if an immediate answer is needed, she and her mother would use a voice call. According to Chloe, ‘I always … personally call my mom, my siblings, my dad. More often than Facebook itself. Yeah, because it’s more convenient, [to] communicate with voice, right, instead of text message.’ James Kwek (male, 23, employed) lives with his mother, and since his elder sister married and moved-out he uses WhatsApp more often to contact her. Like Chloe, he sees less need for using WhatsApp or calling his mother because he sees her daily. However, his mother will frequently call him and his sister to enquire about their day—only rarely using WhatsApp, and not Facebook because she is less able to use it. Here we see an example of ‘benign surveillance’ and kinwork described by Sinanan and Hjorth (2018), and its gendered aspect is also reflected in comments by Kevin (male, 24, student) who lives away from his home in East Malaysia where his three younger siblings live with his parents, grandmother and a domestic worker. They also have a WhatsApp group, and would share details such as the upcoming journey back home for the Chinese New Year, and his mother would make her presence felt, show her concern, checking on his eating habits: Lots of pictures, lots of news… mostly from my worried mother or parents is like sending news, ‘be careful of this be, careful of that’ with the recent ISIS scare and everything. Yeah... and also food as usual.

Similarly, Jonathan (male, 35, employed), said that his mother would frequently WhatsApp him ‘motivational quotes … Buddhist sayings, things like that. … lessons in life.’ But he is more likely to use WhatsApp for coordinating visits, saying ‘“Oh, I’ll be coming back this week, will you guys be around?” or like “Whatcha cooking?” “What time you’re coming?” things like that.’ As with many young Malaysian adults, Jonathan stopped living with his parents after getting married, but as his parents become more elderly it would be expected that they would move into one of their children’s homes. In the meantime, ties are maintained through regular visits and babysitting arrangements that are enhanced by the use of SMMA that enable everyday expressions of care and affect.

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3.4.1 Family Adoption of Social Media and Messaging Apps As suggested by Gutierrez and Ochoa (2016), sharing a house may result in less incentive to use SMMA as was seen in some of the respondents’ comments above, although it also helps to share resources and manage everyday logistics. Another dynamic that reflects Gutierrez and Ochoa’s (2016) account was a process whereby younger members introduce SMMA to their older family members by sharing their knowledge and resources. Faiza asked her parents to use WhatsApp ‘because it’s easier and more convenient’ and reflected that ‘nowadays my dad uses a lot compared to us;’ and Susan (female, 51, employed) also explained that it was her stepson who introduced it to her, although she had to wait until she got an iPhone before she could start using it. Peter (male, 24, employed) lives with his parents and described how his family had collectively moved towards communicating with WhatsApp. Two years prior, his mother had upgraded to a smartphone, and he gave his father his old phone— meaning that ‘everybody had a smartphone so we decided to keep in touch that way.’ Another precipitating factor was when his brother went to study in Australia and, although Peter preferred to use Facebook Messenger ‘[his] Family chose WhatsApp so [he didn’t] have a say.’ WhatsApp is easier to use than Facebook and what he described as his ‘parents’ choice’ may also have been influenced by his father’s weaker digital literacy. Similarly, WC explained that he had started using it because his family was ‘constantly bugging’ him and telling him that he was ‘missing out [on] a lot of stuff’. Overall, many interviewees reported living at least with their parents, if not in a multigenerational household. They often explained their use of SMMA with reference to their family and described how it was integrated into their everyday interactions. Their accounts centred around networked families in ways that emphasise collective values and shared goals, elements of a solidarity that tends to weigh against the individualistic assumptions of networked individualism. Nonetheless, like everywhere, Malaysian families are not always in harmony and the following section discusses examples of respondents using SMMA in ways that reflect networked individualism to a greater degree.

3.5 WhatsApp Groups and Facebook Profiles In spite of the relative conservatism and persistence of traditional family patterns, Malaysians are not immune to global shifts in attitudes towards traditional heterosexual marriages and institutional religions. Whereas SMMA can be important in binding families, the phenomenon of ‘context collapse’ (Boyd 2011; Wesch 2009)— where the public nature of SNSs can cause embarrassment (or worse) due to unintentional sharing across different social groups in a person’s life—highlights areas where SMMA can be used to resist pressures to conform to family consensus. Most

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WhatsApp users describe having multiple groups on their app that enable them to compartmentalise and manage different relationships. Susan described the different WhatsApp groups she used to manage relations with her family: I have groupings with my sisters, so when we discuss things about my parents, so that’s one group. Then my immediate family: Husband, and kids, that’s another group. Sometimes when I go back to Penang then there’s my sister, my brother-in-law, myself. That’s mainly like…I have to scroll down and see which group to use so that, y’know, okay, uh. ‘Flight on time, pick me up.’ y’know? So, it’s really convenient.

Susan used the group with her sisters to be able to talk about her parents, and Karen (female, 36, employed) also mentioned a similar arrangement. Her family mostly uses Facebook Messenger, but although she she was living with her mother and her two sisters, saying: ‘As the Asian culture we all group together,’ she has a Facebook Messenger group with only with her father, brother and one sister because they ‘are closer.’ She recounted how once her mother had joined the group and begun acting inappropriately—commenting too much and questioning the shared content—thus, they excluded her. Kevin also recounted how during a family dispute him and his siblings created a separate WhatsApp group to talk about the issues; the issue was resolved after a week, but his mother found out about the group ‘and she was furious [Laughs].’ There were also some respondents who explained how they used Facebook and WhatsApp to keep their family at arm’s length, reflecting the patterns assumed by networked individualism. As with other families, Nurul Binti Ahmad’s (female, 42, employed) had a WhatsApp family group that included her immediate family and in-laws. However, she explained that she restricted their access to her Facebook posts: So, there are a lot of things I like talk on Facebook can be a bit offensive to the conservative Muslims. … and some family members are a bit conservative. Even my brother is a bit conservative. I restrict them… So, there are some things they can’t see about my Facebook. So, from there, because of that, I think we don’t really like talk too much on Facebook. … that’s why we mostly we’re on WhatsApp where the communication is … more personal rather than something that’s more political.

In this we see an example of context collapse being managed, and the value of control over the distribution of content on WhatsApp is highlighted. Zulkifli (male, 34, employed) is a gay activist who lives with his partner, and he used the lack of Facebook contact as a metaphor for his tense relationship with his family with whom knowledge of his sexuality was a ‘don’t ask don’t tell kinda situation.’ Although he had indicated Facebook as his preferred social media platform, and he communicated with his partner with Facebook Messenger, he tended to use WhatsApp with his immediate family: It’s kinda reflective of my relationship with them. I actually communicate with them on WhatsApp. So, you know, we communicate where we are and things like that on WhatsApp … [for example] my parents and my sister were going to Kuching and they say, ‘I’m going back to Kuching.’ We don’t communicate much on Facebook only WhatsApp. But the information isn’t super personal … ‘I’ve arrived safely’; ‘I’m travelling to Singapore tomorrow’; where we are, that’s it. Or sometimes my brother message, ‘I need my Father’s I.C. [identity card] number’ and things like that. So those are the important family information.

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Kevin had a similar situation—describing himself as a ‘closeted homosexual’, he explained, [I have] two Facebook accounts. One is basically the first account. And the other one is for… a double life. Yeah, so. The first one is for home town friends, it’s where the church friends are and where the family is.

The first account he had opened in Facebook was where most of his ‘hometown friends and family friends’ were, but he rarely used it now, having developed a new circle of friends who shared his lifestyle—many of whom he connected with via his second Facebook account and a Facebook ‘confession page’ for LGBT. Having more than one Facebook account is not a common practice in Malaysia, but it has been noted as a way to deal with social conservatism in Turkey (Costa 2018) and this type of use would seem to be more in line with networked individualism— showing ways in which SMMA can enable the decentring of family in favour of a focus on the individual.

3.6 Conclusions In the above discussion we have seen how uses of social media and messaging apps are negotiated within frameworks established both by the technical limitations of the platforms, and the cultural norms of the familial relationship. The relatively recent developments in ‘always on’ internet connections, mobile devices, video calling and the significant drop in costs have led to polymedia environments, making it easier for the cultural norms to come to the fore. Whereas the networked individualism model presupposes a lessening of family ties as locality diminishes in importance, in these examples we see Malaysian families using social media to maintain and even strengthen ties. Whilst patterns of multigenerational households may be a proximate cause of these differences, other research on transnational families suggests that these may owe more to cultural values. Where family harmony is threatened, we also saw interviewees avoiding conflict by using the SMMA functions to keep aspects of their lives separate from their family. The ability of social media and messaging apps to support dispersed families as well as providing a common space to share experiences and demonstrate support and caring, brings to the foreground the subjectivity of ‘doing family’ that inform these practices—reminding us of the ways in which cultural ‘webs of significance’ (Geertz 1973) are not anchored in location or technologies and therefore there is no necessary correlation of economic development, ICT and lessening family ties. Nonetheless, this does not mean we should ignore the ability of the smartphone and SMMA to draw together some of the strands of these webs, enabling a more flexible family assemblage that is able to negotiate new mobilities whilst maintaining family ties. For example, the many-to-many communication enabled by social and mobile media, such as the group function in WhatsApp, may reduce the dyadic bias of earlier communication media such as the telephone. Thus, we can see how

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the networked family is an assemblage stabilized by locality, culturally inflected family practices and the strategic use of SMMA. The networked family does not preclude networked individuals, but also offers an alternative to some of the assumptions inherent in networked individualism thus far.

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Chapter 4

Torture and Love: Wives of Chinese Gay Men and Their Cyber Communities Wenjing Liu

Abstract  It is estimated that there are at least 14 million women in China who are married to gay men. Called tongqi (同妻) these women often have unknowingly entered into such marriages, with their dreams of a happily family life crushed. For many gay men, these marriages become a useful camouflage that protect them from social pressure and discrimination. While sustaining their heterosexual marriages, they also maintain relationships with gay partners. The women, on the other hand, live tortured lives. They are filled with anger and feel they have been cheated and trapped in their marriages. They are also frightened of the social stigma that they might have contracted HIV from their husbands. With the proliferation of ICTs, especially smartphones, in China, the tongqis are now increasingly afforded the ability to form cybercommunities, which serve as both their social network as well as their political network. This chapter examines the posts and comments of tongqis on open online platforms such as Tianya Luntan and Tongqi Ba. Using this data set, I argue that ICTs, particularly in mobile platforms, allow tongqis to find and build community as well as to educate the public and advocate for social and political change. I also point out, however, the limits of what such technologies can allow tongqis to do, given how laws and societal attitudes about intimate relationships in China have yet to change. Keywords  Gay men · Tongqi · Wives of gay men · Cybercommunities · China

4.1 Introduction In 2012, Hongling Luo, a 31-year-old academic in one of China’s best universities, posted the following note on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo (微博 or Sina Weibo 新浪微博): ‘The world makes me so tired. Let everything end’. She then committed suicide. As it turns out, Luo’s suicide was in part triggered by another

W. Liu (*) Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_4

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note on Weibo, which was posted a day earlier. It was from her husband and it read: ‘Professor Luo, I am sorry. I am a gay. I lied to you in order to hide my homosexual orientation’. Because Luo was a seemingly happy successful scholar with a desirable academic post, the publicness of her suicide announcement on a platform that had 392 million active monthly users drew a lot of attention (see China Network Information Center (CNIC) 2018). People became especially interested about how she was living the unhappy life of a tongqi (同妻/ homowife), that is, of a heterosexual woman who had married a gay man. Luo’s suicide was selected as one of the ten most influential events of 2012 China’s Annual Significant Events Concerning Sex and Gender, a ranking that was first initiated by a group of Chinese scholars in gender studies and social science. Moreover, the date of Luo’s death, June 15, is acknowledged by some people as a day memorializing the suffering of the tongqis. Luo’s online expression of depression and hopelessness is unfortunately not isolated. For instance, in one the most popular online forums in China, Tianya Luntan, there is a well-read article ‘We Live a Depressing Life—A Monologue of a Tongqi’. Similar to the case of Luo, the author narrated her experience of meeting, dating, and marrying her husband only to later find out that he intentionally concealed his homosexual orientation in order to marry her homosexual orientation. The author wrote ‘I feel pain…I don’t have a future’. This sentiment is further discussed in one of the most populous and active online communities in China, Tongqi Ba (同妻吧). Here, the words that tongqis used to describe their lived experiences of marrying gay men included: ‘anxious’, ‘depressed’, ‘sad’, ‘hopeless’, and ‘painful’. Beyond these, my keyword search for groups in the Chinese online messenger app QQ using ‘tongqi’ revealed hundreds of active groups—some with thousands of members— devoted to this topic. Even more broadly, my keyword search for the term ‘tongqi’ on Weibo revealed millions of posts written by tongqis who described their experience of marrying gay men. One striking thing about the strong presence of the stories of tongqis online is that such narratives are few and far between offline. Recent reports have recorded that their numbers range from between 14 to 16 million (Liu and Lu 2005; Song 2016). And yet, I have only ever come across one tongqi who has openly talked about her experience face-to-face with the public: a woman with the pseudonym Xiao Delan (小德兰) who often wears a wedding dress and stands in crowded streets. In Quanzhou in Fujian Province, she even once held up a board that said, ‘I am an ex-tongqi. On this Chinese Valentine’s Day, I am looking for a partner’. The stark contrast between the active online presence and offline quietness of the tongqis was what led me to explore the implications of mobile media technologies for them. In this chapter, I argue that such technologies have made it possible for these wives of gay men to form cybercommunities that enable them to do two things: to find and build communities of support as well as to educate the public about their situation and advocate for social and political change. Before I flesh out these points, I first discuss the context of marriage in Chinese society within which the tongqi phenomenon has arisen. I also establish the scalable sociality afforded by mobile media as my conceptual anchor for understanding the importance of such technologies for marginalized communities like the tongqis (see Miller et al. 2016; Schrock 2015).

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4.1.1 Marriage in Chinese Society and the Tongqis Important to understanding the phenomenon of the tongqis is recognizing that in Chinese society, there is a strong emphasis not just on heterosexuality but, crucially, also on heterosexual marriages and on having children. There is consequently a strong sentiment against homosexuality and gay men particularly, as males are supposed to take the lead in establishing a family. This is also the case for same-sex marriage, which is thought to be antithetical to fulfilling the primary role of a marriage as producing children. These sentiments put pressure on many gay men to hide their sexual orientation, especially by marrying a woman. Gay men often experience this pressure from different sources, including from their parents. Because most Chinese parents expect their children to marry and produce grandchildren, many gay men are pushed to marry women and father children in order to appease their parents (Rauhala and Lin 2018). Extant literature suggests that there are two entwined historical influences for Chinese society’s strong heteronormative patriarchy: its agrarian roots and Confucianism. As regards China’s agrarian roots, it shares with other such societies a culture of favoring the labor of men (see Stockard 2002). Indeed, its assumption of ‘the more sons, the more blessings’ is based on this logic, which assumes that it is that labor of male children that can bring most prosperity to a family. Because of this kind of thinking, the practical importance of marriage often becomes tied to having sons who can then be relied on to be laborers. This has led to the longstanding tradition of both men and women being expected to get married early in order to have children, and male children especially (Wang 2011a, b). Thus, under Emperor Taizong of Tang (598–649), officials matched single men who were over 20 and single women who were over 15 to find them partners to marry. In the Song Dynasty (960–1279), the legal minimum age of marriage for men was 15, and 13 for women. Similarly, for single people who were over the legal minimum age for marriage, the government would intervene to introduce them to partners (Wang 2011a, b). Additionally, it was legal for a husband to take concubines or even divorce his wife if she could not produce an heir for his family. Meanwhile, Confucianism has also reinforced this cultural outlook of heteronormative patriarchy because of its views on family. Han Ying, an influential Confucian scholar, describes the Confucian viewpoint on an ideal family: In peaceful time, the people are engaged in their labor and services without overtime, man and woman get married at the time they become adults, and filial sons always conduct their filial acts towards their parents. Outside the family you can see no man around doing anything; inside the family you can find no woman discontented and unhappy. (as cited in Wang 2011a, b, p. 98).

A clear instantiation of this is that the Confucian argument that of the three ways to be unfilial, having no sons is the worst. Stockard (2002) points out that due to the deeply rooted influences of Confucianism, it is ‘a moral duty of the highest order to have a son, to assure that the line of your grandfather and father—your line— continue[s] unbroken through the generation’ (p. 44).

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Confucianism has also enabled the justification of the Chinese communist government’s intervention in people’s private relationships, urging them to get married and have children. This is because Confucianism believes that governors must first and foremost govern families, regarding the individual family as the basis of wider society. This is reflected in the classic Confucian Book Li Ji (or Records and Rites), which says, ‘From ancient times, those who want to promote great virtue to the world, first need to govern their states; in order to govern their states, they need to first manage their family’. The Chinese government has adopted this belief and, as such, emphasizes that people should get married and have children. The feminist scholar Leta Hong Fincher (2014) notes, ‘as any Communist Party publication will tell you, marriage and family form “the basic cell of society” and “a harmonious family is the foundation of a harmonious society”’ (p.  23). This idea was most recently reaffirmed in 2018, when the Chinese government introduced two new ideas. First, in July 2018, Chinese lawmakers introduce a 1  month ‘cooling off’ period before a divorce request is processed. Citing an increase in divorces, this change is part of the new Civil Code which is expected to take effect in 2020 (Zhang 2018). Second, on August 7, 2018, Renming Ri Bao (The People’s Daily), the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), published the article ‘Giving Birth is a Familial Matter and a National Issue Too’, addressing China’s falling birthrates (Griffiths and Wang 2018). Shortly thereafter, the article title became a slogan of the current CCP’s population policy. Such initiatives by the state have led to the valorization of heteronormative families and of having children These have also meant the continued difficulty of accepting homosexuality and, even more so, same-sex marriages. Indeed, in the recent era of reforms, Chinese society has increasingly had a more open attitude to many issues, such as entrepreneurship. But its stance on homosexuality is to still see it as a social taboo (see Jeffreys and Yu 2015). In 2016 for example, the government banned both the Oscar-winner film Brokeback Mountain and the Chinese TV series Shang Yin because of their depictions of gay love. Following on from this, in 2017, the State Administration of Press released a document stating that media that included any elements concerning homosexual love should be categorized as erotic products and must be banned (‘Rules of Censorship’). It is within this continued context of negativity towards homosexuality and homosexual relationships that the tongqis have emerged. Due to the pressure and hostility that many gay Chinese men experience, many of them marry heterosexual women, have children, and build a family. As consequence of this, China currently has the biggest population of wives of gay men in the world. While approximately 15–20% of gay men in America marry heterosexual women, the pioneering sexologist Liu Dalin estimates the percentage in China to be at 90% (‘Collateral damage: Neither comrades nor spouses, 2010). Unfortunately, these marriages become traps wherein many women feel victimized. Most Chinese women do not immediately realize the sexual orientation of their husbands. This is because like other societies with patrilineal kinship, Chinese society strongly valorizes female chastity, as indicated by the strong societal emphasis on virginity (Zhou 1989). Although an increasing number of young Chinese people accept pre-marital sex, it is still a common

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belief that a woman’s virginity becomes the most valuable ‘gift’ that makes her wedding day special (Zheng et al. 2011). At the same time, many women, including the tongqis, go into a marriage without thinking of the need to ascertain the sexual preference of their partners (Zhu 2018). It is therefore not difficult for gay men to conceal their homosexual orientation from their potential wives. In the latter half of this chapter, I flesh out the lived experiences of the tongqi. Through the narratives that they have posted online, I reveal the difficulties that these married women experience as well as point out the reasons why they do not necessarily leave their marriages. In the next section, however, I first conceptualize the possibilities that mobile media offer them, particularly as regards finding social intimacies that enable them to deal with their complicated lives.

4.1.2 Mobile Media and Marginalized Communities The Chinese government has historically been fine-tuning its censorship strategies generally but also, crucially, online. Aimed not at eradicating online protests but at managing and co-opting these, it has done well to use a mix of hard and soft forms of censorship to advance its own political perspective (Yang 2014). The Chinese government’s strategies include applying the Great Firewall of China (GFW) to block and filter information flows en masse; blocking access to specific websites and social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram; banning the discussion of themes and topics; and surveilling people’s emails and social media accounts (Feng and Guo 2013). This environment of censorship has meant that marginalized communities of women in China, such as the tongqis, have found it difficult to straightforwardly use ICTs to advance their political causes. The platform Tongqi Ba, for example, has been shut down by the Chinese government several times. It is often accused of being an unhealthy place where many dissatisfied women express their complaints about men, Chinese society, and Chinese government. In an article published on Tongqi Ba titled ‘Tongqi Jiayuan [an influential website that centered on the issue of tongqis] was shut down. Will Tongqi Ba be the next?’, one of the administrators of Tongqi Ba reviewed the history of the platform’s numerous shutdowns and underscored that, as a consequence, it has been under the regulation of the Chinese government and is in constant danger of being closed. In spite of this difficult context, marginalized communities of women in China have managed to find ways of using the affordances of ICTs—mobile media most especially—for their own ends. These technologies are especially salient in building cybercommunities that enable women with common political agendas to both virtually gather and express their alternative voices (Garcia-Ruano et al. 2013; see also Kuah-Pearce 2008). The most relevant characteristic of mobile media here is its capacity to disseminate information across different scales of sociality: from one-­ to-­one to one-to-many to many-to-many (see Miller et  al. 2016; Schrock 2015). This stands in contrast to the ‘one-to-many’ of traditional media. For one, this opens

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up the possibility for marginalized communities to initiate and sustain multiple layers of relationships that transcend local and national boundaries (see Garcia-Ruano et al. 2013). Despite geographical constraints, these communities are afforded the possibility of networking with common interests and goals and building online communities in secret or closed groups (Castells 2010; Dahlgren 2001; Gross 2003, 2007). Through the formation of these ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 2006), marginalized groups can find community, camaraderie, support, and ultimately, a sense of empowerment. Take for instance the work of Sim (2008) on the case of lesbian women in Hong Kong and their cybercommunities that have allowed them to forge and strengthen their collective sentiments. At the same time, the scalable sociality of mobile media also enables marginalized communities to bypass the typical political or business control of the channels of communication and, in so doing, shifts the allocation of communicative power (see Garcia-Ruano et  al. 2013). That is, by enacting a multiscalar and networked kind of political activism and mobilization, they can enhance their ability to look for, disseminate, and advocate for information about their causes (Castells 2007). It is, however, important to highlight the contextual nature of the success of such kinds of activism and mobilization, in that they can often be blunted by deeply entrenched structural and symbolic forms of marginalization (Cartier et al. 2005). A clear case in point here is the work of Liu (2008) about the continued difficulties that mainland Chinese women faced in battling against their experiences of sexism in the country. In the data sections, I show how mobile media enable the tongqis to form communities to support each other. These technologies also enable them to feel self-­ fulfillment not only by expressing their experience and educating the public about fraud marriages, but also by advocating for revisions to the Chinese law of marriage that better protect them and that support gay partnerships. I also discuss, however, the limitations to what the tongqis can achieve through their use of mobile media, given the severe censorship in operation in China.

4.1.3 Data Collection and Analysis For this chapter, I used qualitative research methods, gathering data from public online forums and news reports on the tongqis. I explored four of the most populous and influential Chinese online platforms, all of which were open access: Tianya Luntan (天涯论坛), which is similar to Reddit; Sina Weibo (新浪微博), which is similar to Twitter; Zhi Hu (知乎), which is similar to Quora; and Tongqi Ba (同妻 吧) as well as Tongqi Zai Xing Dong Xiao Zu (同妻在行动小组), both of which are Reddit-style subforums exclusively focusing on the topic of tongqi. I searched for posts that included the key term ‘tongqi’ in Tianya Luntan and Sina Weibo, read all the answers for questions that include the keyword ‘tongqi’ in Zhi Hu, and studied the posts in the cybercommunities of Tongqi Ba and Tongqi Zai Xing Dong Xiao Zu respectively hosted on Baidu and Douban, two of the most influential Chinese ­websites. In presenting the data I gathered from these sites, I have sought to protect

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the privacy of the tongqis by making it difficult to trace the original poster of the comments that I quote (see Lüders 2015). This entailed assigning secondary usernames to these individuals, even though many of them might have already used pseudonyms as their original usernames in their online comments. To corroborate the first-hand data from the Internet, I also looked at reports and articles from established Chinese as well as foreign newspapers and magazines. This was a particularly salient task, as the issue of the tongqis had been widely reported both in Chinese media (e.g. China Daily, Shanghai Daily, Nanfang People) and in foreign media (e.g. The Economist, The Telegraph, Huffpost) since 2010. Crucially for this study, most of these reports included an interview of at least one of the tongqis. In analyzing the material gathered, I applied Owen’s (1984) three criteria for interpreting themes in relational communication: (1) recurrence: which is ‘observed when at least two parts of a report had the same thread of meaning, even though different wording indicated such a meaning’ (2) repetition: which is ‘an explicit repeated use of the same wording’ (3) forcefulness: which is ‘the vocal inflection, volume, or dramatic pauses,… underlining of words and phrases’. (p. 275). I began the task of coding with ‘an examination of the data and assigning words or phrases that captured their essence’ (Tracy 2013, p. 189). Some of the codes that subsequently became salient in my analysis included the phrases ‘tongqi’s feelings’, ‘tongqi’s experiences’, ‘tongqi’s actions’, and ‘tongqi’s wishes’.

4.1.4 The Lived Experiences of the Tongqis Before discussing how mobile media mattered in the social intimacies of the tongqis, I would like to characterize the ways in which their lived experiences in China are distinct from other wives of gay men elsewhere. For this, I draw on the very posts that the tongqi have shared online. I also bring in some materials from media that featured the lives of the tongqi. In various internet platforms such as Tongqi Ba, many tongqis expressed anger and depression. For many of them, this was because they rued being cheated into marrying by their gay husbands. As username Xin commented, ‘All gay men who cheat on heterosexual women by getting married to them are cruel…I wasted my best 16 years living with a gay man.’ Another user, Xiao Yuan, wrote, ‘I hate him [my gay husband]. He took away my youth, my love, my everything’. Many of the tongqis also felt their self-esteem erode after realizing that their husbands had lied to them. It was difficult for them to confront that ‘the attraction their husbands ha[d] for them [was] null, and that their competitors [were] men’ (Cheng 2016, p. 3). For example, online user Leave Carrot shared that because she ‘realize[d] that my husband doesn’t love me at all, and he cheated me…I feel that I am in an icy hole…I am a loser’. Meanwhile, another user, Snowca, posted about her experience

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of realizing that she was dating a gay man, saying, ‘Now, I feel all men are gay. I am crushed…. I cannot even work now.…I cannot do anything successfully…. I am only 31 years-old. I will spend the rest of my life lonely’. Apart from harboring negative feelings, the tongqis found themselves socially stigmatized as potential HIV carriers. This was because of the prevalent assumption in Chinese society that gay men and people who have intimate relations with gay men are HIV carriers. In the article ‘Chinese Tongqis: My Husband Never Sees Me Naked’ (2016) featured in the influential Chinese newspaper Xin Jing Bao, Suchun Cheng talks about her experience of having a boyfriend that kept on asking if she was an HIV carrier because she had been previously married to a gay man. To silence her boyfriend once and for all, she said that part of her future plans was to go to a big public hospital to take an HIV test in front of her boyfriend. It is in relation to these kinds of stories that Tongqi Ba user Xin wrote, ‘tongqis are always suffering from the suspicion of catching venereal diseases’. To this, her fellow user Nai Nai replied, ‘This is the most stigmatized and fearful aspect of being a tongqi’. Compounding the issues above, those among the tongqis who requested for divorce found themselves oppressed by the current Chinese Marriage Law, which made divorcing their gay husbands difficult. In particular, Article 31  in Chinese Marriage Law states, ‘Divorce shall be granted if the husband and wife both desire it. Both parties shall apply to the registration office for divorce’. Although Article 32 does list the circumstances under which divorce could be granted if only one party alone petitions for it (e.g., bigamy, domestic violence, etc.), this process takes much longer, especially if the husband refuses to admit his homosexuality. In the event that a tongqi is able to successfully divorce her husband, it would still be hard for her to get any compensation from him. For example, Tongqi Ba user My Lovely Baby recorded her experience of divorcing her gay ex-husband this way: He always agrees to divorce me. But he insists that he should have custody of our son…It took me more than five years to negotiate with him…But I failed in the end. I gave up the custody of my son…I feel sorry for my son. Please do not hate your mother.

As a group of marginalized and stigmatized people, the tongqis clearly need attention and help from society. The social work scholar Fung Kei Cheng (2016) points out, however, that ‘there are no official organizations to prop up [the tongqis], while only tenuous support comes from specific Internet forums’ (p. 4). It is in light of this that, in the next section, I explore how the tongqis are able to use mobile media to obtain, at the very least, some form of social support that can help them cope with their situation.

4.1.5  Tongqis and their Use of Mobile Media My data analysis revealed that the tongqis harnessed the scalable sociality of mobile media as a space for enacting cybercommunities (see Miller et al. 2016). Concretely, they used these technologies to find and build support within these communities.

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They also used these technologies to educate the public as well as advocate for social and political change. I talk about each of these two uses in turn. First, mobile media enabled the tongqis to find their peers, to support each other, and to build communities. These technologies were particularly useful in initiating as well as sustaining multiple layers of relationships (see Garcia-Ruano et al. 2013; see also Castells 2010; Dahlgren 2001; Gross 2003, 2007). The journalist Yan Lu (2016), for instance, explores the emergence of the earliest Chinese tongqi community and points out how this happened across different levels of sociality. Lu says the first online community began with a tongqi under the pseudonym Siqi Liu who had become so desperate about her situation and consequently left a suicide note on an online forum. This note garnered public attention and became very popular with many other tongqis leaving comments for her. In Siqi Liu’s interest to connect with these tongqis, she worked with her friends to created a group on QQ, which is one of the most popular instant message software in China. She found herself creating more of these groups because she got confronted with numerous requests from several tongqis who wanted to join the original group. It is said that it was through these QQ groups—which were initially one-to-many and then evolved into many-to-­ many—that tongqis from across China initially became acquainted with each other. Gradually, those tongqis who were geographically proximate to each other began making connections offline. In late March 2009, the first colloquium of the Association of Tongqis was held in Qingdao in Shandong Province and it was well attended. Lu (2016) pointed out that this colloquium, which lasted for 2 days, was significant not only because it was the first such offline event. It was also important because after many of the tongqis spent the first day crying about their tragic lives, they realized that it was important for them to coalesce in order to request for rights and help their fellow tongqis who were afraid of even facing the reality of their lives. This colloquium resulted in the publication of a landmark document ‘The Joint Statement of Tongqis’. In this document, the tongqis make several significant requests, including legal support from the Chinese government to enable them to divorce without their husbands’ agreement and the elimination of discrimination against divorcees. This statement was circulated across print media and online. It was, however, subsequently taken down by the government. Although it is now hard to find the original document, this document is still remembered and celebrated as the earliest but the most important document of the tongqis. In the online communities that have been formed since then, the tongqis often took care of and encouraged each other, across one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-­to-­ many conversations. For instance, when Tongqi Ba user Jumping To the Sea posted about her husband’s messages to his gay partner, many tongqis left comments that expressed their understanding of her suffering, their support for her, and their wishes for her good future. Some of the comments were about how Jumping to the Sea could deal with the current situation. Based on their experiences, the other tongqis argued that she should collect evidence to prove that her husband intentionally hid his homosexual orientation before their marriage, so that she could eventually present these in court if she decided to file for a divorce. Others pointed out that it was very important for Jumping to the Sea to receive an HIV test as soon as possible. Some tongqis tried

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to comfort her by saying that she was relatively lucky to have married a gay husband only for 1 week and that it was much easier to end a short marriage. Other tongqis encouraged Jumping to the Sea to have faith in her future after divorcing with her gay husband. For many tongqis, these expressions of support and encouragement mattered tremendously. Many of them even said they were still actively engaged in conversations with the online communities to record and share their lives even after divorcing their gay husbands, especially since these communities have become an indispensable part of their lives. Second, mobile media provided the tongqis a space to initiate and advocate for their social causes outside the heavily censored mainstream media (see Garcia-­ Ruano et al. 2013; see also Castells 2007). For instance, the comparatively anonymous environment of online spaces enabled many tongqis to share with frankness their experiences of identifying potential gay men and dealing with fraud marriages. By constructing these suggestions, the tongqis were not only able to reflect on their experiences. They were also able to find purpose in their suffering. For them, it was important that the public got to be aware of the existence of fraud marriages and of how to avoid being entangled into them. In Tongqi Ba, there were numerous posts about how to identify a gay man. In these posts, the tongqis revealed how they figured out their husbands’ real sexual orientation and how they attempt to codify their behavior. For example, the post ‘How to identify a Gay Man’ that was written by Tongi Ba user Life is So Hard was one of the most read and replied post. In the post, Life is So Hard listed several characteristics of gay men, such as: showing little, even no, interest and passion in having sex with women; rushing to get married while emphasizing that couples don’t need to love each other, instead couples can have familial affection; and downloading gay dating apps like Blued and Zank. Meanwhile, in Tongqi Zai Xing Dong Xiao Zu, the post titled ‘Thinking about Tongqi, Let’s Us Discuss How to Identify Gay Men’ also garnered a lot of attention. In the post, many tongqis focused on how it was important for a woman to pay attention to the details to figure out her partner’s real sexual orientation, such as whether her partner enjoyed touching or kissing her. Similarly, in the platform Tianya Luntan, there were numerous posts concerning how to avoid being tricked into marrying a gay man. Although the characteristics that the tongqis discussed in these sites may not always be true for all gay men, their attempt to figure out the codes of behaviors of gay men was their way of simultaneously sharing and imbuing new value to their experiences, refashioning it as an educational tool for the public. Together with the above, the safe spaces of their cybercommunities allowed the tongqis to bravely and unitedly voice out their requests for revisions to the Chinese Law of Marriage that would protect women like them and, together with this, for the legalization of same-sex marriage. In key ways, these requests did create some social impact. For example, the tongqis were able to highlight how they were unable to request compensation for having been cheated by gay men into fraud marriages. In Tongqi Ba, the post ‘The Way to Solve the Issue of Tongqi’ written by a tongqi under the username Cat Nurse was marked as one of the best articles in this forum. In the article, Cat Nurse argued that the Chinese Law of Marriage should regard the action of cheating a heterosexual person into marriage as a serious offense. Accordingly, divorce proceedings shouldn’t require mutual approval from both parties.

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Additionally, the request for legalizing same-sex marriage was a popular topic in the tongqi online communities, and the posts of the tongqis have spurred many discussions. In Tongqi Ba, the user Fu Beauty posted the question: ‘If Gay Marriage is Legal, Will there be Less Tongqi?’. This generated a lot of engagement, with most commenters being of the opinion that the legalization of gay marriage would not only benefit gay people, but also heterosexual people. Here are some of the comments from the users: Filter of Keywords: If gay marriage is legal in China, gays would be able to marry the partners they love instead of cheating heterosexual women. Wet Hands for Electric: Definitely, the legalization of gay marriage would help the issue of tongqis. In China, most people merely believe in the Chinese government. If the Chinese government permits gay marriage, there would be less discrimination against gay people. Consequently, gay men do not need to hide their identity and cheat women. YUWANG: For me, gay marriage is a right. For some people, they probably won’t use it, but it should be there because for some people it is necessary. Blue Jade: If gay men are permitted to get married and adopt children legally, I believe there would be less tongqis.

It also has to be said, however, that the buzz that the tongqis were able to create online tended to remain online. In broader Chinese society, there is still little impetus for any significant political and social change regarding homosexuality and, consequently, tongqi marriages. One key reason for this is that even if the Internet is given more leeway than mainstream media, it is still subject to the Chinese state’s censorship laws and policies. The tongqis need to balance their desire for large-­ scale online activism with their desire to protect and sustain the most basic function of their communities, which is for them to support each other. To avoid the shutdown of their communities due to the politically sensitive content, they unfortunately have to sacrifice their capacity to push more strongly for their political claims. Together with this, another key reason for the lack of significant social and political change is that the broader political conditions in China also make it hard for the tongqis to move out of the comfort of their cybercommunities and onto the offline spaces of politics. This difficulty in materializing their communities and their activities into the offline have unfortunately meant that the state can choose to trivialize their requests for the government to heed their calls.

4.2 Conclusion As seen in the discussion above, mobile media technologies have provided tongqis with a space to meet other women in similar situations and form online communities for support and educate the public on their plight. Mobile media’s ability to disseminate information across various scales of sociality (Miller et  al. 2016) as well as its capacity for cyber community-building has allowed marginalized communities, such as the tongqis, to develop relationships with others beyond their

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geographical locations. Despite being scattered around China, tongqis feel less alone and less helpless because their mobile devices provide access to online forums that have become their lifeline. Through mobile media, they are able to seek and give advice, find others in similar circumstances, and even imagine and hope for a better life. At the same time, while finding others and building cybercommunities through mobile devices provide tongqis with a support system, they also painfully emphasize the hopelessness of their situations because laws and societal attitudes in China have yet to change. Marginal groups may find solidarity and support through social media, but until material changes to China’s marriage laws as well as societal expectations of marriage shift, tongqis continue to exist. Despite the capacity of mobile media technologies ‘to amplify, leverage, transform, and shift political power by enabling people to persuade and inform the thoughts and beliefs of others’ (Rheingold 2008, p.  225), and increasing news coverage by Chinese media (e.g. China Daily, Shanghai Daily, Nanfang People) and in foreign media (e.g. The Economist, The Telegraph, Huffpost) make the public aware of their plight, the road to change for marginalized groups such as the tongqis is long and filled with hurdles. As Qui (2014) points out, despite the spread of mobile devices, especially smart phones, which leads to more participation by marginalized citizens, ‘there is no guarantee that the more participatory process will turn out to be ultimately beneficial for the lower classes’ (p. 388). Still, the individual experiences of solidarity and empowerment through cybercommunities cannot be ignored or minimized. For tongqis these communities are important because they help them navigate the hardships of daily life and give them a sense of agency. Such solidarities are how change begins. And until structural and cultural shifts can happen and become reflected in China’s policies and societal attitudes, they are also what keep the hope alive for those in the margins.

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Chapter 5

The Digital Wash Place: Mobile Messaging Apps as New Communal Spaces for Korean ‘Smart Ajummas’ Jung Youn Moon

Abstract  This chapter seeks to uncover some of the complex ways in which we might reconsider prevalent conceptions about one of the most misunderstood and most stigmatized demographic group in contemporary Korea: the ajumma (아줌 마), which roughly translates to a middle-aged, married woman. It seeks to debunk problematic stereotypes about such women particularly by recasting them as new media users and paying attention to their redefined role in Korean culture. It examines how ajummas in Seoul have become ‘smart ajummas’, embracing smartphones in their daily lives to communicate with each other in today’s so-called ‘smart world’. This chapter particularly sheds light on how these women share mobile intimacies in KakaoTalk group chat rooms similar to the relationships built in the wash place (ppal-let-ter, 빨래터) in the 1960s. By going beyond the usual focus on Korean youth as new media ‘digital natives’, it seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of gendered new media practices in what is often described as a media innovative country. Keywords  Middle-aged women · Ajumma · Communal space · Smartphone · Korea

5.1 Introduction One of the most misunderstood and most stigmatized demographic in today’s Korea is the ajumma (아줌마), who is broadly defined as a middle-aged married woman. In contemporary culture, ajummas are often presented in a sarcastic and comical manner. They are depicted as disorderly, loud, shameless and, crucially for this chapter, as technological outsiders to Korean society. This depiction of ajummas

J. Y. Moon (*) Seoul Women’s University, Seoul, South Korea © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_5

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highlights the tenacity of patriarchal culture within Korea. To address this pernicious image of ajummas, it is necessary to pay closer attention to the important societal role they play. The chapter contributes to this task by challenging the ­stereotype of ajummas as technological outsiders, as it explores how they engage with smartphones in their communal spaces. By shedding light on their capacity to engage and use new media, it hopes to show their distinct ways of communicating amongst themselves in their own communal space and, consequently, the significance of this in the broader dynamics of building community in modern Korea. This chapter looks into how ajummas in Seoul, South Korea communicate with each other in the so-called ‘smart world’, as they embrace smartphones in their daily lives. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the Korean capital city in 2014, I challenge the presumption that only young people’s new media use drives creative change in the country and that those who are older are disengaged from digital change. I posit the idea of ‘smart ajummas’ to capture how these married middle-­ aged women use mobile phones to craft a digital version of the wash place, which was the locus of communication amongst village women prior to the 1960s in Korea. The research at hand seeks to address a gap in studies that do an in-depth exploration of the relationship between ajummas and their usage of mobile media in Korea. There are already many works that examine the relationship between individuals and their smartphone usage in Korea, but they are primarily quantitative in orientation and focused on user behaviour (Keum and Cho 2010; Park and Shin 2010; Kim et al. 2011; Sohn et al. 2011; Yang and Lee 2011). This research takes a qualitative approach to pay closer attention to who ajummas are and how they engage with smartphones in their daily lives. In this chapter, I focus specifically on communal spaces in KakaoTalk, which is an instant messaging application (henceforth, app) for smartphone users in Korea and in the Korean diaspora. However, it is more than just a messaging app. KakaoTalk also allows its users to exchange various types of multimedia files and to communicate through free voice and video calls. As the survey and focus groups for this research revealed, most of the ajummas who participated in this research used this messaging app for daily communication. These ajummas ranked KakaoTalk’s group chat rooms as the highest instant mobile chatting app in the communicative tools they used on their smartphones. Some of respondents even specifically mentioned that they bought smartphones to communicate with their friends via this specific app. What I found in the course of my research was that KakaoTalk did not only serve as a communal space where ajummas communicated with each other. It was also a communal space that enabled them to share jeong1—a close sentimental and emotional bond—with each other. As a mobile communal space, group chat rooms in

 According to Kim (1994), ‘Jeong is more than kindness or liking another. Jeong brings about the “special” feelings in relationships: togetherness, sharing, bonding. Jeong is what makes us say “we’“rather than “I”, “ours” rather than “mine”’ (cited in Kim et al. 2006, p.152). 1

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this messaging app enabled ajummas to enrich intimate relationship with friends or family through ongoing and dialogic communication. For this reason, I call the smart ajummas’ new communal space—that is, KakaoTalk’s group chat room—a digital ppal-let-ter (빨래터) or a digital washplace. Ppal-let-ter is Korean for wash place, the traditional meeting place for women in Korea. A digital ppal-let-ter is a newly situated chat, one which resides in the messaging app but which builds community and bonds of care anew. Because this new communal space is mobile, it allows ajummas to visit and communicate regardless of time and space. Moreover, in drawing attention away from the traditional tasks that women undertake as mothers and wives (washing) and by focusing on community building and sisterhood, the digital ppal-let-ter allows middle-­aged women to be positioned as savvy communicators who appropriate and engage new technologies in order to maintain and even strengthen lived communal relationships.

5.2 The Korean Ajumma Ajummas are portrayed negatively in Korean society at large. They are seen as loud, disorderly, and are mocked by others. These stereotypes, both in the media and in public discourse, are due to a lack of understanding about them (Choi et al. 1999). While the term ajumma refers to middle-aged women and is commonly used in everyday Korean life, the negative stereotypes around it has made it an unwelcome word for most women in the country. Across established platforms such as TV dramas, TV commercials, and even social media, there is much focus on the negative qualities of ajummas. While there are no exact rules or definitions, there are common, stereotypical elements that mark a woman as an ajumma. Often in their mid-30s to early 70s, ajummas are portrayed as tough, stubborn, loud, and meddlesome. They are identified by their appearance, such as their permed hair, brightly colored clothing, and sun visors or hats. This fashion style has led to the ajumma becoming an object of ridicule in media rather than being celebrated as a unique part of Korean culture. Take for example a 2012 TV commercial of Olleh KT, one of the largest companies for both fixed-line and cellular broadband services in Korea. This commercial introducing the company’s newest and fastest LTE WARP service, featured an ajumma and the Star Wars villain Darth Vader waiting for the train on the subway platform. When the train finally arrives, the ajumma rushes into the train to find a seat. Just as she reaches an empty seat to sit down, Darth Vader beats her to it, embarrassing the ajumma. The commercial depicts the Olleh KT’s LTE WARP speed, represented by Darth Vader, as faster than the ajumma, playing off the cultural stereotype that ridicules ajummas

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behaviours in getting train seats. Although rushing to grab seats on the subway is common for all groups in Korea, it is only the stereotype of ajummas as loud, disorderly, and shameless that is circulated in cultural and media texts. Such media representations of ajummas reinforce negative connotations about them, resulting in Korean women of all ages shunning such an identification. For many women, however, the ajumma label is thrust upon them by others. First and foremost, most ajummas are judged by their so-called ajummarous appearance. In the case of Kim, one of the respondents in this chapter’s study, she was called ajumma by an unknown woman in a public space: I realised that I’m an ajumma when someone called me ‘ajumma’. The most obvious place where I [have been] called an ajumma is [in a] Jjimjilbang (Korean style spa/sauna). When one ajumma in [a] Jjimjilbang called to me and said ‘Ajumma! Could you please scrub my back?’ I realised that I’m an ajumma. I undoubtedly look like an ajumma.

Kim was over 40, married and had two children. So whilst she could be categorised as an ajumma, at least in its everyday definition, she did not welcome being called or labelled as one. She felt she was judged on her appearance by an utter stranger (by another ajumma) who didn’t know anything about her at all. Another well-known stereotype about ajummas is the term Kim Yeo-sa. This literally translates to ‘Mrs. Kim’, Kim being the most common surname in Korea and Yeo-sa meaning Madame (Ghosh 2013). It is, however, colloquially used to demean female drivers in general but also ajumma drivers in particular. Various Korean news media have tongue-in-cheek reported car accidents caused by the unskilled diving of ‘Mrs. Kim’, referring specifically to the ajummas. As there is no ‘Mr. Kim’ or ‘Ms. Kim’ to refer to unskilled and inexperienced male or young female drivers, Kim Yeo-sa (Mrs. Kim) is a clear example of gender and age prejudices against ajummas. One respondent, Hwang, pointed out that regardless of an ajumma’s own individual driving skills, people lump ajumma drivers together and dismiss them as unable to drive. She would go on to lament, ‘they just ignore us because we are ajummas. And people don’t care whether we are well experienced drivers or not’. Despite the prevalence of these stereotypes, there is a growing recognition and acceptance of the ajumma identity by many Korean women. For example, there is a popular Facebook group called AjummaEXP with over 2500 followers that celebrate and embrace being an ajumma. Over the years, their role in Korean society has evolved to encompass and include diverse types of middle-aged women such as working women, stay at home mothers or middle-aged single women. Furthermore, in contrast to the views that ajummas are old-fashioned, backwards, and stupid, they have become technologically savvy, embracing new digital platforms such as smartphones in their everyday lives to communicate with family and friends. In particular, ajummas have become avid users of KakaoTalk, which is one of the most popular mobile messaging apps in Korea. Through KakaoTalk, they have found and built a mobile communal space for themselves. As I argue later in this chapter, this digital communal space is akin to the wash place of the 1960s where women bonded and developed intimate social relationships with each other.

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5.3  Ajummas and Social Intimacy Throughout history, women have found spaces to congregate and build relationships with each other, escaping the routineness and solitude of home life. Despite being often being confined to the domestic sphere, Korean women have managed to meet other women to share stories and gossip, seek and give advice, as well as form intimate bonds of friendship. In particular, it could be the ‘golden age’ for middle-aged women because they have more free time than women in their 20s and 30s who are often busy establishing careers and beginning families. At middle-age, women are more able to find their own spaces to enjoy the leisure time and communicate with other middle-aged women (Yoon 2009). For example, the representative spaces of middle-aged women in Korea can be jjimjilbang (찜질방a spa), sanak hoe (산악회, an alpine club) or a church club (or clubs of any type of religion). According to Kim (2010), women who visit jjimjilbang regularly could form bonds and share social intimacies with other ajummas in these spaces. In addition, there are various learning and leisure activity programs designed specifically for middle-aged women at Korean community centers and even department stores. Here I discuss two examples that I consider precursors of the modern-day ajumma. Until the 1960s, Korean women would congregate at the ppal-let-ter or wash place to do their laundry. Due to serious water supply issues in Korea at that time, wash places such as brooks or streams were the only places where women could do the family’s laundry and thus were present in every Korean village. While the wash place was literally a place for doing the laundry, it also functioned as a place of interaction among village women. Here, women could meet other women and share stories about the ups and downs of their daily lives. Wash places provided a space for them to talk about their husbands, children, parents, and in-laws. They could seek advice and support from each other, whether it be regarding family life, domestic duties, and personal concerns. The wash place was where women found companionship with other women like themselves and a social space where bonds of friendships and sisterhood were built. Although anyone, men, women, or children, could come to the wash place, it was tacitly accepted that it was a women’s place. With the adoption of washing machines in the home and the entry of women into the workforce shifted, the wash place gradually disappeared. As women moved into the work force during the 1960s to 1980s, one of the jobs that became available to them was that of being door-to-door saleswomen for the largest cosmetic brand in Korea at that time, Amore (Park 2005). Known as Amore ajummas, these middle-aged women visited the houses of a fellow ajumma, where other ajummas would get together to peruse and buy the make-up products. While Amore ajumma were primarily saleswomen, they were also considered to be mobile messengers who spread the news from door-to-door, from one group of women to another. In addition to being organisers, Amore ajummas also played the role of mediators who helped foster connections between women. Through the Amore ajummas, the wash place became mobile and mediated, but continued to be a space for women to build intimate social relationships with each other.

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The intimate bonds developed in the traditional wash place continued to be fostered through the meetings organized by the Amore ajummas even as these adjusted to changing times and technologies. In the succeeding section, I will illustrate how ajummas went on to develop and maintain these social intimacies through mobile media, particularly the smartphone.

5.4 Smart Ajumma Due to the widespread adoption of mobile phones in Korea, it is not surprising that ajummas have taken it up as means of communicating with each other. I argue that ajummas have become ‘smart ajummas’ not only because they use new technologies such as smartphones, but also because they actively attempt to acquaint themselves with new technologies in their daily lives. By doing so, ajummas are creating unique ajummarous ways of communication and, consequently, new communal spaces. Ajummas are now able to enrich their lives with gathering useful information and broadening the boundaries regardless of location through the use of smartphones. They are able to go to both online and offline spaces flexibly without the constraints of time and space. The increased use of smartphones by ajummas sees an increased engagement with communication in a digital environment. Instead of going to the physical wash place, ajummas are now able to meet other ajummas through using the Internet and mobile phones. In other words, a digital version of the wash place has been created by ajummas through mobile media where they enjoy a new and broadening range of communities, activities, and associations. There are debates as to how digital technologies like the mobile phone impact on the performative nature of gender. For women, they can reinforce traditional roles (Lemish and Cohen 2005) but can also allow for the performance of new meanings (Lee 2005). Take for instance the double-edged impact of these technologies on mothers, who experience these technologies both as allowing them more flexibility in mothering and also as putting them on a tethered leash (Frizzo-Barker and Chow-­ White 2012; see also Rakow and Navarro 1993). Scholars contend that the end result often tends to be a ‘sociotechnical hybrid’ (Ganito 2010, p. 81), that is, as a product of the negotiation between humans and mobile phones. In the case of ajummas, smartphones seem to offer something positive, enabling them to experience ‘an integrated communication package’ that includes ‘verbal, auditory, visual, textual and interactive connections’ (Kang and Jung 2014, p. 377). This ‘integrated communication package’ allows them to communicate without having an actual physical connection. The significant characteristics of smartphones are mobility, portability, ubiquitous computing and a user-centred environment allowing of unconstrained installation of various apps which allow ajummas to exploit mobile communication especially mobile social media such as KakaoTalk. With this ‘portable’ and ‘personal’ device (Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda, Ito et  al. 2005), ajummas are connected constantly to the social network through the use of

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mobile social media. For this reason, smartphones can be positioned as an ‘intimate technology’ because users can bring them anytime, anywhere, even while they’re sleeping (Goggin 2011, p. 152). As an ‘intimate technology’ (Goggin 2011, p. 152), the smartphone helps enrich ajummas’ mobile communication and strengthen their relationship with their family, friends, specified individuals and unspecified masses. This intimate technology enables ajummas to create their own new media cultures and share them with each other. By doing so, ‘mobile intimacy’ (Hjorth and Lim 2012, p. 477) can occur. In particular, the instant messaging app, KakaoTalk’s group chat rooms have become mobile communal spaces of ajummas where ‘mobile intimacy’ can be found. Launched in March 2010, KakaoTalk is a free mobile instant messaging app for smartphone users. People can send free texts and various types of audio and video files as well as do free voice and video calls. It also has a gift shop in the app so people can send the gifticon (gift icon) to their friends or family through the chat rooms. KakaoTalk, which most people call KaTalk, is the most popular free mobile messenger in Korea (Kim 2018). My research reveals that KakaoTalk’s group chat rooms (mobile communal spaces) are akin to that of the traditional wash place. Just as village women in 1960s shared their sisterhood and companionship at the wash place, ajummas in 2018 are doing the same in their KakaoTalk group chat rooms. Through mobile mobile media, relationships are stretched across geographical distances, thus ajummas feel connected to each other despite being apart. They are able to constantly be in contact and interactions seamlessly move back and forth between online and offline environments. I consequently argue that the KakaoTalk group chat rooms developed and maintained by ajummas are a digital ppal-let-ter or a digital wash place where their intimate social relationships take place today.

5.5 Method To explore how the digital communication among ajummas in their daily lives redefined or rebuilt their communal space and communities, this research primarily drew its data using survey methods. I also conducted an online focus group on a KakaoTalk group chat to gather more data and explore the real-life experiences of ajummas about the lives of an ajumma and their own communal space. The survey I conducted spanned over 3 months from September to December in 2014 and involved 101 respondents. It aimed to investigate how ajummas used smartphones and social media, but also to generate a fuller understanding of how ajummas engaged with KakaoTalk in every day practice. The survey respondents ranged in age from mid-30s to late-60s, with most of them being full-time housewives with children and residing in Seoul. The key criterion in recruiting them was whether they self-identified as an ajumma in general, regardless of occupation, income, or educational level. The respondents were recruited via snowballing.

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I also conducted an online focus group through a KakaoTalk group chat with ten ajummas. I recruited the focus group participants from the respondents of the preceding survey and through a snowball sampling based on the recommendations of the said survey respondents. By conducting the focus group interviews in a chat group on the internet, I was able to ‘elicit the top-of-mind answers and emphasise speed over thoughtful response’ and enabled the ‘excitement of live exchange’ for the participants (Krueger and Casey 2009, p. 177).

5.6 KakaoTalk as Digital Ppal-let-ter (Digital Wash Place) Through KakaoTalk, ajummas have found a communal space where they can communicate, interact, and build social ties with each other. I argue that KakaoTalk, and more specifically its group chat rooms, is the contemporary version of the traditional wash place. This is something I call a digital ppal-let-ter or digital wash place. In particular, KakaoTalk’s group chat rooms provide the space for intimate social relationships among ajummas to develop and grow. Of the 101 survey respondents, 95 (93%) used KakaoTalk the most out of all their social apps on their smartphones. Importantly, the survey and focus group participants indicated that their most preferred function of KakaoTalk was its group chat room. Whilst anyone could create these group chat rooms in KakaoTalk, participation in them is permission-based and one must be invited by other members of the group chat. KakaoTalk’s group chat room has become a mobile community where ajummas communicate with their family and friends. Specifically, KakaoTalk as a digital ppal-let-ter has become a space to nurture and build friendships, a bridge between face-to-face meetings, and a women’s space.

5.6.1 A Space to Nurture and Build Friendships The digital ppal-let-ter offers a space for continuous communication and interaction, encouraging the beginning of new friendships and the enrichment of continuing friendships. Similar to the traditional village wash place where women met regularly to do their laundry and talk with each other whilst washing clothes. KakaoTalk’s group chat rooms serve as a space for women to encounter each other. Just as women would meet each other at the stream every few days to continue their stories from their last encounter or talk about new events that had occurred since they last met, mobile chat rooms allow ajummas to be connected with each other without the constraints of time and space. Through technologies such as KakaoTalk, social relations are being stretched across distances (Giddens 1990), thus ‘where we are physically no longer determines where and who we are socially’ (Meyrowitz 1985, p. 115).

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For ajummas, KakaoTalk is not just a mobile chat room, but also an important communal space to nurture and develop their relationships. Through checking-in with each other, sending touching messages, as well as sharing photos and videos, ajummas build online, shared experiences and intimate friendships with other women like themselves. For example, a group of older ajummas (in their early-50s to mid-60s) had met 10 years earlier through their membership in a Catholic church. Through the years, they nurtured their friendship through having regular face-to-­ face gatherings. With the advent of the smartphone, they, like other ajumma, created a group chat in KakaoTalk in January 2014, which further strengthened their friendship. In their group chat, they teach each other how to use KakaoTalk’s features such as purchasing emoticons and using these emoticons during the conversation. Some of members send good (inspirational) phrases, humorous stories, gossipy news, recipes, useful shopping tips, and various types of photos (e.g., their grandchildren’s photos) regularly to the group chat room to share with other members. Y Kim: I’ve sent New Year’s greeting messages to everyone in my group chat room. And sometimes I share my news, too. J Han: I also send some photos I have taken and share good phrases that I have read.

Through KakaoTalk, awkward relationships can also be transformed. For example, S Kim credits KakaoTalk for helping her communicate with her mother-in-law: S Kim: I have more opportunities to talk to my mother-in-law since we’ve been using KakaoTalk together. She often sends me good phrases and beautiful photos through KakaoTalk. So, I reply to her as well. Through KakaoTalk, I talk more often to my mother-­ in-­law compared with before when we don’t use KakaoTalk. Sometimes I try to charm her through KakaoTalk as well, even though it is a bit embarrassing.

Ajummas often gather in various moims (meetings) such as jjimjilbang-moim (a spa) or gye-moim (a mutual financing association for friendship). At the jjimjilbang-­ moim, ajummas are able to relax and perform beauty rituals in the company of each other. Because these hot spas are segregated by gender, women have a space for themselves. A gye-moim is a rotating credit association where members pool their money through fixed monthly contributions. Ajummas either take turns to receive the full amount or spend it together to celebrate special occasions or to travel together. More than an informal financial association, the gye moim is about friendship. In these moims, ajummas talk about everything such as their family, political issues, any useful tips for living and shopping and gossips as well. KakaoTalk has become the favored way of organizing and sending information about these meetings. I Lee: I use KakaoTalk every day. It is free to use so ajummas love it! I used to call to make an appointment with my friends but now I just send messages via KakaoTalk to arrange a meeting with friends. Y Kim: Yes, KakaoTalk’s group chat room is so convenient to organize meetings with friends. J Han: All I need to do is just create a group chat room. And then it is very easy to send a message to everyone at once! It’s so easy!

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Before KakaoTalk, ajummas had to individually call or send text messages to each person. This took a lot of time and effort. Through KakaoTalk’s group chat rooms, organizing and getting together became quicker and more efficient as members are able to see the content of conversations in one view. Furthermore, because communicating through the group chat is asynchronous, members can easily access missed conversations or shared photos and videos at any time. Clearly KakaoTalk, has become indispensable in the lives of ajummas. While in the past, Korean women’s friendships were dependent on the face-to-face encounters in the wash place or the gatherings organized by the Amore ajummas, smart ajummas are able to meet with each other in group chats to exchange ideas, tell stories, solicit advice, share photos and videos, and make plans to meet face-to-face. Thus, intimate group friendships are able to grow and flourish.

5.6.2 A Bridge Between Face-to-Face Meetings While digital mobile technology has afforded ajummas the ability to communicate with each other at any time and across physical distances, these interactions on KakaoTalk also function like a bridge between face-to-face meetings. In the traditional wash place, women had to wait until they saw each other again, sometimes missing each other. The digital ppal-let-ter, however, affords them continuous, uninterrupted communication. While meetings and gatherings are organized through the group chats, conversations continue post-meeting on KakaoTalk as well. R Hwang: Chatting in group chat room is also like an epilogue. After the actual meeting we can review the meeting. And we suggest ideas for next meeting as well.

This illustrates that face-to-face meetings and chat group conversations are not separate. Rather, they seamlessly interact with each other to enhance relationships among members of the group. As Turkle (2009) points out, we no longer live in separate plugged/unplugged worlds, but rather are ‘always on/always on you’. Because of mobile media, social connections continuously flow from pre-meeting to the actual meeting to post-meeting. This illustrates the ‘perpetual contact’ (Katz and Aakhus 2002) and ‘connected presence’ (Licoppe 2004) in this shared communal space afforded by mobile media. Younger ajummas (those in their mid-30s to mid-40s), in particular, saw the face-­ to-­face meetings and group chats as interrelated with each other. H Kim: For me, chatting in the group chat room on Kakao Talk is like a trailer before the actual meeting. K Na: Yes, it is like a time to tune things before the actual meeting.

Clearly, KakaoTalk group chats function as both an organizational tool as well as the space to communicate and have discussions. It helps to arrange face-to-face meetings with members as well as encourages members to arrange future meetings.

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Thus, KakaoTalk group chat rooms act like a bridge that connects a mobile meeting to an actual meeting and a current meeting to a future meeting, emphasizing how face-to-face intimate relationships among women continue on mobile media.

5.6.3 A Women’s Space While rivers and streams are public places open to everyone, it historically was designated as a women’s place, particularly in the context of a site for domestic chores such as laundry. For example, various paintings from the Jo-seon dynasty in the eighteenth century such as ‘A Wash Place’ by Hong Do Kim, who painted everyday Korean life, depicts a group of women doing the washing. In addition, photographs from before the 1960s support the idea of the wash place as a women’s space. One famous modern Korean writer Park Taewon also described the wash place as women’s place in his novel Cheonbyeon Punggyeong (Scenes from Ch’onggye Stream). Similarly, one of the district offices in Seoul opened a space especially for women that was called ‘the wash place of the mind’ (Womennews 2009). This women-only place provides them with a space for tea-time, fellowship, learning, and networking, akin to that of the physical wash place and streams of the past. Following this history of spaces designated specifically for women, I posit KakaoTalk as the digital ppal-let-ter is the contemporary women’s communal space. Regardless of age and gender, the broader Korean population who use smartphones also tend to use KakaoTalk, which is why it is one of the largest and most popular instant mobile chat apps in the country (Kim 2018). Ajummas, however, have been able to use the app’s chat rooms to find and designate spaces for themselves, just like the way they did in the past with the rivers and streams. Within these mobile and intimate spaces, these women can freely communicate with each other. Further, ajummas have created their own mobile cultures and built their own mobile intimacies through communicating with other ajummas in KakaoTalk. As my research has shown, they consider KakaoTalk group chat rooms as their daily primary mobile communal spaces to maintain relationships with their friends and family. In undertaking continuous communication with each other in their group chat rooms, the members are able to enrich the sense of ‘woori (we-ness)’ (Chung and Cho 2006, p.49). According to Shim, Kim and Martin (2008), Uri, or we-ness... in-group-ness as a more essentially relevant feature of Korean collectivism. The social relationship among Korean in-groups are based on social networks, the sophisticated genealogical system, the power of school connections, or regionalism (p. 71).

At the same time, they can build mobile intimacy between members through having conversations by sharing various mobile media and creating mobile cultures. Here we see how women use mobile media in particular ways that respond to the ways they live their lives. Technologies are not created in a vacuum but rather are developed and created to fulfill known social needs (Williams 1974) and ‘forward existing practices that particular social groups see as important or necessary’ (Lister

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et al. 2003, p. 81)’. Thus, we see how KakaoTalk as the digital wash place fulfills the need for ajummas to have their own space to be themselves, support each other, and develop bonds separate from husbands and children.

5.7 Conclusion As a misunderstood category in Korean society today, ajummas have been ignored, overlooked and generalised in the media and how they use the media. They have been stereotyped as loud, discourteous, disorderly, shameless and technological outsiders to smartphones and app developments. However, this research has shown that ajummas have become technologically-savvy smart ajummas. In particular, their use of KakaoTalk’s group chat reveals that ajummas have created a space to nurture and build friendships, a bridge between face-to-face meetings, and a maintain a space for women. I have have conceptualized KakaoTalk’s group chats as the contemporary wash place, a digital ppal-let-ter for women to develop intimate friendships. Despite the generational gap between the physical traditional wash place and the virtual space of the digital ppal-let-ter, they share the same purpose of being a space wherein women are able to meet other women and form social bonds. Similar to how ‘SMS re-enacts nineteenth-century letter writing traditions’ (Hjorth 2005, cited in Hjorth 2009, p. 27), KakaoTalk group chats can be conceived as an extended, upgraded and digitalised version of the wash place before the 1960s. Through these chat groups, ajummas reenact earlier gathering traditions in this digital space to form intimate bonds with each other. Ajummas and their ajumma-specific spaces are not new. They have been a part of Korean culture, often hidden or ignored by the public. This research demonstrates that similarities can be found between two disconnected middle-aged women’s communal spaces that are located in different eras and different spaces. Furthermore, the communal spaces where ajummas can continue to build intimate friendships will keep evolving in tandem with the development of new communication technologies. Consequently, their communal spaces will be reshaped and relocated: just as digital ppal-let-ter in the twenty-first century reenacts the wash place before the 1960s, so too will overlaps, correlations and exchanges continue to emerge between the present and the past as technology evolves and develops. This study of Korean ajummas and their everyday practices of adopting new digital mobile technology in their own communal spaces sheds light on their role in the development of media industries in Korea. Although contemporary ajummas are neither early adopters nor explorers of new digital mobile technology when compared with other groups (Ok 2011), they actively participate in and develop new media practices. Indeed, ajummas demonstrate their own characteristic ways of engaging mobile communication in the distinctive communal spaces they create. Instead of dismissing ajummas, this research has highlighted their continuing role in Korean society, particularly in the development of social intimacies through mobile media technologies.

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Acknowledgements  I would like to thank the ajummas who participated in my study. I would also like to thank Dr. Victoria Duckett for early feedback for my work. The editors of the book, Dr. Jason Vincent A. Cabañes and Dr. Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco, were extremely helpful and generous with advice and direction.

References Choi, S. C., Kim, J. Y., & Kim, K. (1999). Social representation and power of Ajumma in Korea. Korean Journal of Psychology: Women, 4(1), 56–67. Chung, C.  K., & Cho, S.  J. (2006). Conceptualization of Jeong and dynamics of Hwabyung. Psychiatry Investigation, 3(1), 46–54. Frizzo-Barker, J., & Chow-White, P. A. (2012). ‘There’s an app for that’: Mediating mobile moms and connected careerists through smartphones and networked individualism. Feminist Media Studies, 12(4), 580–589. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.741876. Ganito, C. (2010). Women on the move: The mobile phone as a gender technology. Comunicação & Cultura, 9, 77–88. Ghosh, P. (2013). Kim, Park and Lee: Why do Koreans have so few surnames? International Business Times. http://www.ibtimes.com/kim-park-lee-why-do-koreans-have-so-few-surnames-1472324. Accessed 20 Feb 2018. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goggin, G. (2011). Ubiquitous apps: Politics of openness in global mobile cultures. Digital Creativity, 22(3), 148–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2011.603733. Hjorth, L. (2009). CU: The presents of co-presence. Centre for Contemporary Photography. http:// www.larissahjorth.net/storage/LarissaHjorth_CUcatalogue.pdf. Accessed 13 Jan 2018. Hjorth, L., & Lim, S. S. (2012). Mobile intimacy in an age of affective mobile media. Feminist Media Studies, 12(4), 477–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.741860. Ito, M., Okabe, D., & Matsuda, M. (2005). Personal, portable, pedestrian: Mobile phones in Japanese life. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kang, S., & Jung, J. (2014). Mobile communication for human needs: A comparison of smartphone use between the US and Korea. Computers in Human Behavior, 35, 376–387. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.03.024. Katz, J. E., & Aakhus, M. (2002). Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keum, H.  J., & Cho, J.  H. (2010). Smartphone communication gap and political participation: The moderating role of smartphone use in the effects of social media on participation. Korea Journal of Journalism and Communication Studies, 54(5), 348–371. Kim, J. Y. (2010). The significance of talk in women’s everyday life: An ethnographic study about middle-aged women’s talk at a bathhouse. Seoul: Seoul National University. Kim, M.J. (2018). KakaoTalk, the country’s most popular mobile messenger. Platum. https://platum.kr/archives/102366. Accessed 30 July 2018. Kim, Y. J., Jung, J. M., & Lee, E. J. (2011). What drives the adoption and usage of smartphone applications? Factors affecting degree of use, continuous use, and recommendation. Korean Journal of Journalism & Communication Studies, 55(6), 227–252. Kim, I., Kim, L., & Kelly, J.  G. (2006). Developing cultural competence in working with Korean immigrant families. Journal of Community Psychology, 34(2), 149–165. https://doi. org/10.1002/jcop.20093. Krueger, R. A., & Casey, M. A. (2009). Focus groups: A practical guide for applied research. Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington, DC: Sage. Lee, D. H. (2005). Women’s creation of camera phone culture. Fibreculture Journal, 6, 1–11.

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Lemish, D., & Cohen, A. A. (2005). On the gendered nature of mobile phone culture in Israel. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, 52(7–8), 511–521. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-005-3717-7. Licoppe, C. (2004). ‘Connected’ presence: The emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships in a changing communication technoscape. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(1), 135–156. Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I., & Kelly, K. (2003). New media: A critical introduction. London/New York: Routledge. Meyrowitz, J.  (1985). No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. Ok, H. (2011). New media practices in Korea. International Journal of Communication, 5(1), 320–348. Park, H. M. (2005). 100 stories of Korean society: Women. Korea JoongAng Daily. http://article. joins.com/news/article/article.asp?total_id=1657996&cloc=. Accessed 25 June 2018. Park, I. K., & Shin, D. H. (2010). Using the uses and gratifications theory to understand the usage and the gratification of smartphones. Journal of Communication Science, 10(4), 192–225. Rakow, L., & Navarro, V. (1993). Remote mothering and the parallel shift: Women meet the cellular telephone. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 10(2), 144–157. Sohn, S. H., Choi, Y. J., & Hwang, H. S. (2011). Understanding acceptance of smartphone among early adopters using extended technology acceptance model. Korean Journal of Journalism & Communication Studies, 55(2), 227–251. Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and cultural form. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Womennews. (2009). Opened ‘a wash place of the mind’ for women. Womennews. http://www. womennews.co.kr/news/39522. Accessed 25 July 2018. Yang, I. Y., & Lee, S. Y. (2011). Exploring smartphone early adopters categories on the basis of motivations. Korean Journal of Journalism & Communication Studies, 55(1), 109–139. Yoon, S.  Y. (2009). Development of leisure activity model by life cycle. Seoul: Korea Tourism Organization.

Chapter 6

Fandom in My Pocket: Mobile Social Intimacies in WhatsApp Fan Groups Hattie Liew

Abstract  The sociality of fandom is highly visible on social networking platforms. Little has been said, however, about fandom in small, closed social networks that exist predominantly on smartphone applications, like mobile instant messaging applications WhatsApp, Telegram, and LINE. This chapter addresses this gap, as it investigates how individuals residing in Singapore participate in WhatsApp fan group chats. These fan group chats are conceptualized as private, mobile fan spaces, where mobile intimacy shapes individuals’ fan experience and therefore constitutes an important part of fan culture. The concept of mobile intimacy is helpful in understanding how fan group chats allow for communication and perceived proximity over time and space, and in grasping the significance of these chats in the social circles and daily lives of individual fans. Apart from the obvious utility of WhatsApp in interpersonal communication, findings show that individuals use fan chat groups to build personal relationships with other fans, to manage the boundaries of fandom within their everyday life, as a private archive, and as a means to negotiate their place in the fan ecology. Overall, the social practices and intimacies that arise in WhatsApp group chats constitute a crucial part of the fan experience that differ from that of other open social network platforms. Keywords  Fandom · Participatory culture · Mediated affect · Closed groups · Mobile intimacy

6.1 Introduction The rising prominence of fan research during the past two decades has highlighted fandom’s participatory nature. The most striking development has been the advent of digital media (Bennett 2014, p. 7), which has reshaped key aspects of fandom, including communication, creativity, knowledge sharing, and organizational and H. Liew (*) The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_6

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civic power. Such developments inspired scholars to study how fandom and ­technology intersect (for example, Jenkins 2006). One key strand of research focuses on the sociality of fandom on social networks, where fans engage with celebrity Facebook fan pages, create fan videos on YouTube, and post fan fiction and fan art in forums. While there is no doubt that fandom has thrived on digital media (for example, Misailidou 2017; Hoang, this volume; Hillman et al. 2014), little has been said about fans in small, closed social networks that exist predominantly on mobile smartphones. Such social networks include groups on mobile instant messaging applications like WhatsApp, Telegram, and LINE and other mobile-based social media platforms like Snapchat. In this chapter, I investigate how fan group chats shape the fan experiences of individuals residing in Singapore. I focus on WhatsApp (launched in 2009 and acquired by Facebook in 2014), a closed mobile messaging app where only people who are in each other’s contact list can see the content one shares (Aharony and Gazit 2016). It can handle multiple content formats and recently adopted features similar to other social media platforms like the ‘stories’ function (posts that disappear after 24 hours). In 2017, WhatsApp announced that it had 1.5 billion users and handled 60 billion messages every day (Constine 2018). While WhatsApp is one of the largest self-contained communication networks (Metz 2016), it faces competition in some parts of the world from functionally similar apps such as KakaoTalk (South Korea), LINE (Japan and some parts of Asia), and WeChat (Mainland China). WhatsApp enjoys near-ubiquity in Singapore, where its penetration rate was 97% in 2016 (WARC 2016). Its use ranges from interpersonal communication to professionalized purposes in the operations of organizations. While fans in Singapore can participate in online fan communities without WhatsApp, those who use it connect with each other in ways that are distinct from other platforms. Unlike open forums for instance—where participants are anonymous and large in numbers—WhatsApp fan group chats are often comprised of fans that already know each other in real life in smaller, more close-knit groups. That said, it is important to go beyond examining the often-discussed formal qualities of platforms to explain their impact on fans’ practices. Looking into the meanings that fans ascribe to their messaging practices in WhatsApp allows us to better understand individuals’ experiences with the application. In the following sections, I give an overview of existing research on digital fan practices and conceptualize affect and intimacy in digital environments. I then share findings obtained through participant observation of three varied WhatsApp fan groups and interviews with ten individuals who actively participate in these groups. I discuss how the groups can be conceptualized as private mobile fan spaces, where the mobile intimacy experienced by individuals shapes their fan experience and therefore constitutes an important part of fan culture. Apart from the practical uses of organizing people and information sharing, fans enjoy forging personal relationships with other fans that they may not enjoy on other internet-enabled platforms. They also engage in practices similar to those on other fan platforms, like archiving and status building. While participating in fan groups provides opportunities for fans to perform fan practices, they also experience ambivalence precisely because

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of the mobile intimacy WhatsApp affords them. I consequently contend that although how fans ‘do fandom’ is a result of WhatsApp’s characteristics, it is shaped more by the meanings that fans derive from using the platform.

6.2 Fandom Online The profound impact of digital technology—and the Internet in particular—on fandom is reflected in how it has become indispensable to being a fan. It has augmented fans’ capacities for community formation and building as well as fan production, further challenging old power relationships between fans and the media (Bennett 2014, p. 6). In fact, fans have always been early adopters of digital technologies and have quickly integrated new platforms of their time—from early newsgroups to today’s social networking—into their practices (Bury 2017). Some contemporary examples of existing research on internet enabled fan practices include fan fiction communities and archives (De Kosnik 2016), fan crowdfunding (Bennett et  al. 2015; Chin et al. 2014), grassroots media distribution (Jung 2011), and electronic fanzines (Smith 1999). One recurring theme in fan research is the formation of fan communities. Recent research has revealed how social media platforms shape fan communities by way of their affordances and general platform communication norms. For example, Hillman et al. (2014) pointed out how media fandom on Tumblr utilizes a unique Tumblr language, while Misailidou (2017) found that ironic GIFs are a common form of cultural production among media fans on Tumblr. Such norms amongst Tumblr users imply the existence of communities where membership relies on both technical understanding of the platform and cultural understanding of the fan groups. Other kinds of fan research highlight how the objects of fandom like pop stars, sports teams, and those who manage them make use of social media platforms to cultivate fan communities. For example, Lady Gaga’s strategic Twitter engagement with fans builds a sense of closeness between her and her fans as well as among fans, as fans perceive communication on Twitter as intimate, despite the fact that millions of other unknown individuals follow the account (Bennett 2013). Despite the promise of vibrant communities online, new social media platforms seem to facilitate community-building less and less (Bury 2017). Early online platforms like newsgroups were opportunities to reach out to fellow fans one normally would not have access to, as their key features encouraged in-depth engagement between individuals. However, the popularization of blogs followed by social media platforms shifted the focus from group collectivity to personalized networks. In this mode, while one potentially has access to a much larger group of fans, people posting one-liner comments, reposts and giving likes no longer necessarily constitute online communities in the sense that they consist of ‘discussions long enough, with sufficient feeling, to form webs of personal relationships’ (Rheingold 1993, p. 5) and are ‘understood as discursive constructions with specific histories of interactivity and specific sets of practices’ (Bury 2017, p. 629).

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In this context—where digital technology is indispensable to fandom, where new platforms enable new varieties of digital practices to emerge, and with changing meanings of an online community—WhatsApp fan groups can be conceived in several compatible ways. First, using mobile apps in fan practices is a continuation of fans’ ready adoption of new technologies for fan cultural production and community building. Second, fans’ uptake of social media is an extension of how being a fan is largely a social experience, for at the very least one perceives oneself to be from an imagined community of fans. WhatsApp fan groups can be seen as a type of social practice that augments the fan’s experience. Third, closed social networks like those on WhatsApp may provide opportunities for in-depth, sustained engagement between individuals that other open platforms with a comparatively massive number of anonymous subscribers do not offer. WhatsApp fan groups may thus represent a shift in how fans ‘use social media to “do” participatory fandom differently’ and ‘find ways to establish a sense of connection without necessarily being part of an online community’ (Bury 2017, p. 640). While existing research on online fan practices are invaluable to our understanding of Internet cultures, fan cultures, and contemporary society, much of current research focuses on public, open social networks or open platforms. This chapter seeks to address the paucity of research on what fans do in closed-door fan communities marked by exclusivity, rather than 24/7 inclusivity. It also seeks to further the scholarship on how fans have always adopted new technologies by attending to the as yet nascent work on how fans use mobile devices and, crucially, mobile apps. By focusing on practices on fan WhatsApp groups, I shed light on an aspect of fan practice that is hardly seen, but yet can be an important part of being a fan.

6.3 Mediated Intimacies, Mediated Affect Fan culture is by its nature affective (Grossberg 1992). There is also growing consensus that digital technologies are affective technologies (Hillis et al. 2015). Both these conceptual developments necessitate that we consider fandom in tandem with the intimacies and affective impact of digital practices. In line with this, I posit that ‘mobile intimacy’ is a useful concept to contextualize this study. ‘Mobile’ refers to the idea that ‘intimacy is better understood as extremely mobile processes of attachment’ (Sadowski 2016, p. 63) and the ‘ability to be intimate across distances of time and space’ (Raiti 2007, para. 2). Hjorth and Lim (2012) argue that while the mobility of intimacies predates today’s digital culture, the proliferation and widespread adoption of services such as social media and GPS particularly on mobile devices give prominence to this phenomenon. Specifically, mobile media collapse distinctions between what is private and public, and between work and leisure spaces, as well as blur and strengthen boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds. This has influenced how ‘various forms of mobility (across technological, geographic, psychological, physical, and temporal differences) and intimacy infuse public and private spaces’ (Hjorth and Lim 2012, p.  478, emphasis in original),

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enabling the overlapping of the physical space with an electronic one that is relational, emotional, and social. Mobile technology has not only contributed to an overlapping of and moving between different spaces and intimacies but also to a shift in sociability. As Raiti (2007) states, the foundation of mobile intimacy is how new media distribute time, space, and place. He argues that place loses its significance as the time taken to cross distances diminishes and the value of an action does not necessarily increase with the time taken to perform it. What becomes valuable instead is, proximity, which describes the ‘appearance of the world as more intimate’ (Tomlinson 1999, p. 3), and the technological mediation that enables it. Raiti (2007) argues that this intensification of mediation impacts human relationships in paradoxical ways despite the general optimism surrounding digital communication. One way to think of mobile technologies as shifting sociability is the idea that they are ‘generative of sensation and potentiality’ (Hillis et al. 2015, p. 10). Central to these technologies is affect, or ‘an active, contingent dynamic or relation that orients interpretation and moves readers, viewers, and listeners in very physical ways’ (Hillis et  al. 2015, p.  7). Another way to think about mobile technologies shaping sociability is specific to social media. The notion of ‘scalable sociality’ conceives of the changes in interpersonal relationships brought about by these platforms (Miller et al. 2016). It argues that due to the diminished differences between public and private media brought about by the Internet, it is more useful to understand social media with regards to how individuals relate to and interact with each other on these platforms along two compatible continuums: the size of the group and the degree of privacy. This means that different platforms used by the same people can be placed relative to each other in terms of these continuums: from those that allow for small group sizes and a high degree of privacy to those that have big group sizes and a high degree publicness. Empirical research on mobile media and intimacy has highlighted that the collapse in space and time facilitated by digital technology enables co-presence (Ito 2003). Digital co-presence is where participants are ‘socially and interactionally accountable’ (Ito 2003, p. 1) despite being physically distant. Existing research has highlighted communication strategies that build, maintain and manage this co-­ presence (Ito 2003; Arminen and Weilenmann 2009; O’Hara et al. 2014). Of particular relevance to this study are works that focus on similar social situations – closed group chats. Ito (2003) argued that in making these groups, individuals create communication places where the group has established membership rules specific to them, and that have a perceived purpose and emotional meaning to its participants. While the group itself is made possible through technological affordances, its social significance is emergent. There are also varied functions that group chats have for individuals. Kim and Lim (2015) mapped three functional regions for the use of the Korean application Kakao. These functions were ‘performing everyday life’, ‘connecting to the maintained social capital’ and ‘connecting to the expired relationship’. Simultaneously, individuals employed strategies to manage their memberships, activities, and group boundaries.

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Although the concept of mobile intimacy was a response to technological advancement, fans have experienced mobile intimacies before the digital age. In fact, they have always actively searched for ways to connect with distant fans, to connect with their object of fandom, and to experience fandom as a collective whole. The intensity of mobile intimacy experienced by fans after the adoption of digital technology should thus not be seen as something new, but rather an augmentation of previous experiences, facilitated by devices and applications. In addition, the concept of ‘scalable sociality’ is a useful tool to understand fan’s digital affective experiences (Miller et al. 2016). We can define WhatsApp group chats as spaces where there is a small number of participants and a high degree of privacy, given the closed nature of the platform. This is in contrast to other platforms individuals may use, such as Facebook (low privacy and many participants). As such, how individuals interact with each other and their relationships may be different, and although the ubiquity of internet-enabled mobile devices mean that these platforms are readily available for individuals to communicate across space and time, they each enable different mobilities to different extents. While there has been a plethora of research on mobile and digital communications, there has been much less on closed mobile app-based chat groups. What is available so far begins to reveal how communication practices and group dynamics intersect with the technical capabilities of popular mobile applications. In addition, giving serious thought to such communication as affective cultural practices presents a way to examine their social meaning and the politics behind them (Dixon 2018). The inseparability of fandom with mobile intimacy, as well as fans eagerness to engage in affective communication practices and explore new technology, provides us with an opportunity to further understand a common, but under-studied practice in mobile communication.

6.4 Method I conducted participant observation with three WhatsApp groups in early 2018 to ‘understand the language, practices and activities’ (Brennen 2013, p. 163) of music fans residing in Singapore. I obtained initial access to fan groups doing a previous study on music fandom and gained inspiration for this research when fans described events in group chats. In this study, the focus was not on specific celebrities or fandoms, but what fans did in closed social networks. I observed three WhatsApp group - two belonged to fans of different Mandopop (Mandarin pop music largely based in Taiwan) singers and one to fans of an American pop singer, with 32, 6 and 45 members respectively. Participants were mostly in their 20s and 30s, with two people having overlapping memberships in two groups. I then interviewed ten individuals who were active chat participants. They shared how they joined the group, the practices they engaged in, and their motivations, gratifications and other related stories.

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It is useful to note that being a non-fan turned out to be useful position for understanding fan dynamics. It is also important to mention that a member in one of the groups specifically requested that I not name their object of fandom as the small circle of fans in Singapore would make them easily identifiable among other fans outside the group. I then extended the same courtesy to all groups.

6.5 Fans on WhatsApp Groups On the whole, WhatsApp group chats included both fandom-related talk and general socializing without reference to fan activities or the object of fandom. Within each category, there was what can be described as a casual chitchat as well as communications for practical reasons like coordinating a meet-up. In addition, different types of conversations were often intertwined, and participants held several simultaneous conversations. For instance, on one occasion, someone posted a photo of an album in a limited-edition vinyl format. He then offered to help others in the group purchase the item since he was already at the store, and people constructed a list by cutting and pasting the previous version of the list and adding their name to it. While this was going on, a few poked fun at a ‘superfan’ asking why he wasn’t the first to be at the store or why he wasn’t buying up every copy, while a few others geeked out over audio equipment. Conversations also tended to be continuous, that is, conversations were without specific starts and endings and persisted over an extended period of time (Kim and Lim 2015). Understandably, fan activity was especially frequent during periods when there was activity from their object of fandom. This was not necessarily something major like a new album, as it included small things like social media updates, which appeared regularly. As such, casual chitchat and fandom-related conversations bled into each other continuously, especially because not everyone was free at the same time and so reacted to the messages at different times. Like mobile phone users, WhatsApp chat groups expanded the physical, material experiences of fans, for each event began before and ended after the actual event via the group chat (see Ito 2003). For example, through someone’s personal network, a group of fans attending a performance managed to secure a short fan gathering with the singer. In the days leading up to the performance, the chat group was filled with anticipation and fantasies of how successful the performance would be and how the gathering would play out. People thanked each other on their way home, and in the following week, they shared photos taken with their phones and chatted about the performance and the gathering. In these ways, social intimacy was maintained despite not being physically co-present. While there were many specifics to what fans did and what they talked about on the WhatsApp groups, several communication patterns like those described above overlapped with those found in existing studies on mobile group chats (e.g. Smith and Tang 2015; Kim and Lim 2015; O’Hara et al. 2014; Nouwens et al. 2017). This is not surprising as, even though the focus was on fandom, users interacted with

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fellow fans as they usually did with others on the same platform. As one interviewee, Daisy, put it, ‘I don’t really think much about it [how she uses WhatsApp with the fan group], cos I’m the same way when I am on WhatsApp with my other friends’. Despite this commonality, my focus here is on how the use of these communication practices and experienced mobile intimacy shaped meanings in fandom. In the following sections, I discuss four themes that illustrate how membership and engagement in WhatsApp fan group chats shaped the participants’ experiences in fandom as well as their everyday lives.

6.5.1 Building Personal Relationships According to the interviewees, one of the benefits of participating in a WhatsApp fan group chat was the opportunity to build stronger and more personal relationships with fellow fans. What contributed to the fans’ perception that this space was more personal and intimate than others was its privacy, exclusivity, the everyday associations they had with the app, as well as the fact that participants knew each other before joining the group chat. Leonard, one of the co-owners of a fan group chat, said, ‘we [group owners] formed this chat almost two years ago so that it’s more convenient to organize the fans we know in real life. And also, so that fans can know each other better’. He explained that he also owned a Facebook page and a closed Facebook group, ‘but we don’t know everyone from there… Sometimes they may know each other and comment on each other’s comments, but it’s just different. Somehow, I feel that the WhatsApp group is more personal, and you also know they are real fans’. Leonard can be considered a famous fan (someone whom many fans know) and he took it upon himself to bring fans together and share information on Facebook. However, he limited his WhatsApp group invitations to those whom he had met physically, had kept in touch with, and whom he deemed to be harmless and sincere. Similarly, Daisy, who was in a different group than Leonard, explained that most people in her group knew each other offline and that the WhatsApp group was an extension of their offline relationship. She also compared the WhatsApp group to groups on other social media and said, You don’t really know people that well on, like, Instagram or Facebook. You usually go to the fan page for a reason, or comment on something specific. On WhatsApp, maybe it is because it’s just us, like, other people cannot see the chat, so it is more casual and honest, and we talk about things outside stuff like news and concerts and all that. Being on a chat app makes it feel friendlier too. Like, you know, I talk to my mom on WhatsApp and all that.

In this case, the sense of privacy and the associations individuals may make with the platform contributed to the perception of a WhatsApp group being a more intimate virtual space than more open fan spaces. In addition, participants often

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already knew each other (or at least one other person in the group) through other venues, and had been screened, no matter how informally, to be, in Leonard’s words, ‘real fans’ before they were extended an invitation to join the group. Exclusivity of the fan group was also a factor that bonded participants together. WL, who was recently added to her WhatsApp group, stated that she immediately felt closer and she would think of members in the group before other fans. For instance, she would share information with the WhatsApp group first before she posted on Facebook. Interestingly, Leonard, Daisy, and WL’s comparisons of WhatsApp with other fan spaces on social media revealed that although they participated in multiple platforms, their WhatsApp group ranked higher in closeness and importance in their minds. Several factors contributed to this, such as the perception that the individuals in the group were committed fans just like themselves (instead of strangers who may be casual audiences) and the opportunities for interaction that went beyond ‘liking’ or commenting. Evidence of personal relationships abounded in the WhatsApp groups. Apart from the obvious posts regarding their object of fandom, streams of random ‘hellos’, birthday greetings, and casual chitchat were common. Practices present on other social networking platforms such as sending emojis, GIFs and other digital content (outside the context of fandom) were also present in the group chats. For instance, on Kelvin’s birthday, a fellow chat participant tagged his name followed by a cake and a gift emoji in the fan group chat, while another sent a humorous birthday meme. These digital practices were akin to gift exchanges and produced social value among those involved, even though they may seem trivial or unintelligible to outsiders (Hillis et al. 2015). Through continuous streams of updates and conversations in the group, fans also experienced a variation of ‘ambient intimacy’, which is the ability ‘to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible’ (Reichelt 2007, para. 3). This resulted in an emotional attachment, the process through which may ‘underlie the formation and maintenance of relationships on social media’ (Reichelt 2007, para. 1). Membership in a WhatsApp fan group is not just an expression of an existing affective relationship with the object of fandom, but one with selected fellow fans. The formation of such cliques, whose social intimacy is built significantly through their participation in such closed groups, has an impact on the fan ecology and hierarchies. One’s perceived position within fandom is negotiated and managed through one’s membership in groups and the social networks and information that come with it, which is something I discuss later. Furthermore, fans’ perceptions about the legitimacy of participants in WhatsApp groups as well as perceptions of privacy and intimacy of the group differ from how they view fan groups on other platforms such as Facebook. This highlights Miller et al.’s (2016) point of ‘scalable sociality’ and how fans relate to and interact with each other differently on different fan platforms.

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6.5.2 Managing Boundaries and Ambivalence Although fans enjoyed being in a WhatsApp fan group, they experienced bouts of ambivalence toward it precisely because of the co-presence it afforded them. To be sure, the fans liked that their fellow fans were always with them, even if only figuratively. When they got excited about something regarding their object of fandom, they could easily communicate with other fans that, as Leonard put it, ‘will understand, unlike other friends who don’t get it’. The WhatsApp fan group did not merely provide convenience, but also facilitated the formation of common fan experiences among participants despite their physical distance from each other. The fans also appreciated that they had access to the fan group on a device as commonplace as a mobile phone and, crucially, on an application as ubiquitous as WhatsApp. This meant that their engagement in fan practices was invisible to those around them. The fans found this useful because they often experienced shame (Zubernis and Larsen 2012), especially since society tends to portray them as immature and too emotionally invested in popular culture (Jenkins 1992). Following the comment quoted above, Leonard told me that his friends often teased him, and that he didn’t let his colleagues at work know that he was an active fan ‘in case they see me differently’. Although he started the WhatsApp group with a very practical purpose to bring fans together, he quickly discovered that a great advantage of the group was that he could be a fan who could hide in plain sight, since ‘others will just assume I’m just texting’. In other words, Leonard’s fan mode was potentially always on, but he was still able to manage the boundaries between fandom and other aspects of his life. That said, the interviewees also said that this perpetual ‘fan mode’ could be intrusive. Of the ten, eight admitted to muting their fan group chat either intermittently or permanently. Depending on the combination of an individual’s phone and application settings, muting can mean totally switching off notifications or having the notifications but having no sound alerts. For example, Gwen muted the chat by receiving no alerts at all, as she thought that ‘they either appear at the wrong time or there are too many’. Her first complaint related to asynchronous communication on the fan group where different rhythms of everyone’s lives meant that there rarely was a time outside specific fan events, like a concert or fan gathering, when people were simultaneously available to talk. Her second complaint related to notification overload, a phenomenon described in the media (e.g. Shankland 2015) as well as in academic research (e.g. Church and De Oliveira 2013). While it is true that notifications also occur with dyadic exchanges and even outside instant messaging applications, WhatsApp chat groups can generate a huge amount of notifications as conversations carry on regardless of whether all members are participating (Smith and Tang 2015). The interviewees tried to manage the level of intrusiveness fan chats had on other aspects of their lives. However, they did not see leaving the chat as an option because, to them, it was an important part of them being a fan. Even though they

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found the continuous chatting intrusive enough to mute, they still opened the chat at regular intervals, in case they were left out of anything important. As Gwen put it, Actually, the chat can be quite irritating sometimes, so I think it’s right to mute it. But I have FOMO [fear of missing out], so even though I put it on silent, I still obsessively check it. Actually, it’s more troublesome this way, cos I can’t just read a notification on the home screen, but I have to open WhatsApp to see if there are any messages.

Being in a WhatsApp group puts an individual perpetually in ‘fan mode’ due to the social co-presence the platform affords them. Texting and sharing digital artifacts are the modes of exchange in these groups, and to a third party, it is indistinguishable from everyday communication. Fans are thus able to manage the boundaries between fandom and other aspects of their lives, minimizing judgment that fans commonly experience due to their intense investment in popular culture. However, co-presence can also prove to be intrusive to fans’ lives. While this generates feelings of ambivalence towards the group, the perceived benefits of staying in it outweigh the inconveniences and fans find ways to manage the chat’s presence in their lives.

6.5.3 WhatsApp as a Private Archive Sharing other digital material besides text messages was common in WhatsApp fan groups. As a result, a group’s chat and media archives formed a rich ever-growing repository of digital fan artifacts. As fans valued information, and even more so information that was exclusive, part of a WhatsApp group’s value to the fans was its capacity to function as a private fan archive. As Table 6.1 shows, WhatsApp fan groups contained a wealth of information. For instance, in one of the groups I observed, 156 jpeg files (photos and screenshots) were shared between its 32 members over approximately 6 months. Although the Table 6.1  Material shared in WhatsApp fan groups Category (alphabetical order) Description Audio and video Recordings made by media producers (e.g. television appearance); recordings (official) obtained by fans through digital technology like DVRs and screen capture software Audio and video Covert fan-made recordings such as a fancam of a live show recordings (bootleg) Links and screenshots URLs and screen-captured images that lead to or contain information from entertainment news outlet. Photos Mostly fan-taken, rather than official media photos; cover almost everything, from pictures of events, albums, promotional material and merchandise Reposts Material from social media by the object of fandom and other related public figures, like a famous hair stylist

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fans may just be excited to share the information at the moment and may not think of it as such, participation in WhatsApp fan group chats can be conceived as a process of archiving. The archives generated in a WhatsApp fan group speak to the idea of fan cultures as archival cultures. In particular, it is a variation of a ‘rogue archive’ (De Kosnik 2016), which is focused on cultural material unaffiliated with traditional memory institutions (e.g. museums), run by fans, and is freely accessible to anyone on the Internet. However, the archive of a WhatsApp fan group is fundamentally different from other electronic fan archives like fan fiction communities or e-zines, due to differences in accessibility, rudimentary cataloguing capabilities of the platform, and lack of organization in information gathering. Most importantly, the content is shared for exclusive knowledge among its members, rather than for the fandom at large to benefit from. For instance, fans prioritized sharing information with the chat group over sharing it on Facebook pages because they valued fans in the group over fans unknown to them. At times, they also did this to better establish a reputation as someone with access to rare information relatively greater to other members of the group. As WhatsApp is a closed platform, group members are the only ones who can access the group’s media archive. In addition to accessibility, being able to make sense of the content adds on another layer of exclusivity. WhatsApp has some basic features to categorize content, namely the ability for users to ‘star’ messages, and the chat archive having ‘media’, ‘documents’ and ‘links’ sections. However, it cannot catalogue information in more sophisticated ways that other platforms do, such as the use of hashtags. Fans consequently have to rely on their memories to identify the context in which the said material was sent and locate them through searching using keywords and/or dates. For example, an individual wanted to read a discussion the group had a few weeks earlier, where they speculated about some guest performers to a concert after someone shared a screenshot of an Instagram post. He then searched ‘special guest’ to locate the discussion and the screenshot. In this way, the shared knowledge or experiences required to make sense of the chat archives adds on to the exclusivity of the group. If one were to export the archives and give it to an outsider, it would appear as a meaningless collection of files. Although it may look chaotic, the chat archive is an invaluable resource for participants as there are materials unavailable in mainstream media. For instance, a participant in Leonard’s group obtained photos and video clips of a private performance at a gala dinner from a friend who happened to attend the dinner. The material was shared with the group but was never shared on Facebook. According to fans’ investigations, the dinner was also never covered by the media. These are the kinds of information that fans like. Coupled with all the other material such as reposts from social media they are ensured that they do not miss out on anything. This gives the group chat legitimacy among its participants and confirms their perceived status in the fandom, which makes membership in the group worthwhile. Simultaneously, the willingness to share information with the group exclusively, or at least before they do so with anyone else, demonstrates fans’ affective investment

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in the group. As a fan practice, it can be considered as gift to the fandom (Chin 2014). Thus, such digital practices go beyond the pragmatic purpose of information gathering to include an affective dimension.

6.5.4 Membership and Status Fandom can be seen as sociocultural fields, each with their own unique set of rules governing social practices (Chin 2018). Hills (2002), for instance, adopts Bourdieu’s (1984) ideas of social and cultural capital and argues that fan spaces are hierarchical, evidenced by how fans try to gain social standing among other fans. Furthermore, fans police the boundaries between themselves and non-fans (Fiske 1992), as well as distinguish types among fans (Chin 2018). WhatsApp fan group chats can be seen as a part of such a sociocultural field where fans engage in specific practices on WhatsApp to elevate their position in fandom. Doing so allows us to explore the boundaries and status norms of fandom, and investigate ‘how (new) popular fan spaces and the interactions within these platforms contribute to the accumulation of fan status’ (Chin 2018, p. 246). For the interviewees, membership in WhatsApp fan groups was an integral part of the fan experience because it was crucial to navigating their place in fandom. As mentioned earlier, one had to be deemed a sincere and real fan before being added to a fan group chat. Of course, it was up to the group owners to decide who was ‘sincere’ and who were ‘real’ fans, bearing in mind differences in opinions, affiliations, preferences, and even petty conflicts exist within and between each fandom (Chin 2018; Tushnet 2014). Because of the closed nature of these WhatsApp groups, participants were often unaware of their existence until a member of the group asked them to join. Thus, an invitation was a form of external validation of a fan’s existing level of commitment rather than an end to which a fan deliberately performed fandom in front of others for. In addition, individuals could belong to different fan group chats, each with a different perceived status within the fandom. Sometimes, cross-membership also helped them gain status within each group. For example, Stefan belonged to a small group that I observed (six members), and another larger group that I did not observe. Often, he would selectively share with the smaller group information he got from the larger group, whose members included famous fans and fans that worked in the media. This helped to establish his reputation in the smaller group, as he appeared as someone who was more up-to-date than the others. Stefan also mentioned that he didn’t add me in the bigger group because he thought that I wouldn’t be interested in such detailed information ‘because you are not super crazy like us’. Stefan’s use of ‘crazy’ in this instance was positive and an inclusion criterion, indicating enthusiasm and commitment, and not the typical language observed by several scholars (e.g. Jenkins 1992; Gray et al. 2007) that belittles fans as ‘otherwise functioning adults’ (Callahan 2005, p. 46). In Stefan’s case, his multiple memberships and his

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management of whom he brought to which group shaped not only how he perceived his place within the fandom, but also influenced the part of the fan ecology that was visible to him. Although fans can be members of multiple groups and experience multiple levels of mobile intimacies, they are limited to what is visible to them because it is impossible to exhaustively document a single fandom. While ‘fans may occupy multiple positions simultaneously’ (MacDonald 1998, p. 138), different norms and preferences in reading a text between groups meant that a fan’s status in one social circle is often not carried over to another (Chin 2018). While a fan may make use of WhatsApp fan groups to negotiate his or her place in fandom, it is difficult to determine where exactly in the fan hierarchy an individual occupies.

6.6 Conclusion WhatsApp fan chat groups are private mobile fan spaces where participants’ fan practices are part of their quotidian experiences. As a space residing on a ubiquitous medium (in their context), fans are able to participate in fandom in plain sight, making it indistinguishable to others. In this way, these WhatsApp groups as mobile fan spaces are public private spaces. They facilitate the mobility of social intimacy between fans regardless of their immediate contexts, while allowing them the flexibility to manage the boundaries between fandom and other aspects of their lives. In this chapter, we saw how group chats go beyond their initial pragmatic purposes and become spaces rich with social practices that hold meaning to their participants. While fans have always been quick to adopt new technologies into their fan practices, an application of Miller et al.’s (2016) ‘scalable sociality’ would mean that participants of a WhatsApp group chat, with its high level of privacy and small number of participants, would experience fandom very differently on other open digital media platforms popular with fans. This is because the degree of privacy and group size is related to how individuals relate to and interact with each other. Indeed, in the preceding discussion, we have seen how participants in fan group chats enjoy more personal relationships with fellow participants in comparison to those on other platforms they use. The norm is also that participants already know each other offline and are screened before they get added to the chat, reflecting stronger preexisting ties between new and existing members that are not necessarily present on open platforms where anyone can join in. While some behavior in WhatsApp groups serve the same purpose as those found elsewhere, namely archiving and climbing up the fan hierarchy, they differ in actual practice due to the nature of the platform itself. For instance, the high level of privacy allowed participants to selectively share information across groups, while minimal cataloguing features on WhatsApp made the fan archive meaningful only to its participants. In addition, as Bury (2017) demonstrates, the nature of online fan communities changes with each emerging Internet platform, moving increasingly from group collectivity to personalized networks. While comment culture, where ‘lively debates

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are the exception’ (Lovink 2011, p.  52), thrive on social media platforms, these small private group chats present an opportunity for fans to engage in the kinds of discussions early online fan newsgroups were celebrated for. As such, it is useful to ponder if fans’ participation in WhatsApp chat groups is an attempt ‘to “do” participatory fandom differently’ (Bury 2017, p. 640) and to assess how this type of fan experience is different from the online communities typically associated with participatory cultures. While there has been numerous research documenting and analyzing fan practices, most have focused on the most visible, open platforms. This chapter presents another possible angle from which we can understand fandom. By looking at closed fan groups on a platform as personal as the mobile phone, we are able to acknowledge the breadth of fan practices, the evolving nature of fan and the contemporary everyday experiences of individuals.

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Part II

Enacting Global Relationships

Chapter 7

Dating Apps as Digital Flyovers: Mobile Media and Global Intimacies in a Postcolonial City Jason Vincent A. Cabañes and Christianne F. Collantes

Abstract  This chapter is about middle-class millennial Filipino women and their experiences of mediated global intimacies in the Philippines postcolonial capital of Manila. It focuses on their use of mobile technologies in exploring relationships with foreign men, and Westerners particularly. Drawing on an 18-month ethnographic research, this chapter sheds light on how the women use mobile apps to enact a distinct and temporary resolution to the challenges of experiencing global intimacies in a postcolonial city. Specifically, they construct what we call ‘digital flyovers’, that is, digital infrastructures borne out of dating apps and other mobile media that allow them to bypass what they think to be ‘uncosmopolitan’ Filipino men and to connect with foreign romantic prospects who share their own ‘globalised’ backgrounds and sensibilities. We show that, on one hand, these digital flyovers demonstrate how the women do have the privilege of accessing spaces conducive to cosmopolitan global intimacies, something that is elusive for most people in the Philippines. We also underscore, on the other hand, that these digital flyovers do nothing to change the ‘foundations’ of the society beneath them, which means that middle-class Manila’s distinct social dynamics continue to persist in their romantic and sexual lives. Keywords  Postcolonial city · Millennials · Cross-cultural relationships · Digital intimacy · Dating apps

J. V. A. Cabañes (*) · C. F. Collantes De La Salle University—Manila, Manila, Philippines e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_7

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7.1 Introduction ‘When you know, you know!’, Erika texted us. Even if it was just a mobile phone message, her excitement was palpable. Perhaps this was because her 27 years of experiences had taught her that even in today’s world of mobile media and dating apps, the road to finding ‘The One’ is not necessarily easy. So, when a Tinder date Erika almost blew off during a New York trip for her digital marketing job blossomed into a full-blown beautiful transcontinental romance, she could not help but share her joy. She told us that this guy—whom she was just supposed to meet for a quick 15 minutes in between the end of a Broadway play and her subway ride to her hotel—had not only booked a flight to visit her in the Philippine capital of Metropolitan Manila (henceforth, Manila). This guy was also now her fiancé. Erika would take a much longer time revealing this news to many of her family and friends, however. ‘I don’t like how judgy people in this city can be,’ she said. ‘Imagine what they’ll say. He’s a foreigner. Plus, we met on Tinder’. Like Erika, the 14 other middle-class millennial Filipino women we got to know during our 18-month fieldwork in Manila were all at the forefront of the intensifying ‘globalisation of intimacy’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2014). Not only did they live in a 12-million strong postcolonial capital with a distinct and longstanding history of cultural diversity (Connaughton et  al. 1995; Irving 2010; Wilson 2004). They were also in the ‘social media capital of the world’ where mobile phones accounted for 67% of people’s online access, higher than the global average of 42% (We Are Social 2018). All of them had indeed used dating apps and other mobile media to explore the possibility of having relationships with so-called AFAMs (a colloquial term that is the abbreviation of ‘a foreigner assigned to Manila’ or ‘a foreigner around Manila’) (De Leon 2017). And for most of the women, this was because of their exasperation with what they described as the conservatism of most Filipino men, many of whom still subscribed to more traditional prescriptions of Filipino femininity. For these men, the ideal woman should be docile, passive, and possess a sexuality that is conveniently obtainable but non-threatening. As Cate de Leon (2017) explains in her personal essay for Philstar Global, many Filipino men in Manila tend to search for sexually available women, ‘…but sleep with them too early, and many will lose respect for you’. The women in Manila, in the Philippines in general, and in East/Southeast Asia more broadly are no strangers to the complexities of cross-cultural affairs. Much has been written about the long and complicated history of these women’s intimate relationships with foreigners, and especially about how these have been imbricated in problematically gendered, raced, and classed transnational power dynamics (Jones and Shen 2008; Loos 2008; Constable 2003, 2010; Parreñas 2011; Hiew et al. 2015). In the Philippines particularly, much of the scholarship has been on lower class Filipino women’s encounters with foreigners looking for what they euphemistically refer to as a ‘good time’ or a ‘good wife’ (for example, Roces 2000; Tadiar 2004; Angeles and Sunanta 2007). This is, of course, understandable, especially since the sex tourism of women and children in the Philippines continues to

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plague the country (Duerr 2015; Tacon 2015; Tubeza 2011). The phenomenon of mail-order brides and its other contemporary forms continue to be popular as well (Saroca 1997; Constable 2003; Faier 2009; Fresnoza-Flot and Ricordeau 2013). We return to this theme later on in this chapter. But here, what we want to highlight is that there is also a growing number of middle-class East/Southeast Asian women— the Filipino women in our study included—whose social positioning enables them to imagine a different kind of intimate relationship with foreigners. With their university degrees, professional careers, world travels, and cosmopolitan sensibilities, they are hopeful that their relationships can work to subvert the earlier mentioned transnational power dynamics (Pananakhonsab 2016; Parker and Dales 2014). This chapter focuses specifically on how dating apps and other mobile media matter in middle-class millennial Filipino women’s attempts at finding global intimacies in Manila. Through this empirical anchor, it aims to contribute to two key sets of scholarship. For one, this chapter helps nuance the literature on the global intimacies of such middle-class East/Southeast Asian women by attending to not just the online dimension of these relationships (for example, Pananakhonsab 2016), but to their mobile mediated quality as well. It pays particular attention to whether and how dating apps and other mobile media have allowed Filipino women to materialise the kind of global intimacies that they desire (see Miller and Sinanan 2014). It looks into the ways in which they use these technologies to try to sustain an environment where there is a ready opportunity for them to connect with desirable foreigners in Manila and beyond. This is especially in light of how many of the women in our study were of the belief that the rise of mobile media and dating apps helped them maximise what they felt was an increasing diversity of foreigners in the city (see Albay 2017; Gonzales 2017). Beyond the still-present dirty old foreign men (DOMs), there were, amongst others, professional managers leading many of the ever-mushrooming digital upstart offices, social entrepreneurs excited at the possibilities of an emerging economy, and intrepid backpackers finally discovering the Philippines trail (see Chua 2017; Lim 2015; Puhm 2017). At the same time, this chapter also deepens the literature on mediated intimacies that usefully reminds us that digital dating continues to be imbricated in gendered, raced, and classed social dynamics (for example, Cabrera 2007; Saroca 2012; Tsunokai et al. 2014). It complicates the discussion of such intimacies by zeroing in on the unique ways in which the affordances of dating apps and mobile media might be differently harnessed in a global South context (see David and Cambre 2016; Hobbs et al. 2017; Schrock 2015). This is because in Manila, cross-cultural kinds of digital dating become entwined in the city’s distinctly postcolonial imaginaries of social hierarchies and intimacies (see Cabañes 2014, 2019; Collantes 2018). This point is particularly salient since the women in our study did share that their mix of dating apps and mobile media was premised on conscious strategies of social exclusion. Depending on their intent, they prioritised Bumble or Tinder or some other app to make it easier for them to find the kind of men they found desirable as well as to make themselves desirable to these men (see Gamboa 2019; Rappler Social Media Team 2015).

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To reiterate, this chapter examines how middle-class millennial Filipino women use dating apps and other mobile media in exploring relationships with foreign men. It assesses the degree to which they are able to use such technologies to materialise the kind of global intimacies that they desire. And in so doing, it also sheds light on the degree to which their relationships continue to be entwined with Manila’s distinct brand of postcolonial imaginaries of social hierarchies and intimacies. As a way of conceptually describing the mediated dynamics of global intimacies that we observed, we propose the notion of dating apps as ‘digital flyovers’. We explain this in the next section.

7.2 Conceptualising the Mediation of Global Intimacies in a Postcolonial City In talking about dating apps as ‘digital flyovers’, this chapter builds on two existing ideas. One is Neferti Tadiar’s (2004) metaphor of the Manila flyover that soars past the heavy on-ground traffic in order to connect the city’s centres of capital. In Tadiar’s work, she elucidates on the nationalist and postcolonial capitalist logics that continue to dominate the Philippines state. Within this discussion, she contends that as an urban infrastructure, the flyover symbolises the attempt of the country’s middle and upper classes to keep the liquid flows of transnational capital going in the midst of the gridlock of local labour. Parallel to this, we contend that the notion of dating apps as flyovers is also driven by such transnational and cosmopolitan desires, but this time expressed through mediated gender relations. This is because Manila’s middle-class millennial Filipino women seek to use dating apps and other mobile media to bypass ‘uncosmopolitan’ Filipino men and to connect with foreign romantic prospects that share their own ‘globalised’ backgrounds and sensibilities. The other idea in which ‘dating apps as digital flyovers’ is anchored is the work that one of us has done on ICTs as a ‘temporary resolution’ (Cabañes 2019). This pertains to how individuals can use technologies to create digital infrastructures that mitigate, even if only momentarily, the many challenges of doing global intimacies, especially when these go against a society’s traditional cultural norms. The earlier study discussed how Manila’s Punjabi migrant youth harnessed mobile media to enact ‘digital barriers’ that tenuously shielded their bold explorations of cross-cultural intimacies from their cultural community’s traditional demands surrounding arranged marriages. In the same vein, we attend to the vulnerability of dating apps as digital flyovers. Dating apps and other mobile media do open up Manila’s middle-class millennial Filipino women to the cosmopolitan experience of meeting diverse foreigners. At the same time, however, these technologies also expose these women to the dangers of the very same foreigners mapping onto them their exoticised and racialised assumptions and desires. In the rest of this section, we define the social and technological dynamics that are central to understanding how Manila’s middle-class millennial Filipino women

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enact digital flyovers in their intimate affairs with foreigners. First is that even if the increasing intensity of global intimacy in Manila is contemporary, its distinct inflection is very much shaped by the city’s long-standing social dynamics surrounding intimate relationships. The second thing is that while the affordances of dating apps and other mobile media can enable the women in this study to shape their global intimacies, these technologies nevertheless tend to have contradictory consequences for their relationships.

7.2.1 Global Intimacies and the Postcolonial City The drive for Manila’s middle-class millennial Filipino women to use dating apps and other mobile media to enact digital flyovers should be understood in relation to how they are navigating through and attempting to break away from what De Leon (2017) terms as ‘Manila’s confines’, which are comprised of the limitations of dating within rigid social class lines and having to still subscribe to conservative practices of sex, dating, and intimacy. This involves nearly unbending expectations of middle-class Filipino women in Manila to perform and adhere to their higher social status, whilst also following more traditional sexual norms. The women in this study are pressured to do this in a postcolonial city whose religio-cultural landscape is still significantly Roman Catholic and is still divided by socio-economic fault lines (Cornelio 2016; Hau 2017). But as we discuss later on in this chapter, what they want are relationships based on the idea of modern romance. This means having relationships that are about individual choice versus social scripts as well as an attraction rooted in emotional intimacy, psychological compatibility, and, crucially, sex appeal (Illouz 2012). Equally important, this means having a stance towards sexual relations that are framed less by traditional ideas of heteronormativity and more by an ethics of ‘erotic pluralism’ and ‘ethical tolerance’ (see Giddens 1992). Within this context, the connection with foreign men that digital flyovers allow can be seen as a way to bypass some of Manila’s social and cultural rigidities and to experience more cosmopolitan forms of intimacy. As mentioned in the introduction, however, the trend of Filipino women making connections or having intimate encounters with foreigners is hardly new, especially in postcolonial and continually globalising Manila. These encounters have been part of a political and economic history that has largely contributed to the ways in which Filipino women themselves have become racial and gendered stereotypes even on a transnational scale. Crucial to this history is the country’s colonial past and the residues of the American Occupation from 1898 to 1946. This period saw the establishment of military bases on several parts of the islands, state sponsored sex tourism, and large-scale overseas migration (Jeffreys 1999; Chant 2005; Tadiar 2004). As side effects of these complex national and transnational processes, several Filipino women participated—whether willingly or unwillingly—as sexual servants, mail-­ order brides, and even marriage migrants with foreigners both locally and overseas (Tolentino 2001; Constable 2003; So 2006).

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Over time, the Philippines became a site for globalised intimacies in such a way that allowed these sexual and intimate transactions to also help construct and perpetuate stereotypes of Filipino women as being ‘passive, demure, shy, desirous of monogamy and family-oriented while being also sexually voracious but with an aim to please men’ (Peracullo 2014, p.  15). In her work on internet dating between Filipino women and Australian men, for instance, Saroca (2012) addresses the ways in which, ‘racist and sexist stereotyping of Filipino women as so called “mail-order brides—exotic, poor, submissive women and/or opportunistic gold-diggers who use men as “passports”’ was still ‘pervasive in the media and other popular discourse’ (p. 55). In Mic.com, Chelsea Hawkins (2015) even reports on how these dynamics continue to prevail in more recent forms of digital dating. She uncovers the ways in which Asian women are actually quite popular on online dating sites, but mainly because of the racial, fetishist desires of non-Asian men: The tendency of non-Asian men to fetishize Asian women, lusting after their ‘exotic’ appeal or assigning them offensive stereotypes, has turned online dating for Asian women into a minefield of unwanted sexual advances and problematic questions. It’s behavior experienced by many minority groups online, whether it's transgender women, black women or lesbians. Asian women are a particularly notable example, and it has a name: ‘yellow fever.’ (Hawkins 2015)

Although such notions towards Filipino women still persist in cross-cultural, transnational, and globalised intimate relationships (either through or without the use of mobile technology and the internet), the interactions between these women and their foreign counterparts in places such as Manila actually indicate a more complex picture of gendered power relations and women’s agency. The recent works of several scholars present how Asian women can undermine the power dynamics that accompany the racial and sexual stereotypes prescribed to them throughout the years (Saroca 2012; Peracullo 2014, Pananakhonsab 2016). In Love and Intimacy in Online Cross-Cultural Relationships (2016), Wilasinee Pananakhonsab talks about ‘better-educated, higher-class Thai women who possess more power in negotiating with their prospective Western partners and who seek to strike a balance between economic considerations and love/ intimacy’ (p. 5). This trend subverts the premise that only lower class ‘Third World’ women seek companionship and intimacy from wealthier, Western men in hopes to achieve higher economic standing. It instead introduces the idea that women from the global South can also aspire for relationships that are rooted in the abovementioned idea of modern romance. In line with the above, this chapters foregrounds the ways in which Manila’s middle-class Filipino women are able to negotiate with and even invalidate such stereotypes. And it is within this that we situate their enactment of digital flyovers that enable them to search for more subversive and cosmopolitan romantic and sexual interactions in the city. But even then, we also recognise that the racial, classed, and sexualized prescriptions of Filipino or ‘Third World women’ projected onto them by foreigners or expatriates are still well-entrenched. Their global intimacies thus remain characterised by the frictions between these two realities.

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7.2.2 Global Intimacies, Dating Apps, and Other Mobile Media Equally crucial to understanding the digital flyovers created by Manila’s middle-­ class millennial Filipino women are the communicative opportunities that dating apps and other mobile media afford them. A useful starting point for this is to acknowledge their abundant and ready access to a wide range of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This is something that stands in stark contrast to the majority of Filipinos, who only have ‘good enough access’ to most ICTs (Uy-Tioco 2019). Not only do the women in this study possess the economic capital to purchase mobile technologies and services, they also possess the cultural capital to maximise the social uses of these. Consequently, the communicative environment in which the mobile dating of these Filipino women occurs epitomises the concept of ‘polymedia’ (Madianou and Miller 2012). What they have is a truly ‘“integrated structure” within which each individual medium is defined in relational terms in the context of all other media’ (Madianou and Miller 2012, p. 170). Consistent with a polymedia approach to interpersonal communications technologies then, we pay attention not to the individual constraints of the various dating apps and other mobile media, but to the social and emotional consequences of how the women deploy their particular affordances vis-à-vis other ICTs. To help us identify how mobile media matter in the global intimacies of the women in our study, we turn to the concept of ‘communicative affordances’ (Schrock 2015). Based on a decade of literature about mobile communication, Andrew Schrock presents a typology of ways in which such technologies enable individuals to shape the quality of their relationships. They are: (1) portability, or how one can, over extended periods of time, transport and physically carry mobile devices, (2) availability, or how one can influence the way in which one is contactable or otherwise, (3) locatability, or how one can influence the accuracy in which oneself or another person can be geographically placed, and (4) multimediality, or how one can produce and/or integrate visual platforms in one’s communication. In using the ever-portable dating apps particularly, the communicative affordances of mobile media offer Manila’s middle-class millennial Filipino women two important opportunities in their construction of digital flyovers. One is that these apps enable the women to prioritise what we call ‘status proximity’ over ‘spatial proximity’ (see Westcott and Owen 2013). The combined control over availability and locatability that the technologies offer them mean that they can have enhanced capabilities to look for foreign men with a cosmopolitan disposition closer to theirs (status proximity) over the local men of Manila who literally surrounded them (spatial proximity). That said, these very same affordances of availability and locatability still meant that the women were vulnerable to meeting Western men who were not cosmopolitan. After all, the occidentalist assumption that these men are necessarily better than non-Western men is itself problematic (see Bulloch and Fabinyi 2009).

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Second, dating apps can be Foucauldian ‘technologies of the self’ that enable the Filipino women to fashion a version of themselves that fits with their cosmopolitan self-narratives and, as such, could challenge problematic tropes about females like them who are interested in dating foreigners (see Hobbs et al. 2017). Because of the multimediality of the communicative tools available to them—ranging from in-app images and captions as well as beyond-app links that led to other social media accounts—the women could potentially initiate subversive ‘new’ narratives of cross-cultural relationships (see Ellison et al. 2006; Marwick 2013). However, this multimediality also exposes the women to the risk that their strategic refashioning of themselves as attractive cosmopolitan partners might nevertheless be interpreted by Western men from within their problematic imaginaries of what is supposed to be a sexy and desirable Asian woman (see Tsunokai et al. 2014). In the latter half of this chapter, we attend to the ways in which the abovementioned tensions in the affordances of dating apps and mobile media play out in how the women in this study construct their digital flyovers for dating. We highlight especially how this digital infrastructure of intimacy continues to be entwined in the classed, raced, and gendered frictions of global intimacies in a postcolonial capital like Manila.

7.3 Methodology In our study, we took an ethnographic approach to understanding the mobile media practices of Manila’s middle-class millennial Filipino women. This meant situating their enactment of dating app- and mobile media-enabled digital flyovers within the broader context of their everyday lives (Gillespie 2005). In the course of our 18-month research, which spanned from August 2017 to April 2019, we conducted life story interviews as well as follow up conversations with a total of 15 participants. At the time that we first met them, they were all in their late twenties (27–29  years old) or early thirties (30–33  years old). We had selected these age ranges because these women were already in their twenties when mobile dating apps like Tinder first became popular in the 2010s and as such, knew what dating was like before and after that moment (see Fetters 2018). In attempting to set the contours of the participants’ middle-classness, meanwhile, we considered two things. One was to see it from the lens of socio-economic status, that is, ‘a social category pertaining to individuals or groups sharing comparable behaviours, characteristics, and way of life’ (Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017, p. 891). The other was to see class from the lens of self-ascription, that is, how they themselves performed ‘social divisions [through their] individual practices, subjectivities, and perceptions’ (Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017, p.  891). Concretely, the indicators of middle-classness that we looked out for as we did our purposive snowball sampling included the Filipino women’s: (1) educational background, with all of them coming from Manila’s top tier universities, (2) occupation,

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with all of them being salaried professionals, ranging from being a theatre actor to an advertising suit to a scientist to a medical doctor, (3) network of friends, with all of them being intensely integrated into ‘middle-class Manila’ society, and (4) cosmopolitan sensibilities, with all of them being very well traveled and some of them even having spent a year or more studying or working outside the Philippines (see Hau 2017; Kimura 2003; Pinches 1999). Apart from the interviews, seven of the Filipino women allowed us—and in some cases, invited us—to do a ‘technical walk-through’ (Light et al. 2018) of the dating apps they had been using. This entailed them opening the apps and guiding us through their key affordances and mechanics as well as their user interface arrangements, functions, and features. The walk-throughs were especially helpful to our research, as they allowed us to gain valuable empirical insight into the mediated spaces created by mobile dating. We were able to see how the participants crafted their dating profiles, swiped through the potential matches offered by the apps, and handled some of the conversations with the Western men that matched with them. Because of the sensitive nature of these walk-throughs—but also of the interview material as well—we have anonymised some of the information about the women in this study. We have changed their names as well as some of the biographic details that might be used to identify them. We ensured, however, that these anonymisation techniques notwithstanding, our account of their stories hew as close as possible to what they had shared with us.

7.4 Cosmopolitan Connections In the literature review, we briefly indicated that the women in our study sought to enact digital flyovers because of their desire for global intimacies, particularly those that navigated through and broke away from Manila’s confines (De Leon 2017). Common to all of them was that their desire for modern romance seemed to stem from an initial encounter with Western men. Crucially, these initial encounters had a different texture from the exploitative Western man-Asian woman dynamic; a combination of the women’s middle-class status, high level of education, and cosmopolitan experiences meant that they saw these men as, at the very least, their equal (see Hau 2017). Six of them first met Western men as they studied or worked or even just had an extended holiday in cities like Sydney, London, and New York. Others had the chance to meet such men in Manila itself, either because their existing middle-class social networks in the city already included foreigners or because they had an opportune match with a foreigner in one of their dating apps. Through these experiences, the women developed a comparatively negative perception not only of middle-class Filipino men, but also of middle-class Manila dating culture. Here we return to Erika (27, digital marketing executive) from this chapter’s introductory story. She described what she thought was the usual structure of single dating in middle-class Manila, saying,

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Dating here [in middle-class Manila] can be boring after a while. There’s almost a pattern to what happens. The first three dates, which usually happen over three months, would be the ‘getting to know you’ stage. The guys will be all respectful [∗with ‘air quotes’∗] and the girls will be all hard-to-get. Only after that do you get to be a bit more physically intimate. Then, you begin thinking of the possibility of marriage. Because people often wonder about the point of dating if the goal isn’t ending up together.

Eliza (29, theatre actress) pointed out that entwined with middle-class Manila’s expectations about dating was its expectations about women’s sexuality. Having been in a few relationships that were not necessarily conventional—including having a year-long sexual relationship with a 42-year old married man when she was 22 and fresh out of university—she thought that Filipino men’s ideas of how women should be were often very conventional. According to her, They find it difficult to handle very sexual women like me. And I’m very ‘in your face’ when it comes to that. Sorry to say this about Pinoy (or Filipino) guys [∗addressing Jason∗], but they really can’t deal with my sexual appetite. I can be very insatiable…For example, foreigners don’t mind that I sleep around. Pinoys would find that deflating. They’ll ask me why they’re not enough for me. I find that very stifling.

By using dating apps and other mobile media to enact digital flyovers, the women in our study found a way to lift themselves above all these and experience a sustained feeling of being readily connected to a more global and, they hoped, cosmopolitan dating scene. As we said earlier however, such digital infrastructures of intimacy tend to be tenuous (see Cabañes 2019). So, whilst the women felt that mobile dating allowed this sense of constant connection, they were also cognisant that it was often an illusory feeling. Illustrative here is the case of Steph (28, advertising professional). She demonstrated how it is that in mobile dating, one can control both one’s online availability and locatability (Schrock 2015). She did so to prioritise men using status proximity, that is, those Westerners with similar cosmopolitan sensibilities as her, over spatial proximity, that is, the obviously overwhelming number of Filipino men in the city (Westcott and Owen 2013). She said that she found dating apps useful because they made it easy for her to meet the kind of Western men she was looking for. These were the ones who were different from the typical middle-class Filipino men, as they were ‘less judgmental’ and ‘more liberated’. Steph also said that the role of other mobile media—like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger—was that they served as spaces wherein she could further explore the ‘dateability’ of the men with whom she matched. This was especially important because it was common practice in dating apps that if one wanted to increase the possibility of meeting a match, one had to quickly move the conversation away from the exceptional spaces of dating apps towards the more mundane spaces of everyday social communication platforms (see Ansari 2015). Through this combination of dating apps and other mobile media, Steph said that she got dozens of matches with Western men and went on to go on dates with 5 of them in a span of 6 months. Being constantly connected to a more global dating scene, however, did not necessarily guarantee Steph a pleasant experience. If anything, it shattered her assumption that Western men were by default better than non-Western men; they could, for

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instance, just as easily be sexist (see Bulloch and Fabriyani 2009). Steph said that she had many harrowing experiences with her matches. The most memorable of these was a first and only Skype video chat with a Tinder match who decided to appear on her screen as just his penis. ‘I was with my mom. Walking at a shopping mall,’ she recalled. ‘She was about to peer at my screen, so I had to contain my panic and shut down the chat as fast as I could’. And even with those whom Steph got to date, none progressed beyond a second meetup. All in all, however, she still pinned her romantic hopes more on non-Filipino men. Assessing her mobile dating experiences so far, she rued with ambivalence: Despite all these options, you can’t find someone who can just see through you…apps like these give us the illusion of choice…but the reality is that the people you meet aren’t your real choices. They just come and go in your life, you never had them as an option anyway. The real choice that you have is the person who sticks. They are few and far between, but they are there.

The other key affordance of the digital flyovers, however tenuous, was that it enabled the women in our study to materialise their cosmopolitan selves in their dating lives. They could create dating app profiles that expressed their more ‘liberal’ sexual desires, which were addressed primarily to Western men. They could also use other mobile media for online flirting and cybersex with these men, sometimes just for the fun of it but also sometimes as a precursor to an actual face-to-face encounter. That said, the women would also often find that Western men would often continue to map onto their online performances their problematic geographic imaginaries of ‘exotic Asia’. During our conversation with Fatima (31, strategic planner), she voluntarily brought out her smartphone and gave us an informal ‘walk-through’ of the dating app Bumble as well as of her social media profile on the photo sharing app Instagram (Light et al. 2018). Exemplifying the multimediality afforded by mobile dating, she showed us how she made these apps work together to make herself attractive to the kind of Western men that she wanted (see Schrock 2015; see also Hobbs et al. 2017). Fatima said that one of the things she liked about Bumble was its ‘feminist’ branding, as the app allowed only women to initiate conversations with their matches. She also liked the early 2019 version of the app because apart from enabling her to display her photos and her brief bio, it also gave her a menu of lifestyle preferences that she could choose to display. ‘I can be very specific.’ Fatima said. ‘Like here [∗points to one part of her profile∗], I say that I want to get married eventually. That filters out so many people already! [laughs]’. To those Bumble matches whom Fatima liked enough, she also gave her private Instagram account in exchange for theirs. Apart from being able to check out her matches, she also wanted them to have a better sense of who she was or, to be precise, how she represented herself. In the posts that Fatima shared with us, she said that she simultaneously wanted to show that she was ‘hot’, hence the sexy images that emphasised her curves and her glowing tan. She also wanted to show, however, that she was more than that, hence the images that showed her cosmopolitan life of good food, cultural pursuits, and world travels.

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All the women in our study pointed out that despite their careful online self-­ representation, some Western men still stereotyped them as an Asian ‘whore’ or a ‘gold digger’ (see Tsunokai et al. 2014). For example, Deirdre (30, marketing professional) expressed her frustration that some Western men chatted with her in overtly exoticised and racialised ways. Showing us her mobile phone album filled with screen grabs of her verbal tussles with her foreigner matches on Tinder, she zeroed in on a lovely conversation with an American man who matched with her on Tinder. That was until the guy said that he actually had a girlfriend and that he was on the app just for a videosex playmate. When Deirdre said that she did not find cheating cool and that she felt sorry for the man’s partner, he started verbally ­assaulting her, ending his volley of insults with ‘I’m white. You’re brown. You’re below me. You’re 3rd world slut’ (sic). Fighting back, Deirdre said, ‘Haha funny. Not all Filipinos are like that. Don’t think of yourself too highly.’ Perhaps flying over the man’s simplistic understanding of Filipinos, she also emphasised that she was Filipino-Chinese and, as such, sought to claim the associations of this cultural minority with being the Philippines’ economic elite (Hau 2017). As she put it, ‘Stupid, I’m yellow. Haha bye.’

7.5 Postcolonial Foundations The fragility of the digital flyovers enacted by Manila’s middle-class Filipino women notwithstanding, they did have the privilege of accessing spaces conducive to cosmopolitan global intimacies. This is something that has remained elusive for most others in the Philippines. At the end of our research, 2 of the women we interviewed were in a relatively stable relationship with a foreigner: Erika (27, digital marketing executive) who was engaged to her American boyfriend and Cathy (29, medical doctor) who was living together with her Belgian boyfriend. The others ranged from simply enjoying the global singles dating scene, to being just out of a relationship with a foreigner, or to being at the beginning stages of exploring a new relationship with one. Still, this digital infrastructure remained a temporary resolution that could only momentarily mitigate the many challenges of doing global intimacies (Cabañes 2019). This was because beneath these digital flyovers of dating apps and other mobile media, the foundations of the Filipino women’s ‘confines’ remained intact (De Leon 2017). They were still very much embedded in a predominantly conservative Roman Catholic and class-divided postcolonial city. This manifested itself in two key ways in the lives of the women in our study. For one, 12 of the women had the experience of having to be discreet about their relationships with the foreigners whom they had initially met online. This was because their very own families and friends, not to mention broader Filipino society, were still generally judgmental about both dating foreigners and dating apps (see Saroca 2012). Before what she called her ‘brief hiatus from the heartbreak of online dating’, Tina (fashion designer, 33) was actively chatting with different foreign men, and not just Westerners, primarily through the dating app Badoo. Its special

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feature was its ‘search function’, which allowed users to see who was on the app in an entirely different city or part of the world. This was important for her as she deliberately chose only to be visible to people outside of Manila, for fear that her friends would see her dating profile. Tina explained that she did not want anyone to tell on her, especially since she had an extremely conservative family, what with her father who was a high-ranking military officer and her mother who was a devout Roman Catholic housewife. She recalled how she had almost allowed one of the Indian men she had matched with to come visit her in Manila, but that she pulled back at the last minute for fear of what the people closest to her would say. Even for those who had experienced being in relatively long-term relationships, discretion was still quite common. Cathy (29, medical doctor) assumed that she was more fortunate compared to others in a similar situation as hers because her parents were atypically open-minded about relationships with foreigners. She said that she grew up in a household where both her mother and father often invited foreigner friends, so they did not really bat an eyelash when she introduced her Belgian partner, who was then in a long-distance relationship with her. But when the Belgian man moved in with Cathy in Manila, they had to keep their living arrangement on the downlow. ‘I’m not ashamed of it, of course not,’ she said. ‘But I also just want to live a quiet life.’ Tellingly, only Eliza (29, theatre actress), with her self-professed ‘fierce’ persona could go head-on with what other people thought. ‘If you date a white man, then people think you’re a hooker. But I decided to get over that.’ She even regularly posted about her Tinder experiences on an open Facebook account solely dedicated to shaming the Western men that dared to racialise and exoticise her. In one of these public posts, she featured one of her American matches who asked her over text why she could speak English so well. She responded, ‘Hahahaha omg [or oh my god]. It’s a little thing called colonisation and globalisation.’ The second way in which the unchanged ‘foundations’ of the women’s digital flyovers manifested itself was in their stance towards relationships. Although dating apps and other mobile media made it easier for them to explore more diverse experiences of sexuality, all of them still longed to eventually find ‘The One’. That is, that special person with whom they could have a long-term, monogamous relationship. This is very much in line with what scholars of mobile dating in the West have found (for example, Hobbs et al. 2017). Fatima (31, strategic planner) articulated this idea most clearly. She said that she had enjoyed all the sexual exploits she has had with Western men, ever since she went on a university student exchange programme in Toronto. As she put it, ‘When I told one of my male Filipino friends the number of men I slept with, he suggested that I shouldn’t be bandying it around. But why shouldn’t it be okay for a woman to experience all of that?’ When we asked her if it was okay to know how many kinds of foreign men she had slept with, she said, ‘It’s United Nations level. I can’t remember them all, but I can tell you there was an Australian, German, French, a Black American, and many others. ∗laughs∗’ At the same time, however, Fatima also said that at some point, it got tiring and she was now keen to find a more stable longer-term relationship. And she made this clear on all her dating app profiles. This dynamic was something that came up again and again with the other women in the study.

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For those who eventually found out that their cultural differences with Western men could be difficult to overcome, they did not necessarily give up on finding ‘The One’. They instead adjusted their search parameters, in life generally but in their dating apps as well. And in the cases of 5 of the women, they spoke about wanting to date a foreigner who was half-Filipino or who was at the very least familiar with Filipino culture. One of these 5 was Grace (30, scientist). She said that after her string of difficulties dating foreign men, she was now more interested in what she called ‘Fil-foreigners’ or foreigners with Filipino descent. Grace explained, ‘What I like about Fil-foreigners is that they are the best of both worlds. They understand Filipino culture, but they’re not completely immersed in it.’ To close out the data sections of this chapter, we return to Erika (27, digital marketing executive). As one of the abovementioned 5 women, she said that one of the reasons why she fell in love with her American fiancé was that he was no stranger to Filipino culture. ‘He grew up with a Filipino best friend’, she recounted. ‘So, he didn’t have problems relating to the cultural things I was telling him…He knew so many things about Filipino culture.’

7.6 Conclusion This chapter looked into how Manila’s middle-class millennial Filipino women use dating apps and other mobile media to explore relationships with foreign men, and Westerners particularly. It argued that through mobile dating technologies, these women enacted a distinct kind of temporary resolution to the challenges of experiencing global intimacies in a postcolonial city (Cabañes 2019; Collantes 2018). In particular, they constructed digital flyovers that allowed them to bypass what they thought to be ‘uncosmopolitan’ Filipino men and to connect with foreign romantic prospects who shared their own ‘globalised’ backgrounds and sensibilities. We showed that on one hand, these digital flyovers meant that the women in our study did have the privilege of accessing spaces conducive to cosmopolitan global intimacies, something that remained elusive for most people in the Philippines. But on the other hand, these digital flyovers did nothing to change the ‘foundations’ beneath them or the ‘confines’ of Philippine society, which meant that the women’s embeddedness in middle-class Manila’s distinct social dynamics insisted on manifesting itself in their romantic and sexual lives. A critical point we want to tease out from this research is about a particular dynamic that undergirds middle-class millennial Filipino women’s experiences of mobile mediated global intimacies. That is, they often involve—whether wittingly or otherwise—an act of distancing from other lower-class Filipino women, or any other lower-class women from Asia or the so-called ‘third world’. To exclude themselves from the predominance of traditional relationships and conservative ideas about female sexuality in Manila, they rely not only on their privileged access to polymedia. They also bring to bear their social and cultural capital in navigating

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these technologies. In challenging the harmful racial prescriptions by foreigners particularly, the women do not always negate the said prescriptions as a whole. They instead tend to assert their distinction from lower class Filipino women. Without always saying it directly, they articulate that they are highly educated, cosmopolitan, and just like the ideal of a Westerner who is a citizen of the world. This act of distancing in which the Manila’s middle-class Filipino women engage is indicative of the difficulty of the desire for materialising modern love via mobile spaces that are entangled in a postcolonial city such as Manila. This is because these global aspirations are premised on an assertion of middle-classness and cosmopolitanism in the midst of what is often contexts of significant deprivation (Arora and Scheiber 2017). In light of this, an important question that needs further consideration is whether and how the middle-class drive for liberated intimacies might actually overlap with how the lower class also often transgress the conservative sexual moralities of a postcolonial society (see Lorenzana 2019). And if so, could it be that going against some of the very norms central to middle-classness—especially the control of sexuality to signal middle-class respectability—might indicate a broader societal chance that is afoot? As intimacies in the myriad postcolonial metropoles continue to globalise with the assistance of these mobile dating apps and as middle-­ class women express their own modernity and cosmopolitanism, it is important to be attentive to the possibilities of new forms of intimate relationships and even solidarities that might open up amidst the continuing social strains around race, gender, and class. Acknowledgments  We are grateful to Jozon Lorenzana and Cheryll Ruth Soriano for their insightful comments on the draft versions of this piece. We would also like to thank our fellow scholars who shared their thoughts on the presentation versions of this piece at the School of Media and Communication Research Seminar Series at the University of Leeds, UK, the Online Intimacies, Intimacies Online Conference at Roskilde University, Denmark, and the Digital Transactions in Asia 2018 Conference at De La Salle University-Manila, The Philippines.

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Chapter 8

Visualizing Birth Tourism on Social Media: Taiwanese Expectant Mothers in the United States Tingyu Kang

Abstract  This chapter examines how birth tourists visualize their daily spatial experiences through producing and sharing digital photography on social media. It is primarily based on semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with Taiwanese women who have participated in birth tourism in Los Angeles, California. The findings illuminate how photo-sharing activities are shaped by norms both intrinsic and extrinsic to social media platforms as well as how birth tourists make sense of the complex power dynamics underlying the politics of Asian transnational intimacy. First, they illustrate the racialized, gendered, and classed subjectivities of the informants manifested in the informants’ visualization of the spatiality of birth tourism. The informants primarily took and uploaded photos of leisure settings around the metropolitan area of LA outside of the Chinese-speaking ‘ethnic enclave’ of the neighborhoods where they stayed. Whereas the co-ethnic spaces are understood as sites for ordinary everyday life, which is not photo worthy, urban localities marked by white, middle-class consumerism are perceived as extraordinary spectacles to be viewed, recorded, and shared. Second, the informants carefully selected the audiences for these consumerism-themed photos on social media. This is because birth tourists are largely constructed by their Taiwanese audiences as upper-­ class women abusing their reproductive bodies for the transnational exploitation of capital, labor, and loyalty. The careful selection of audiences is also closely linked to a gendered spatial norm regarding reproductive women, which associates pregnant women’s hypermobility and excessive pleasure with irresponsible motherhood. Keywords  Birth tourism · Pregnancy · Nationalism · Transnationalism · Mobile photography

T. Kang (*) National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_8

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8.1 Introduction In suburban Los Angeles, a form of trans-Pacific family arrangement has become increasingly visible. This arrangement is centered on expectant mothers from a range of different countries arriving here and hoping for a better future for their children and for the family as a whole. Labeled as birth tourism, it is about cross-­ border flows where pregnant women travel to a country with a Jus Soli system so that their babies can be born as citizens there.1 This movement can be understood as part of a wider trend in transnational family arrangements; that is, the pursuit of connections with multiple states to maximize the capital accumulation of a family. This pursuit is often identified as ‘flexible citizenship’, a popular family strategy in the neoliberal age (Ong 1999). Birth tourism has become a rapidly growing form of flexible citizenship among Asian transnationals. However, existing studies on this kind of citizenship have not yet caught on to this and have largely focused on business and educational migrants (for example Ong 1999; Waters 2010; Chee 2003; Zhou 1998). This chapter examines how birth tourists from Taiwan to the United States visualize their daily spatial experiences through sharing mobile photography on social media. Sharing mobile photography has become a central way in which individuals construct and maintain intimacy. This research enquires into the rationales underlying the informants’ selective presentation of their experiences as birth tourists. It demonstrates how individuals’ selective process of mobile photo sharing is shaped by norms both intrinsic and extrinsic to social media. With regard to intrinsic norms, the visual culture of contemporary social media invites users to present an upper-­ middle class consumerism. Thus, the informants primarily took and uploaded mobile photos of leisure settings around the metropolitan area of LA outside of the ‘ethnic enclave’ of the Chinese-speaking neighborhoods in which they stayed. Co-ethnic spaces are understood as sites for ordinary everyday life, which is not photo worthy, whereas urban localities marked by white consumerism are perceived by the informants as upper-middle class lifestyles and thus extraordinary spectacles, which serves as a normative practice intrinsic to social media. With regard to extrinsic social norms, the gendered, classed, and racialized normative discourses on birth tourism that are extrinsic to social media also subject birth tourists to the online surveillance of their sharing activities. The informants carefully selected the audiences for these consumerism-themed photos on social media. This is because their Taiwanese audience largely construct birth tourists as wealthy women abusing their reproductive bodies for the transnational exploitation of capital, labor, and loyalty. The careful selection of audiences is also closely linked to a gendered spatial norm regarding reproductive women, which associates pregnant women’s hypermobility and excessive pleasure with irresponsible motherhood. Overall, this chapter illuminates the racialized, gendered, and classed  Jus Soli refers to birthright citizenship, the right of anyone born in a country to become a citizen of that country. 1

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s­ ubjectivities of the informants as manifested in the informants’ visualization of the spatiality of birth tourism. The data demonstrates how they cater to the upper-­middle class visual culture prevailing among contemporary social media and how they are subject to the complex power dynamics underlying the politics of Asian transnational intimacy.

8.2 Mobile Photography, Social Intimacy and Surveillance The popularity of camera phones has transformed the social implications of photography in many ways. While traditional cameras are often used to take photos for special events, the mobility afforded by camera phones means mobile photography is increasingly about creating images of everyday life (Gye 2007). Moreover, camera phones paired with social media platforms have also led to the changing motives of photo creation. While traditional photography is created to be kept and shared with a relatively private audience, mobile photography today is often meant for sharing more publicly (Oeldorf-Hirsch and Sundar 2016). The boundary between creating photos and sharing them is blurred as sharing photos online increasingly becomes a primary motivation of photo creation. Many of today’s mobile phone users frequently share photos online, which is motivated by a variety of reasons. This includes exchanging experiences, maintaining existing relationships, forming new relationships, and receiving feedback on the presentation of the self (Gye 2007; Oeldorf-Hirsch and Sundar 2016). Sharing mobile photography thus becomes central to modern construction of intimacy. Originally mobile photography was theorized as ‘networked visuality’, which attracts wide and relatively distant social networks and promotes exhibitionism (Bell 2006; Hjorth 2008; see also Sinanan et al. 2018). However, more recent sharing modes of mobile photography tend to be largely private and intimate which aims for closer social-spatial audiences (Reading 2009; Sinanan et  al. 2018). As building intimacy requires exposure of personal vulnerabilities (Zelizer 2009), sharing mobile photography on social media that exposes certain parts of individuals’ private lives serves as a way in which users establish and maintain social intimacies with each other (Miguel 2016). Although mobile photo sharing is central to modern experiences of intimacy, it is subject to constant surveillance. Since the early 1990s when information technology first become readily available in the households, corporates and governments of all levels have been found to monitor users’ online activities. Highlighting Bentham’s and Foucault’s conceptualizations of surveillance, Gandy (1993) identifies how online personal data have been utilized for social control and discrimination (see also Humphreys 2011). While Gandy focuses on governments and corporates as the main observers surveying users’ online personal data, it should be noted that online activities are often subject to other monitoring gazes. Humphreys (2011) distinguishes among several different forms of surveillance. In addition to the government and corporations, lateral surveillance and self-surveillance are also evident in

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today’s social media. The former refers to how users monitor each other on social media while the latter is about how a user learns to watch his or her own behaviors and adjust her future behaviors based on these records. In fact, although governments and corporates have long been found to collect and utilize online personal data, social media users tend to be less concerned about governmental and commercial gaze and more about how other users watch them (Marwick and boyd 2011). It is the social norms prevailing among other users rather than governmental or commercial power that they mainly conform to. This form of surveillance, also referred to as social surveillance, is not about hierarchical power structure but more about the constantly scanning and gathering of personal information by horizontal social relations such as friends and acquaintances (Marwick 2012). As a result, social media users carefully manage the information they submit for the scrutiny of their friends and acquaintances online. They seek to conform to the prevailing norms among these social audiences of their personal data. While photo sharing using mobile technology is considered central to the making and shaping of intimacy, individuals often find themselves trapped in the tension between a desire to share and norms regulating how to share. This present study thus explores these social norms the users conform to and/or negotiate with when they create and share their mobile photography on social media.

8.3 Intrinsic Norms: Photo Sharing on Mobile Media Social norms that structure individuals’ online sharing activities can be intrinsic and extrinsic to social media platforms. Online platforms tend to develop their own intrinsic cultures and norms. In the context of today’s social media with photo-­ sharing functions, such as Facebook and Instagram, aestheticized bodies and an upper-middle class lifestyle have increasingly become normative in its visual culture (Tiidenberg 2015; Tiidenberg and Baym 2017). Demonstrating idealized bodies and an upper-middle class consumerism serves to gain fame, social capital, and popularity on social media. Studies on Instagram have proposed the concept of Instafame, which illustrates the online trade between fame and images of upper-­ middle classed, beautified bodies (Abidin 2014; Marwick 2015). The norm of presenting an upper-middle class everyday life through images of beautified bodies on social media is closely linked to the neoliberalization of the self. That is, social media users become entrepreneurs themselves. They seek to promote the self as a brand online, which consolidates social media users into the wider cultural economies (Banet-Weiser 2012). In so doing, presenting an upper-­ middle class lifestyle through consumption is a key task when individuals construct their personas in visual forms on social media.

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8.4 Extrinsic Norms: Transnational Expectant Motherhood While presenting upper-middle class consumerist bodies serves as a norm intrinsic to today’s social media culture, there are also wider social norms that are extrinsic to social media platforms and are embedded in wider social environments. These norms extrinsic to today’s social media culture also largely constitute a monitoring gaze upon individuals’ photo sharing activities on social media. In the context of birth tourism, these wider social norms involve norms surrounding motherhood, nationalism, and class distinction.

8.4.1 The Morality of Expectant Motherhood With regard to norms surrounding motherhood, expectant mothers have been found to be subject to many disciplinary discourses. The medicalization of pregnancy has led to the colonization of pregnant women’s bodies and decreasing bodily autonomy (Burton-Jeangros 2011; Longhurst 2005; Rothman 2014; see also Thomas and Lupton 2016). With the advanced medical technologies that visualize what is inside the pregnant body, women’s bodies are increasingly understood to be mere containers of fetuses, which means docile maternal bodies serve not only as a physical quality but also a moral one (Balsamo 1996; Tiidenberg and Baym 2017). As a result, this disciplinary medical-moral discourse tends to assign the sole responsibility of taking care of a fetus to the pregnant woman (Marshall and Woollett 2000). This medical-moral discourse has increasingly evolved into a disciplinary gaze in recent years, where regulatory power is exercised in visual forms. Associated with the visualization of disciplinary power is the publicization of disciplines. The recent trend of celebrity pregnancy watch is an example, with pregnant celebrities’ aesthetic and medical choices being visualized for public surveillance (Brubaker 2007; Dworkin and Wachs 2004; Marshall and Woollett 2000; Morris and McInerney 2010; Sha and Kirkman 2009). In addition to celebrity culture, close medical-moral surveillance can also be found among social media users. Selfies on social media further open up a space inviting the public’s gaze to regulate various bodily choices during expectant motherhood (Tiidenberg 2015; Tiidenberg and Baym 2017). Studies on pregnant women’s selfies demonstrate how the pregnant users of social media conform to the abovementioned disciplinary gaze. Tiidenberg and Baym (2017) found that pregnant women’s selfies primarily conform to the dominant discourse of medicalization, portraying the self-learning of medical information and the self-surveillance of reproductive bodies as essential to responsible expectant motherhood.

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8.4.2 Borders, Reproduction, and Gender In addition to the morality of motherhood, birth tourists’ presentation of everyday life is also subject to a highly nationalistic gaze prevailing both in their origin and destination country. Although many studies have explored the visualization of expectant motherhood on social media, this literature has not yet explored the context of pregnancy in transnational families in particular. Pregnancy and reproductive labor in a transnational context are often grounded in a set of gendered and nationalistic imageries. The policies and laws on transnationally mobile women’s reproductive bodies often illuminate a moral panic around border-crossing women’s reproductive capacity. Many countries require female migrant workers to regularly take pregnancy tests, and some of them deport migrant workers once they become pregnant (for the case of Taiwan, see Lan 2008a, b; see also United Nations 2009). These women’s mundane everyday sexual practices become a site where state power is exercised. A similar moral panic has largely constructed and regulated birth tourists’ reproductive capacity. For example, in the case of birth tourism to Ireland, the discourses of public policies, news media, and public opinions focus on birth tourists from Africa. They portray the women in this racial group not only as sexually active but also as hypersexual, thus violating Irish values regarding intimacy, sexuality, and the family (Lentin 2004; Tormey 2007). This image of birth tourists challenges the country’s perceived racial homogeneity and this has led to a referendum that resulted to the abolishment of the rule of Jus Soli in Ireland. Although relatively less studied than the case of Ireland, stereotypical images of birth tourists to the US has also been found to constitute racialized violence surrounding these women’s reproductive bodies (Wang 2017). In 2012, residents of Chino Hills, California, protested against the burgeoning maternity hotels that catered to Chinese-speaking birth tourists in the neighborhood. The discourses utilized in the protests denote both moral panics over women’s reproduction and desires to contain it. Whereas the abovementioned studies identified how the receiving countries of pregnant women produce highly gendered nationalistic imageries to regulate their reproductive bodies, it should be noted that the sending countries also construct various disciplinary discourses that monitor these women’s bodily experiences during pregnancy. This is because women’s reproductive bodies have long served as a symbol of the borders of the nation, which are meant to be guarded to ensure that the national identity remains intact (Kanaaneh 2002; McClintock 1995; Yuval-­ Davis 1997). In colonial contexts, the national boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized are often maintained through the surveillance of the sexual practices of certain racial groups (Stoler 1995). Women’s sexual practices are never private because their reproductive capacity is considered to be key to the prosperity of their nations and to the maintenance of the national identity. In addition, women’s reproductive bodies produce soldiers for the nation. Thus, the national Other cannot be allowed to intrude the boundaries of women’s bodies, which resemble the b­ orders

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of a nation. This imagery reinforces a series of binary distinctions of subject/object, man/woman, and patriot/homeland (Kanaaneh 2002; McClintock 1995; YuvalDavis 1997). The outflow of women and their reproductive capacity is consequently portrayed as a betrayal of their homelands, stimulating nationalistic backlash toward this form of transnational flow. This gendered and nationalistic sentiment serves as the social setting that shapes my informants’ presentation of their daily lives to their online audiences as expectants mothers in the US.

8.4.3 Class and Multiple Citizenship In addition to the abovementioned politics of gender, reproduction, and nationalism in the sending countries, birth tourists’ presentation of their experiences on social media is also structured by the sending countries’ public perceptions of class and multiple citizenship in the age of neoliberalism. Birth tourism can be understood as part of a wider trend in transnational flows where individuals seek flexible linkages with multiple nation-states to maximize their social, political, and economic stability and return. These linkages with multiple nation-states are often in the form of multiple citizenships. This trend is conceptualized as flexible citizenship (Ong 1999). In seeking connections with multiple nation-states, one tends not to consider citizenship as a source of identity and a sense of belonging but rather as a strategic move based on calculative rationality (Ley 2010; Nonini and Ong 1997; Ong 1999; Waters 2005, 2006). For many Asian transnationals, flexible citizenship is primarily a family strategy. That is, very often it is one or some of the family members who participate in transnational movement to seek economic return for the family as a whole (Ley 2010; Ong 1999; Waters 2005, 2006, 2010). One of the popular family arrangements is as follows: The father primarily remains in the country of origin to provide economically for the family whereas the mother accompanies their children to study abroad to gain qualifications in Western education, obtain a managerial position in a Western job market, and secure citizenship for the children and subsequently for the family in the destination country (Ong 1999; Jung, this volume). In a less common scenario, it is the mother who remains in the origin country to assume the role of breadwinner while the father stays in the destination country with the children (Waters 2010). The scenario of ‘parachute kids’ is also common. That is, only the children stay in the destination country while their parents primarily remain in the origin country (Chee 2003; Zhou 1998). It is in relation to all these that birth tourism should be best understood as another family strategy of flexible citizenship. This time around, it is the pregnant women who stay in their destination countries for several months for their children to gain citizenship, while their family members largely remain in the sending countries. Existing studies have identified that, for many East Asian countries, multiple citizenship is a popular strategy among upper-middle to upper class families (Ley 2010; Ong 1999; Waters 2005, 2006, 2010). Studies on East Asian transnationals

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with multiple citizenship often portray entrepreneur-headed and professional-­ headed families adopting the above family strategies leading to linkages with more than one nation-state (Nonini and Ong 1997; Ong 1999). This often leads to heated debates on class, power, and justice in immigration laws and policies. It is argued that the institutionalization of dual or multiple citizenship allows for imbalanced rights and obligations among transnationals. Transnational individuals are able to flexibly evade the obligations that each nation-state enforces while still enjoying the rights associated with citizenship. Neoliberal border governance also further grants citizen-like rights and benefits to attract non-citizen individuals with skills and capital (Ong 2006). This imbalance between rights and obligations is enjoyed particularly among upper-middle to upper class transnationals, which engenders nationalistic sentiments with a sense of deprivation against the elite class. This serves as the context in which birth tourists in this study make sense of and present their trans-border experiences.

8.5 Methods The findings of this article are part of a larger research project on birth tourism from Taiwan to the US. The data were primarily collected between 2014 and 2016. The fieldwork of this research was based in Los Angeles (LA), California. For Chinese-­ speaking birth tourists, Southern California has been a main destination since the 1980s. Many pregnant women sojourn around LA, particularly in areas with a large Chinese-speaking population. This includes Hacienda Heights, Monterey Park, Rowland Heights, San Gabriel, Walnut, and other surrounding neighborhoods. These were also primarily the areas in which the informants of this study stayed. A number of businesses in these areas have sprung up to cater to these transnational visitors. For instance, maternity bed and breakfast businesses (B&Bs) have emerged in these areas to accommodate Chinese-speaking birth tourists from mainland China and Taiwan. They offer not only accommodation but also transportation, catering, leisure activities, and childcare services (for relevant news reports see Chang 2013; Davies and Boyle 2013; Gorman 2015; Johanson 2013; Newcomb 2013; Shuman 2013). The findings of this chapter are mainly based on 20 semi-structured interviews and further informal conversations with women who have participated in birth tourism from Taiwan to the US. I identified the initial informants through my own social network and through my fieldwork in LA. I then adopted snowballing to contact further informants. Participant observation was also conducted to collect place-­ based information. I was immersed in the daily living spaces of the informants in the US, including the maternity B&Bs, the surrounding streets, and public spaces of neighborhoods where the B&Bs are, and further leisure spaces that the informants had visited.

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When asked about the motivation to participate in birth tourism, the informants highlighted the ethics of motherhood. The informants explained that they were doing it for the children. For some of the informants, gaining US citizenship for the children meant better education, as they considered Western qualifications to be the cultural capital central to the accumulation of wealth and the maintenance of class distinction. Other informants rationalized the decision to travel by identifying the pay gap between Taiwan and the US as well as the advantages that US citizenship may bring a child in the labor market. It is worth noting that husbands were often the ones to propose the plan of having a child born in the US. In many cases, the wives’ initial reluctance to participate in birth tourism was underlined by various perceived risks associated with this form of global flow, from legal risks and health concerns to moral hazards. This perception of having a child born in the US was largely reflected in the women’s sharing activities of their experiences as a birth tourist. The informants were primarily from well-off socioeconomic backgrounds. The main breadwinners of the informants’ families, mostly the husbands, assumed a range of upper-middle class positions, ranging from business owners and independent investors to engineers. Many of the women served as the primary caretakers of the family and did not participate in the labor market prior to their participation in birth tourism. Some informants quit their jobs shortly before their trips to the US to take part in this form of transnational reproductive labor. In addition, some informants, whose occupations included engineers and teachers, took leave for birth tourism and associated reproductive labor. In the interviews and further informal chats, the informants were asked about their experiences regarding visualizing and sharing their daily lives in the US with their friends and families using digital technologies. They used a range of digital media to share photos, with Messaging apps being a central tool in this. Among messaging apps, LINE was most often utilized, followed by Skype. Some informants also reported using MSN Messenger when they participated in birth tourism years ago.2 They used these tools not only for textual communication and photo exchanges but also video chats. Social networking sites were also reported to be an important site for photo sharing. Facebook was the primary social networking site where the informants shared photos during their stays in the US.  I analyzed the Facebook posts of the informants who agreed to accept my friend request and who allowed me to access their photos on it.

 While all three software products are largely referred to as messaging services, they differ in several ways. While all three products allow for textual, audio and video-based interactions, both LINE and Skype are popular among mobile phone users as mobile applications as MSN was discontinued in 2013 and remained primarily a computer-based product. 2

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8.6 The Spatiality of Birth Tourism The informants’ daily lives were structured by the specific spatial arrangement of birth tourism. And as will be discussed in the next section, it was these spatial experiences that were selectively recorded and presented in visual forms on digital platforms. The informants usually arrived in the destination country during the third trimester of their pregnancies and stayed from a few weeks to 2 months after childbirth before they returned to their origin country. A typical arrangement was for the husband to accompany the pregnant woman to the US, with the husband then returning to Taiwan to provide economic support for the family while the wife remained in the US for reproductive labor. During their stay in the US, the majority of women were largely physically separated from their family members and friends. This served as the background for the women’s photo-sharing behaviors online. The informants primarily stayed in maternity B&Bs, which were in the form of detached houses or that of apartments in condos that each contained 2–6 bedrooms. This meant their daily lives in LA were largely structured by these business owners and conformed to standardized and commercialized daily routines. While the informants stayed in the ethnic businesses of maternity B&Bs in co-ethnic neighborhoods, most maternity B&Bs made transportation arrangements for the informants to participate in weekly grocery shopping as well as retail shopping spaces and other tourist attractions around LA. Due to the lack of other transportation methods, and because of the protests against birth tourism around the neighborhoods, when not traveling to engage in the activities arranged by the maternity B&Bs, the women largely remained immobile. Jenny’s account paints a typical picture of their daily spatial routines: A bunch of pregnant women lived together. We chatted all day long. […the maternity B&B] had a fixed timetable. Each week they took you out twice or three times for grocery shopping. They also had outings routinely, such as outlet shopping, […] artistic performances, and going to the beaches. It was like taking a vacation in LA.

Some of the informants would take a walk in the streets surrounding the maternity B&Bs as their daily exercise routines. Meanwhile, others chose to remain in the house due to the increasing protests against the influx of birth tourists into the neighborhoods. Another informant, Holly, elaborated: The maternity B&B had a ‘car-in car-out’ policy, [which means one was advised not to go out unless the maternity B&B offered you transportation]. They included in their package three outings per week. They took us to Walmart, shopping outlets, and so on. […] If your maternity B&B is a house, then they wouldn’t want you to walk in the streets because the neighbors might see you.

The informants’ daily lives were immersed in the abovementioned spaces, from their own rooms, the shared spaces of maternity B&Bs, public streets, and shopping spaces in the neighborhoods, to further leisure spaces around LA. These spaces ranged from private, semi-public, to public locales. The informants visualized the self differently in different types of spaces. Photographs taken in the private rooms

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were predominantly close-up photographs about the pregnant self, featuring their reproductive bodies (i.e., the maternal bodies showing the bump, ultrasound photos). Photographs taken in the public and semi-public spaces were more often long shots showing the informants in various consumerist activities. It is worth noting that, for the informants, the photography of public and semi-­ public spaces and that of private ones tended to be associated with distinct sharing technologies and, furthermore, associated with different audiences. On the one hand, photos shared using the messaging app LINE were primarily photos of the fetus and the baby taken in their private rooms, such as ultrasound photos, the bump, and the newborn, and are meant to be shared within close family members. On the other hand, photos shared on Facebook, especially on its newsfeed, were largely about the women’s leisure activities outside of the private spaces, which were meant to be viewed by wider audiences. This distinction in sharing patterns was closely linked to the different norms intrinsic to each technology itself. While LINE was considered a space for private and intimate interactions, Facebook was thought to be only suitable for public and semi-public visuality. Holly’s account is an example. When asked about how she shared photos during her stay in LA and what the themes were in the photos, Holly explained how she distinguished between messaging apps (LINE) and social networking sites (Facebook). Whereas the former was utilized to share intimate moments about pregnancy and childbirth with her family, the latter was about sharing other information with wider friends, including close friends and acquaintances: My Facebook photos were all about me but photos of me and my daily life in California was not something my parents would be interested. They wanted to see baby-related stuff. My parents were not on Facebook […] so I had a family chatroom on LINE specifically for the sharing of these [baby-related] stuff.

According to Holly, the visualization of reproductive bodies was considered a private, familial matter; thus, photographs of this theme were taken indoor in private spaces and shared among family. Messaging technology was understood to be a closed, intimate channel for sharing. Therefore, the informants articulated it as being exclusively associated with the sharing of the private socio-spatial experiences. In the meantime, social networking sites such as Facebook were configured as a virtual public space for wider audiences. Another informant, Alen, also offered a similar account. She used LINE to exchange images with her husband, parents, and in-laws, and she used Facebook to share photos mainly with audiences outside of her family members. She explained the following: My Facebook photos were about where I went and what I ate. My family didn’t have Facebook accounts except for my sister, and my husband’s family were not on my Facebook, so [sharing these photos on Facebook] was fine. […my parents and my husband’s parents] sometimes nagged about thing I did when I was pregnant, from what I ate to where I went. It felt free not to let them see these photos.

The norms of expectant motherhood in wider Taiwanese familial culture structured the distinction in Alen’s sharing patterns. She explained that the older

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g­ enerations of her family members and her husbands’ family members were absent from Facebook. As a result, photos that did not conform to the imageries of normative expectant motherhood were fine to share on Facebook. The older generation in the family largely assumed an authoritative role in the hierarchical culture of Taiwanese families, who, according to the informants, tended to portray ideal expectant motherhood as abstinent and disciplined. Pregnant women’s bodily choices that did not conform to this moral imagery of expectant motherhood may invite criticism and surveillance from the family members of the older generations. This caused the informants to abstain from sharing photos with pleasure and leisure themes via messaging tools with the older generations in the families. Meanwhile they remained active on sharing these themes on Facebook where the older generations were largely absent.

8.7 (Semi-)Public Spaces, Consumerism, and Facebook Although Facebook is more often used as a way to present the informants’ daily lives in public and semi-public spaces rather than in private rooms, it should be noted that not all of the informants’ public and semi-public spatial experiences got to be presented on Facebook. Whereas the informants were immersed in a wide range of public and semi-public spaces, from the streets, supermarkets, and parks in the co-ethnic neighborhoods where they stayed, to shopping spaces in neighboring towns and further spaces in LA and wider Southern California, it was, rather, mostly the semi-public spaces marked by white middle-class consumerism that were selected to be presented on Facebook. These practices were shaped by the norm of class distinction intrinsic to social media. That is, as existing studies on digital visuality suggest, the norms of presenting an upper-middle class lifestyle is now prevalent on social media (Abidin 2014; Marwick 2015). The majority of the photographs on the informants’ Facebook walls during their stays in the US were their visits to leisure localities outside of the neighborhoods where they stayed. This included Disneyland, beaches, outlet malls, parks with themed events, Universal Studios Hollywood, and other tourist attractions in LA and southern California. One informant, Stacey, was a typical example. Throughout her stay in the US, she shared five photos on Facebook, which, respectively, featured an open-air fireworks event on July 4th, her visit to Universal Studios Hollywood, Disneyland, Chinese Theater LA, and a designer handbag at a mall. She explained the rationale underlying her sharing of photos, saying that Facebook photos are all about the fun and fabulous. According to Stacey, these localities of consumerism in LA signified fun, indulgence, and transnational mobility. Thus, they served as spectacles for her audiences and therefore photographable and sharable. Places in LA that were marked by white consumerism had implications for class distinction, as consuming exoticism abroad signifies earning power and transnational mobility, which is itself a cultural capital cue.

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It should be noted that this imagery on what is photo worthy was not only classed but also racialized. For all of the informants, visits to the abovementioned leisure settings and major tourist attractions in California were only sporadic. Among most informants, these visits occurred less than once a week. The majority of their time was spent either inside the B&Bs or out in the streets and parks in the neighborhoods where the B&Bs were located. Whereas photos taken inside their rooms in the maternity B&Bs were often shared via messaging tools with close family members and photos taken in the major tourist destinations in LA were mostly shared on Facebook, their outdoor activities near the maternity B&Bs in the neighborhoods where they stayed were less often photographed and shared online. When asked about the selective presentation of various spaces online, the informants highlight that the neighborhoods they stayed were co-ethnic and thus were marked by everydayness and ordinariness. In the meantime, the abovementioned major leisure settings in LA were white-majority and were scenes of extraordinariness; thus, they were deemed spectacles for sharing on social media. For example, Jan explained: I was staying in a Chinese-majority neighborhood. People called it little Taipei. You wouldn’t want to take photos of Taipei, would you?

Jan stayed in Rowland Heights, an Asian-majority area. She primarily took and uploaded photographs of leisure settings around the metropolitan area of LA outside of the Chinese-speaking ‘ethnic enclave’ of Rowland Heights. While the co-­ ethnic spaces of Rowland Heights were understood as sites for ordinary everyday life which are not photo worthy, urban localities marked by white, middle classed consumerism were perceived as extraordinary spectacles to be viewed and recorded. Here, race and class intertwined to form the politics of gaze in birth tourism. The implicit norms on social media were about sharing images of an upper-middle class lifestyle. These informants achieved this through visualizing their transnational spatial experiences of white consumerism.

8.8 People Who Did Not Share on Facebook While the intrinsic norms to social media was to share photos denoting an upper-­ middle class consumerist lifestyle, the informants’ photo sharing activities were also shaped by other norms extrinsic to social media platforms. These extrinsic norms included the morality of expectant motherhood and that of national belonging that dominated not just within social media platforms but also wider society (Burton-Jeangros 2011; Longhurst 2005; Stoler 1995; Thomas & Lupton 2016; Yuval-Davis 1997 among others). These extrinsic norms were evident in some of the informants’ reluctance or reduced frequencies of sharing during their stay in the US. Whereas many informants chose to present their experiences as birth tourists on Facebook, several informants reported a refusal or reduced frequencies in sharing photos on Facebook during their stays in the US.  These informants identified

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a­ nxieties resulting from the stigma of birth tourism. They perceived a public sentiment against birth tourists in Taiwan. This negative sentiment was underlined by the interweaving discourses of normative expectant motherhood, nationalism, and a sense of economic deprivation. As demonstrated earlier in the account of Alen, several informants generally perceived a normative medical-moral imagery of expectant motherhood, which is popular among their potential audiences on Facebook, particularly audiences of the older generations in Taiwan. Publicizing expectant women’s daily spatial mobility on social media often subjected their bodily decisions to surveillance. Alen specified that it was because of the absence of her parents and in-laws from her Facebook that she was able to share. Other informants reported using various photo-sharing strategies during pregnancy to avoid this digital form of monitoring gaze upon their reproductive bodies. Some reported sharing less often on Facebook during their stay in the US while others carefully filtered the visual cues in what they shared. One informant, Quinny, explained how her bodily decision during pregnancy was monitored at a distance via various digital technologies and how she strategized to negotiate it: My family didn’t want me to drink tea [during pregnancy], but I really loved it. It’s not even scientifically solid. My doctor said it’s ok to drink tea. It’s just you can’t have too much of it. I just ignored [my husband]. When I drank tea, I wouldn’t let him see me. Don’t use video calls, don’t take photos, and don’t check-in on Facebook.

In addition to this monitoring gaze structured by the normative medical-moral imagery of expectant motherhood, many informants also reported a reluctance to share during their stays in the US due to a perceived nationalistic sentiment against birth tourism. One informant, Shing, best explained this: I didn’t use social media back then […They’d] ask why you want to be an American. They’d ask that. Why would a Taiwanese want to become an American?

The perceived hostility against dual citizenship and against the lack of singular national belonging to the homeland led to the informant’s reluctance to share. This nationalistic sentiment was often intertwined with class distinction and a sense of economic deprivation. Several informants identified how dual citizenship or American citizenship is widely viewed among their potential audiences on Facebook as a status symbol, which some of them worried might lead to heightened conflict regarding class and the distribution of wealth and transnational mobility. The informant, Shing, said: I didn’t want my friends to know that I was in the US […] I didn’t want people to know. I hope that the fact that my younger daughter has American citizenship is like…if it becomes of use, then it becomes of use. I don’t want to brag about it […] My older daughter wasn’t born in the States and she doesn’t possess American citizenship. I don’t want people to think that my younger daughter is better-off. And I don’t want my older daughter to think that she is not as good, either.

Shing perceived that, in the eyes of her social circle, American citizenship was a status symbol (i.e., something to brag about). The families I interviewed were generally from well-off backgrounds. These were families that could afford

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a­ pproximately US$20,000 to participate in birth tourism and that could also afford to have non-working wives devoted full-time to reproductive labor. This exclusive transnational mobility of upper-middle class and upper-class families was considered to be a source of conflict and hatred and thus was deemed inappropriate to share on Facebook. This reluctance or reduced frequencies of sharing illustrates how the presentation of one’s everyday life online is shaped not only by the intrinsic visual culture within social media platforms but also by wider social norms. The intrinsic social media culture of presenting an upper-middle class consumerist lifestyle is essential in gaining fame and social capital. However, such a visualization tends to be surveilled from the prism of wider social norms. In this present study, these surveying social norms included the morality of capital accumulation, national belonging, and ideal motherhood. The informants were trapped between the norms intrinsic and extrinsic to social media. By this I mean the tension between the need to present online a photo-worthy upper-middle classed consumerist leisure setting and the need to conform to a wider normative gaze constituted by a sense of economic deprivation, nationalism, and the morality of motherhood.

8.9 Conclusion Overall, this study demonstrates how sharing activities can be structured by values and norms both intrinsic and extrinsic to social media platforms. On one hand, the informants are motivated to share photos indicating an upper-middle class consumerist lifestyle as this has increasingly become essential in gaining social capital and fame on social media. On the other hand, an upper-middle class lifestyle embodied through transnational mobility and consumerization of reproductive bodies are subject to a disciplinary gaze by the wider society. The results of this study illustrate how the informants made sense of the complex racial, classed, and nationalistic formation of the spatiality of birth tourism. They digitally visualized their spatial experiences as birth tourists in various spaces, from the private rooms of maternity B&Bs to consumerist spaces in wider LA. Whereas messaging tools were imagined as a sharing technology for their private spatial experiences, Facebook newsfeeds were associated with the demonstration of public and semi-public spaces with wider audiences. It should be noted that the public and semi-public spatial experiences of birth tourists that were presented using Facebook newsfeeds were highly selective. Whereas the informants were largely immersed in the communal spaces in the Chinese-speaking neighborhoods where they stayed, it was the white consumerist locales outside of the co-ethnic neighborhoods that was more often visualized and presented on social media. This was because, for the informants’ perceived audiences on social media, purchasing leisure experiences in a white western consumerist destination signified an upper-middle class status. This largely echoes the dominant visual norms in today’s social media that promote an

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upper-middle class spectacle by rewarding users who provide this type of photos with social capital and fame. However, not all of the informants were happy to share. Medical-moral discourses on normative expectant motherhood prevented some of the informants from sharing photos that conformed to the upper-middle class consumerist visual norms on social media. This is because spatial mobility and consumerist pleasure are considered excessive in the medical-moral imagery of ideal expectant motherhood. This regulatory discourse is further interweaved into a nationalistic sentiment against the globally mobile elite class. The informants perceived that women of this class were considered to be betraying the nation through gaining global mobility, that is, global mobility that is available only for wealthy women, who can afford to buy themselves reproductive experiences abroad. Because of this, some informants shared less on social media, with others being reluctant to do so at all. Here it would be crucial to note that the photo-sharing technology in Taiwan has been reported to have shifted in the years after I did fieldwork. Instagram is increasingly gaining popularity while the market share of Facebook continues to shrink among young people (Lin 2018). It is worth examining how transnational intimacy is visualized in this recent techno-social environment of the Instagram generation, particularly considering that the audiences on Instagram are primarily younger generations who, according to the informants, possess a different set of ideologies regarding normative pregnancy and transnationalism. The sharing culture on Instagram is also further visualized than on Facebook, which may invite a distinct visual form of transnational expectant motherhood. Further studies should explore these emerging visualities of social intimacy among the new generation of mobile technologies.

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Chapter 9

Left-Behind Children as Agents: Mobile Media, Transnational Communication and the Mediated Family Gaze Hong Chen

Abstract  Based on 38 in-depth interviews of left-behind children from Fuqing, a major illicit migrant-sending area in China, this chapter investigates how these children perceive the use of mobile media during transnational communications with their migrant parents. Additionally, it interrogates the ways in which these children employ mobile media to negotiate intergenerational relationships. I develop an argument about the ‘mediated family gaze’ to describe the familial power dynamics and emotional circulation in a techno-­mediated context. The emergence of the ‘mediated family gaze’ in transnational family life has minimized the geographical and temporal constraints that divide these dispersed family members. That said, it has, also triggered some children’s protestations since it has justified some migrants’ prolonged absence. This study highlights the varied forms of agency enacted by left-behind children through the deployment of ‘mediated family gaze’ of changing their care deficit situation but also of fulfilling their filial duty. Compared with other versions of the gaze, characterized by the ‘power asymmetry’ between ‘the gaze’ and the ‘gazed-upon’, I argue that ‘mediated family gaze’ is more reciprocal and subject to negotiation as a consequence of the unconfined translocal familial settings along with the affordances of mobile media. Given the emergence of diversified family arrangements in contemporary mobile societies, the relevance of ‘mediated family gaze’ goes beyond transnational settings. Keywords  Left-behind children · Transnational family · Illicit migration · Mediated family gaze · Mobile media

H. Chen (*) Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_9

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9.1 Introduction The aroma of wine and food pervaded the air. At the same time, melodious music circled around the hall, mingling with snatches of laughter and the vague sound of firecrackers from the outside. Finally, Chao Hong had some time to take a break, after doing a toast to almost every guest in this room, most of whom travelled a great distance to attend her wedding ceremony. She found a quiet corner and turned on the webcam on her smartphone. She tried to dial her parents who were absent on this special day, probably one of the most important days in her entire life. Like most parents in Fuqing who devoted themselves to chasing their migration dream, Chao Hong’s mother gave up farming and smuggled herself into Britain for economic gains in 2002. Her upfitter father then followed in 2005. Because of their undocumented status, both of Chao Hong’s parents have not returned to Fuqing since then. Chao Hong asked her fiancé to hold the phone for her, as she spun in front of the camera and showed her mother how beautiful she was in the wedding dress. Giggles burst out from the little screen. Chao Hong’s father teased that she had gained some weight and that the dress looked a bit tight on her. Chao Hong rolled her eyes and, ignoring the joke, started to complain to her mother how her fiancé was being lax in preparing for the wedding. The conversation was so natural, as if her parents had never left. That is, until the moment when her father said, ‘Sorry that I can’t hold your hand and give it to your fiancé’. A silence followed. Everyone then started whimpering in front of the camera. Tears fell down Chao Hong’s face, staining her wedding gown. ‘Thanks for raising me. I am married today’, she said while wiping off the tears. ‘You can come back now. It’s time for me to take care of you.’ Chao Hong’s story is typical of the life experience among many transnational families today. Large-scale labour migration worldwide has given rise to the poignant separation of many families. With parents working away from their homeland for better income, left-behind children are becoming increasingly recognized as a consequence of such migration flows. This has primarily affected developing countries such as the Philippines (Parreñas 2005), Mexico (Dreby 2010) and China (Xiang 2007). For family members dispersed by migration, the proliferation of mobile media technology can be seen as a cause for rejoicing, as it promises to diminish the spatial and temporary constraints that divide them. Being the ‘social glue’ of transnationalism (Vertovec 2004), new media technology has made it possible for family members scattered around the world to maintain ties of kinship, just like proximate families do. Consequently, transnational families are always at the forefront of adopting communication media (Asis 2006; Gonzalez and Katz 2016). This is particularly true for undocumented migrants who are restricted by borders and whose family intimacy is heavily dependent on mediated communication (Madianou and Miller 2012). Inspired by the two aforementioned phenomena, this chapter contributes to the intersection of media and transnational family studies by asking the question of how left-behind children in Chinese transnational families engage with distant relationship with migrant parents via mobile media.

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In examining how the maintenance of intergenerational relations is articulated via the use of mobile media within transnational families, I draw from the concept of ‘the family gaze’ (Morgan 2011), which seeks to capture the power dynamics within families. This concept primarily refers to the ways in which family members not only see each other, but also constitute each other and each other’s relationships through this seeing. As a particular form of family practice, it contributes to developing a sense of intimacy amongst family members and also appears to be the ‘subject, sanction or negotiation’ taking place among them (Morgan 2011, p. 94). In this chapter, I build on this concept and propose the term ‘mediated family gaze’. Through this, I aim to describe the familial power dynamics and emotional circulation within a techno-­mediated context. As mobile media has the potential to compress the space and time between dispersed family members, I argue that it may also redefine ‘the family gaze’, which traditionally works through physical co-presence within a relatively confined setting. This chapter begins with a literature review of left-behind children in the context of China’s internal migration and other transnational settings. I then describe how media technology has been recognized as an indispensable tool among transnational family members. This is followed by an overview of my research context and methodology. Next, I examine how left-behind children perceive the advent of mobile media in their life and interrogate the various strategies they deploy during transnational communications with their migrant parents. I conclude by discussing how children’s agency is interwoven with media technology use in a transnational familial setting.

9.2 The Children Left Behind Prior scholarly interest in Chinese left-behind children has mainly addressed their situation and well-being against the backdrop of China’s internal rural-to-urban migration. Here, migration is viewed as a destabilizing and risk factor. It is seen to boost the national economy at the cost of family disruptions. In many cases, left-­ behind children are depicted as vulnerable and passive victims of migration, suffering from the negative consequences of the lack of parental care and guidance. These include mental depression and psychological dysfunction (Liang et al. 2017; Wen and Lin 2012), physical health crises (Yeoh and Lam 2007), high rates of school drop-outs and poor academic performance (Koo 2012; Lu 2012), as well as risks of misbehavior and abnormality (Guo et al. 2012; Ye and Pan 2011). The dark consequences of migration revealed by these multiple studies are undisputedly essential in sketching the contours of China’s immense internal migration. However, most of these studies are designed to reflect upon migration policies and seek potential institutional arrangements for these separate households, thus employing a top-down quantitative approach and rarely inquiring into children’s own voices and subjectivities.

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Similar findings have also been observed in the literature within transnational familial settings. Both positive and negative outcomes have been found in left-­ behind children’s economic well-being (Kandel and Kao 2001; Nguyen et al. 2007), physical and mental health condition (Frank 2005; Graham and Jordan 2011; Valentina et al. 2015), as well as educational achievement (Kuhn 2006; Jampaklay 2006). Aside from these perspectives that probe the ‘impact of migration’ on left-­ behind children, another strand of transnational family research has actually begun integrating the subjective voice of children, elucidating how they experience growing up in such globalized families (Asis 2006; Olwig 1999; Poeze and Mazzucato 2014). Some of them identify children as agents who exert influence within transnational households, such as shaping parents’ migratory decisions and the distribution of family resources (Dreby 2010; Olwig 2014). To be sure, studies have delved into children’s embodied agency embedded in their daily life in the country of origin. They have shown how children hold power over and control of their left-behind life, even influencing the whole families’ migratory trajectories. What is largely unexplored in the extant literature, however, is empirical evidence that interrogates the ways in which these children interact with migrant parents to negotiate their powerless situation (noteworthy exceptions see Lam and Yeoh 2018; Hoang and Yeoh 2015). What particularly requires further nuanced investigation is how these kinds of distant interactions contribute to the shaping of intergenerational relationships in a transnational context. Given the reality that the majority of labour migrants cannot afford frequent travels—some of them cannot even move across borders freely due to their undocumented status— the parent-child interaction is therefore generally sustained by information and communication technologies (ICTs). To better understand the role that media play in maintaining such separated kinship ties, the following section fleshes out an overview of how transnational family communication is redefined by digital technological innovations.

9.3 Transnational Families in the Digital Age Media technology has played a significant role in the contemporary process of transnationalism. Key to this is how transnational mediascapes have been central in the creation of ‘imagined worlds’ that geographically dispersed people inhabit (Appadurai 1996). Like audiences from countries who share a common imagination constructed by a certain television show, family members in a transnational family also live an ‘imagined’ life to some extent (Bryceson and Vuorela 2003). As Huang et al. (2008) point out, ‘regardless of whether their pluri-locations are accidental or deliberate, transnational families are primarily defined by the fact that they continue to maintain shared imaginaries and narratives of belonging’ (p. 6). Given that the family within a transnational context is no longer a place-bound unit, the rapid revolution of mobile media is of particular significance for family members dispersed by migration. The circulation of transnational care and intimacy via the ubiquity,

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simultaneity and immediacy of mediated interaction (Nedelcu 2012) now constitutes the ‘fragments of daily life’ (Morgan 1996, p. 190; Nedelcu 2012). It enables family members across borders to maintain a sense of ‘virtual co-presence’ (Baldassar 2008) and ‘doing family’ (Morgan 1996). The recent growing body of empirical evidence, to some extent, has dissolved the assumption that distance is implicitly a barrier for communication and intimacy exchange, particularly within a transnational context. For example, some studies have demonstrated that the ‘tangible’ mediated intimacy enhances the mutual support and solidarity among these split families (Baldassar et al. 2007; Nedelcu and Wyss 2016), mitigate the emotional loss of family separation (Bacigalupe and Camara 2012; Uy-Tioco 2007), and even provides possibilities to create an ‘ideal distance’ that leads towards a ‘pure relationship’ between migrants and non-­ migrants (Madianou and Miller 2012). But we should not romanticize the intervention of new media technology in transnational family life. The consequence of mediated communication can also inflict new practical conflicts and constraints, for example, the ubiquitous connectivity that strengthens the feeling of control and surveillance (Kang 2018; Acedera and Yeoh 2018), the communicative opportunities enabled by mobile media that gives rise to new expectations and burdens of co-­ presence (Horst 2006; Peng 2016), and the poignant moments during the virtual co-presence when a family crisis or ceremony takes place, which reminds family members of the frustration of physical separation (Chib et al. 2014; Wilding 2006). However, the existing literature on the intersection of transnational family and media has primarily focused on how migrants employ media technology to negotiate relationships with their family members at home. Those who are left behind in the original countries, particularly left-behind children have rarely been made as proper and main research subjects. Although Madianou and Miller (2012) and Fresnoza-Flot (2014) note that Filipino children utilize communication media to respond to their migrant mothers’ parenting from afar, the left-behind children’s media use should be further explored not only outside the mother-child dyad, but also in different migratory contexts. In this chapter then, I seek to engage and enrich the field of left-behind children, transnational family and mobile media by addressing the two following research questions. First, how do left-behind children in Chinese transnational families perceive the advent of new media technology during transnational communications with their parents? Second, in what ways do they exert their agency in shaping the distant intergenerational relationship via the use of mobile media?

9.4 Research Context and Empirical Data This chapter draws from 38 in-depth interviews with left-behind children from Fuqing, which has been historically recognized as a major illegal migrant-sending area in China (Fong et al. 2014). Located in the southern tip of Fuzhou prefecture in central Fujian, Fuqing has a long history of migration to Southeast Asia and more

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recent large-scale emigration to Europe (Pieke et al. 2004). The pervasive overseas emigration in Fuqing relies on a multiplicity of ‘push’ factors, such as the poverty status due to the geography (e.g. insufficient arable lands to the local people), lack of governmental and business investments, as well as developed networks of migration brokers (e.g. mature smuggling industry). Also, ‘pull factors’ like lucrative overseas working opportunities and thriving Fujianese communities located in various European countries, have been among the crucial causes, facilitating the transnational emigration wave in Fuqing (Liu-Farrer 2010; Thunø and Pieke 2005). Although there are no official estimates of the emigration population across the entire Fuqing, some of the village committees had conducted demographics censuses locally. Of the two villages I visited, there were over 1800 villagers living abroad, constituting almost 40% of the whole population. All the interviews were conducted between 2016 and 2018. Given the lack of job opportunities, many of the participants left the villages and went to the centre area of Fuqing or Fuzhou for better career prospects. In addition to doing interviews in the villages, therefore, I also visited their residence and working places and spent time with them during their days off. Initial contacts were made via referrals from the UK-based participants (their migrant parents) in my earlier research (Chen 2019). The initial left-behind children participants then introduced their relatives, friends, and classmates as potential interviewees, as overseas migration had already been a pervasive culture in Fuqing (Fong et al. 2014). During these interviews, I primarily focused on how left-behind children employed media technology to contact their parents from afar, and also the role media technology played during the process of transnational communications. Generally, the interviews in Mandarin lasted from 2 to 3 hours and were recorded and then fully transcribed. Additionally, I added some of the participants as ‘friends’ on social media such as WeChat, Weibo, and QQ, which allowed me to do an online observation of what they shared on their social media profiles. Data gathered from multiple sources allowed me to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the complexity and dynamics of mediated child-­ parent relationship in transnational families. Of the 38 participants, 17 were female and 21 were male, with ages ranging from 18–31 years. More than half of all interviewees (23/38) said they had both of their parents working abroad. 10 reported their fathers were working overseas whilst five had their mothers as migrant parents. All of the participants stated that they had accessed new media technology within the last 10 years, and the majority of them regularly used as least one mode of mobile media (e.g., smart phones, laptops, tablet computer, along with applications such as QQ, WeChat, and Weibo, etc.). The broader context for this is that Internet technology has developed rapidly in rural China. According to China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC 2017), the estimates of rural internet users have reached 2.01 hundred million by December 2016, accounting for 27.4% of the total netizens in China. Fuqing in particular has a remarkably high penetration of household broadband compared to the relatively low penetration rates of the overall ICT infrastructure (33.1%) in rural China. Based on the statistics provided by the local telecommunication office, of the two villages I visited, the penetration rates of household broadband have experi-

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enced a drastic boost from 13% in 2007 to almost 70% (646/925) in 2017. This number echoes earlier studies indicating the high adopting rates of internet among transnational families (Asis 2006; Gonzalez and Katz 2016).

9.5 The Perception of ‘Mediated Family Gaze’ Although left-behind children are not at the frontier of migration, they live with migration (Asis 2006). Here, I investigate how transnational family life is experienced by these children through their use of mobile media in their transnational communications with their parents. Given that long-term separation has undermined the prerequisite of ‘the family gaze’, this section contributes to fleshing out how it is revitalized within a techno-mediated context. It turns out that the emergence of ‘mediated family gaze’ does not always lead to a harmonious relationship between parents and children. Instead, it has sparked the binary opposite opinions based on the statements of these left-behind children.

9.5.1 Embracing the Technology: ‘They Are Back’ According to Morgan (2011), caring about the other within a family is manifested by the gaze among different family members. The external bodily features of the other, like height, weight and posture, as well as the implied inner states, such as anxiety, displeasure and so on, not only constitute the object of the family gaze, their regular availability to others also appear as the acknowledgement that a relationship exists. Yet, the long-term separation among parents and children has obliterated the routine availability of the family gaze within a bounded space, which in turn destabilizes the cornerstone of the intergenerational bonds. Given the context, the elimination of constraints entailed by time and space becomes vital in understanding the role that mobile media play during transnational communications. The proliferation of new media has revitalized the family gaze even within a transnational context, giving rise to the emerging ‘tangible’ mediated intimacy (Wilding 2006), which has been embraced and appreciated by many of the left-behind children. Xiao Lin, a 21-year-old male whose parents migrated to Liverpool for work in 2005, developed a closeness to them after the prevalence of digital tools, as new media-based interactions, such as webcam calls, have included more visual and sound cues: The first time I had a webcam session with them, I remember the feeling was neither happy nor sad but complicated. We hadn’t seen each other for approximately five years. Although I am familiar with their voices on the phone (i.e. international telephone calls), I had no idea that they were already that old (sobbing). (Technology) really helps. It seems that the distance between us has vanished and I can feel them now.

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An extreme case that exemplifies the revitalization of the ‘tangible’ gaze afforded by new media is the story of Wen Hui. Since his mother’s departure for Birmingham, the 18-year-old had been ridiculed by his classmates, saying that he did not have a mother because they never saw her at their school meetings. So, when his village first gained access to the internet, Wen Hui launched a webcam conversation with her for the first time. He took his classmates back home and introduced his mother to them in front of his newly bought laptop—a vivid and convincing proof that the woman he frequently mentioned was real. What’s more intriguing is that the mediated ‘parents’ were reported to have become even more ‘real’ from some children’s perspectives. Chao Hong, the protagonist of the vignette said, People act differently when they are online, maybe more sensitive or emotional as they hide behind the screen. Before she (Chao Hong’s mother) left, I had no idea what kind of person she was except for the ‘mother’ figure that I saw at home. But now I started to know my mother’s taste in music by the song she shared on WeChat Moments. I learned her feelings about her life through the caption she wrote on Qzone.

In some cases, children felt that their relationship with migrant parents even improved during long-term separation. The positive transformation of the parent-­ child relationship was not only due to separation strengthening the sentiment of longing from both sides, which in turn intensified family bonds. It was also about the interactive feature of new media diversified the ways children and parents communicated, which reinforced the intergenerational solidarity between parents and children. Several participants reported they developed emotional closeness with their migrant parents through sharing their online life, such as playing online games, sharing online diaries, or watching the same net dramas. In varying degrees, the multimodal interactions afforded by mobile media allowed dispersed family members to develop common topics despite their long-term separation. Such ‘interactive intimacy’ was arguably conducive to entrenching the mutual ‘gaze’ between migrants and non-migrants.

9.5.2 Detesting the Technology: ‘I Don’t Need the Unnecessary Care’/ ‘It Deprives Me of Them’ Gaze is not merely about care but is also related to control and surveillance. The family gaze, as Morgan (2011) put it, is characterized by the underlying asymmetry of intergenerational power, since parents are assumed to ‘claim the parental right’ to ‘gaze with more frequency on their children than the reverse’ (p.  93). Although long-term absence impeded the parents’ frequent gaze upon children, the advent of new media technology, to some degree, enabled them to turn their absence into presence in children’s life. Many of the left-behind children resented that their parents attempted to recover their parenthood by imposing discipline in the name of love, thereby sharing the negative attitude towards media’s role in frequent

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c­ ommunications. For them, digital technology could shift from a vehicle that conveyed affection and care to a cage that facilitated surveillance. This was particularly salient when some of the left-behind children had already been accustomed to the parents’ absence instead of their presence (see Parreñas 2015, p. 102), and had even been enjoying the freedom brought by this situation (also see Dreby 2010). For example, Jian Xiong, a 19-year-old boy, was once caught playing truant and staying at home by his parents in London because his WeRun1 steps registered less than 100 for several days. Meanwhile, the family gaze via mobile media did not always provide genuine support. Neither did it solve practical problems in children’s everyday life. Sometimes, it became more of a reminder of the family’s traumatic separation. Chao Hong’s sorrowful wedding is a typical example of this, indicating that mediated communication is sometimes unable to be a substitute for the proximity of embodied company. In such cases when the constraints of distance and time become evident, mobile media aggravated the poignancy and anxiety. Examples of these were school conferences, graduation ceremonies, or illnesses of kin (see also Uy-Tioco 2007; Wilding 2006). In these instances, a webcam session or an instant message would not be sufficient to deliver the care that children needed. It would instead create a strong psychological gap. As some of the participants narrated, the so-called mediated ‘co-presence’ was revealed to be nothing more than ‘illusory’: They were not able to attend the sports meeting and share my joy of winning a medal for sprint. What they would usually do is leave some encouraging comments below a photo I posted on social media. I do understand them to some degree, but I am still a child. Can you understand that feeling especially when you see your classmates having their parents around? (Chun Ling, 18-year-old girl, both parents abroad) All she could do was to ask me to drink more water when I had a high fever, and then kept asking me if I was feeling any better…sometimes I feel like… [deep sigh] I prefer not to have this ‘telephone mother’. (Di Er, 19-year-old girl, parents divorced and mother abroad)

The frequent family gaze afforded by mobile media also contributed to some parents’ holding onto an illusion that they were fulfilling their parental duty. Ironically, with some children, this triggered resentment towards media technologies. Xue Qiang, a 19-year-old boy whose mother married a new husband and decided to settle down in London, blamed the existence of the mobile phone for the infrequency of his mother’s visits to China: She thinks she has fulfilled her maternal duty, like a phone call every two weeks and several comments on my WeChat Moments…and she believes that’s enough for what she has done as a mother. The times she came back to China decreased from once per year to once every two years. When I see the photos she posted on the WeChat Moments—red wine, beef steak, luxury bags, and short videos showing the construction of enlarging her house, I know she had given up her reunion dream. She won’t go back. I know (choke with sobs).

 An affiliate application of WeChat that calculates the steps one walked everyday and publishes the result as a ranking list in public. 1

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Left-behind children were sensitive to this kind of ‘betrayal’, and they transferred their blame to the digital tools that became part of their parents’ excuses for justifying their prolonged absence. That said, we cannot draw a superficial conclusion that negative attitudes towards new media inevitably led to a refusal to use them. The next section deals with how left-behind children would take advantage of various digital tools to strengthen their agency in negotiating the intergenerational relationship with their parents.

9.6 Children as Actors: ‘Mediated Family Gaze’ as Strategies Contrary to prior literature which primarily interpreted left-behind children as the passive victims of their parents’ migration, this study has captured the varied forms of agency enacted by them, through the deployment of ‘mediated family gaze’, in shaping their relationship with parents. Below I discuss how they crave for the parents’ gaze, negotiate their parents’ gaze, and in turn, reverse the gaze to surveil their own parents.

9.6.1 Left Behind but not Left Forgotten: Craving for the Parents’ Gaze Generally, Chinese illegal migrants are in unskilled work, particularly in catering, food processing and agriculture, as the lack of qualification and language skills limits them to working largely in a low-paid and poor working condition (Lam et al. 2009; Pieke et al. 2004). In my earlier findings (Chen 2019), some of the undocumented migrants struggled to make ends meet, and so paid little attention to their left-­behind families. Meanwhile, those who were documented shifted their life focus to their host society, as they were able to access richer social resources. Under such circumstances, the majority of the left-behind children reported experiencing a long period of emotional loss after their parents’ departure. Some of them even took measures to regain their parents’ gaze in a deterritorialized context, such as disclosing the embodied cues of their practical life and conveying the associated inner states via the use of mobile media. Xue Qing, a 20-year-old girl complained that her father had not been answering her calls for some time. Even though she knew he was striving to earn the money to build their big house, Xue Qing still wanted him to pay more attention to her. She said, ‘family is not just about living in a big house, it’s more about family members living inside’. In order to regain his attention and affection, Xue Qing sent her exam papers with full marks and painted family portraits by overseas mail. This was when digital technology was not yet popular. By the time she bought her first smartphone in 2012, the way she expressed her

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desire for her father’s gaze underwent some changes. For instance, she began to frequently post certificates of merit (e.g. scholarship and awards of extracurricular competitions), details of her disciplined and organized daily life (e.g. jogging selfies, photos of her self-made dishes), and in-depth feelings and thoughts of life (e.g. diaries recording how she helped her mother take care of her grandmother who had Alzheimer’s disease) on WeChat Moments: I want him to know that I am very mature and distinguished now. I am the girl he should be proud of. Hope he can return to China in the near future. By then, he would not have to suffer anymore, as I believe I am outstanding and strong enough to take care of him for the rest of his life.

Xue Qing’s strategic self-representation on social networking sites (SNSs) echoes what Yu et al. (2017) have called ‘performative interactions’, by which they refer to the ways in which individuals manipulate interactive modalities and content for certain purposes (p. 133). However, in addition to such positive ‘performative interactions’ (constructing an embodied distinguished self), there is another group of children in this study who have dramatically taken the other end of the spectrum. A small proportion of the juvenile participants admitted that they had messed up their life (e.g. dropped out of school, got involved in gangs, indulged in net bars, etc.) and that their parents had already given up on them. In order to attract their parents’ attention, these children frequently shared their ‘chaotic life’ on social media. They would do things like post a video clip of revelry in a night pub, a close shot of a new tattoo, or a selfie while puffing on a cigarette. They believed that through these, they could change the status of being long-overlooked. What would often happen though is that they would end up in furious quarrels with their parents. Take case of Wei Xin, a 21-year-old left-behind girl. Her mother had divorced her disabled father and then established a new family in London once she had obtained British citizenship. While flashing back to these traumatic moments, Wei Xin could not hide her grudge against her mother’s departure. She narrated that she and her mother had a huge fight on the phone after she showed off her freshly tattooed middle finger (with a striking ‘F∗∗K U’ on it) on WeChat Moments: She is definitely not a responsible mother. Look at me. I am the evidence of her neglect of duty. She has already started a new life, while I am dwelling in the past. I want her to feel guilty. I cannot do anything else but constantly remind her that it’s her fault that made me like this.

As discussed earlier, left-behind children’s misbehaviours have long been ascribed to the lack of parents’ care and supervision due to their long-term absence. I argue, however, that this is a partial story that requires a more nuanced exploration. For Wei Xin, the display of a ‘delinquent self’ on social media cannot be merely interpreted as the result of parents’ absence. It also serves as an active way for left-­ behind children to express their resentment and acquire their parents’ attention. Despite the poignancy, we have to acknowledge the fact that these children are more than the passive victims of adults’ migration, but also hold the initiative to transform their care deficit situation. As a result, Wei Xin’s mother later increased the amount

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of the remittances she was sending, though material compensation may not necessarily ameliorate the mental and emotional hardship of the familial separation.

9.6.2 Achieving Autonomy or Showing Consideration? Negotiating Parents’ Gaze Parental control and care have always served as two sides of a coin. In contrast to the aforementioned children who utilized various strategies to draw their parents’ attention, another group of them strategically exploited mobile media to cast off their parents’ remote gaze and acquire individual autonomy. Xiao Yu, a 19-year-old girl, recalled that when she hit adolescence, her relationship with her migrant parents in Vancouver intensified. When she was 15 years old, her desk-mate in school became her boyfriend. Xiao Yu’s mother discovered this when she came across it on Qzone, particularly in the online blog website where her daughter recorded the minutiae of her daily life. Her parents were strongly against their puppy love as they saw it as a distraction that would affect her daughter’s academic performance. However, from Xiao Yu’s perspective, her parents’ long absence2 had disqualified them from disciplining her. Here we see that the ‘ambient co-presence’ facilitated by a ubiquitous media environment increased people’s awareness of activities by significant others (Madianou 2016, p.  183). This, in turn, intensified conflicts between children’s desire for autonomy and parents’ gaze for control. Yet, media technology is not only a means of controlling, but also a way of achieving independence and privacy (Baym 2015). Consequently, Xiao Yu was angry that her mother didn’t respect her privacy and locked up her Qzone account. The age of a child has always functioned as a crucial variable in determining the parent-child relationship in transnational families (Dreby 2010; Woodward, Fergusson and Belsky 2000). This is not only due to the fact that younger children are more likely to be affected when parents migrate, but also because they are often not mature enough to understand their parents’ decision to migrate. The reason triggering the change of intergenerational relations could be when these children start to work, develop a romantic relationship (see also Dreby 2010), or begin a family (see also Madianou and Miller 2012). When children mature, they may understand their parents’ gaze in another way. Some of them started realizing that their parents’ control actually derived from care. However, the concern based on virtual co-­ presence did not necessarily contribute to solving practical problems, but more often than not led to parents’ worrying and self-blaming. Hence, these children

 Xiao Yu’s migrant parents were saving money to open a small take-away restaurant, thereby curtailing the amount of remittances for a long period of time. The remittances, according to Xiao Yu, are ‘sufficient to avoid starving to death, however far from being well fed’. At that time, it was her boyfriend who helped her go through the financial hardship. Hence, parents’ physical and financial absence may largely destabilize their authority over children. 2

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chose to filter the information by sharing the good news while holding back the bad (bao xi bu bao you). As they stated: I would not answer phone calls when I don’t feel good. You cannot not conceal your status on the phone. I mean, when you are sick or in a bad mood, your voice would tell. She was living on her own in a foreign land. I could not imagine how hard it is to have a life in an unfamiliar place without any support. But I have never heard her complaining about anything for a single word. So how could I increase her burden and worry her unnecessarily? (Xiao Xia, 22-year old girl, mother abroad) I have to admit I had resentment about their leaving when I was a kid. But now I am a [internal] migrant worker [in Fuzhou] myself and have my boy left behind [in Fuqing with my wife’s parents]. I could feel the powerlessness of being unable to provide practical help [when kids are in need]. All of a sudden, I started to understand why they were so keen to ask me if I was good on the phone, because that’s the only way [to relieve the feeling of powerlessness]. So now every time they call to ask me the same question, my standard answer is ‘yeah, everything is good’. (Yu Bing, 26-year-old son, both-parents-abroad)

9.6.3 ‘It’s My Turn to Take Care of You’: Reversing the ‘Gazed-Upon’ Status As mentioned earlier, the children’s advanced age may have helped them better understand the pressure and needs their parents experienced. But I argue that media technology also plays a significant role in contributing to children’s maturity. The rich visual and sound cues afforded by new media (e.g., webcam calls and social media) have given rise to the alleged ‘tangible’ intimacy, yet also provided children with a more intuitive presentation of their parents’ aging and vulnerability, particularly after a long-term separation. Like the aforementioned case of Xiao Lin, who felt both grief and shock about his parents’ aging appearances after their first webcam session, it is not uncommon for children to realize their parents’ incapacities through the ‘mediated family gaze’. Wen Fang, a 29-year-old left-behind daughter, was aware that her mother was no longer in her prime as she remembered at childhood during one of their webcam calls. Her mother was an undocumented chao-fan-mian (a position in charge of dealing with rice and noodle frying) who worked in a Chinese take-away restaurant in London. The small room she rented in zone three3 did not have a heating radiator, which made the cold and damp winter intolerable for someone suffering from omarthritis (a very common occupational disease in catering business). Wen Fang’s mother had concealed the state of her illness until during a video call, but Wen Fang

 London is divided into 9 zones. Central London is located in zone 1, and the following zones (2, 3, 4 and so on) form concentric rings around it. Residence in zone 3 is comparatively affordable for many migrant workers whilst still reasonably near to London’s China Town (zone 1) where they work. 3

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noticed plaster boxes lying on the mattress. Wen Fang could not contain her ­emotions when she saw her mother’s shoulder and back covered with plasters on the screen. I had no idea she was in such poor health until I saw it by own eyes… She cannot even lift her arm over her head…I understood her attempt to save on outgoings and send as much remittance as possible. But she is not taking her health seriously. ‘Losing health to make money, and then losing money to restore health.’ This is the tenet of a lot of Fujianese. But I don’t buy it. I scolded her on the phone, asking her to swap for another room with a heating radiator, or at least buy an electric heater.

In this way, the mature children did not see ‘doing family’ via media technology as only for the sake of receiving care and discipline. Rather, what they did was to reverse the status of being ‘gazed upon’ and made their parents the object of their gaze. Given that these children were unable to provide the material and emotional support through regular face-to-face forms, communication technology then became indispensable for them to constantly monitor their parents’ health and bodily appearance. The first means utilized by some of the left-behind children is what Malinowski (1923) terms ‘phatic communication’. This refers to trivial conversations where the fact of communication per se is much more important than the actual content of communication (see also Madianou and Miller 2012). Indeed, it was from such banal interactions that the children became more aware of the connectedness they shared with parents, despite their geographical separation. Wang Yi, who had been a left-behind daughter for over 10 years, delivered care to her mother by doing nothing more than asking her on their weekly phone call if she slept well, what she ate for lunch, and how her nursing work was: The elderly parents are just like children. They need your concerns and care, even if it is a short call. What really matters, I think, is to make her aware that I have her back. That’s the reason that I make phone calls every week no matter how busy I am.

The ‘brevity’ and ‘regularity’ of such mediated communication between parents and children, echoes what Nedelcu and Wyss (2016) describe as ‘ritual co-­presence’, corresponding to ‘sustaining intergenerational ties via media as a ritual communication to accomplish the filial obligation’ (p. 209). In their work, however, they depict filial piety as passive responsibility, which constitutes the ‘basis of a subjective feeling of co-presence’. The left-behind children in this study, meanwhile, seem to be more active in taking on the obligation to sustain intergenerational solidarity. This is reflected in the nuances of caring by these left-behind children. Wen Zhen, a 25-year-old girl, revealed her strategy in taking care of her parents’ ‘self-esteem’ in their ‘ritualized’ communication: Although I have already grown up, I know I am always a kid from their perspective. So sometimes being too independent will make them feel sad, as they may realize they are not needed anymore. I learned this by myself when I became a mother of two children. That’s why I always ask for their advice in childrearing during our weekly webcam session, even if I don’t need these outdated suggestions any more.

Aside from these ritualized forms of co-presence, there was also a group of participants who adopted a more intrusive and intensified ‘co-presence’. Children at home

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did an active search for the details of their parents’ daily routines, which sometimes resulted in remote supervision and even disciplining them. This was especially the case when their parents were in need of constant care, such as those who had chronic diseases. For Chao Hong, mobile media allows her to deliver regular care to her migrant father in poor health, He (Chao Hong’s father) has been suffering from diabetes for long. His physical health and strength are much worse than before. But he is still doing manual jobs for the money to build our house. Sometimes he is too busy to pay attention to his health. Then I would remind him to take pills and inject insulin every night (it is actually morning in the UK due to the time zone difference) and call him again in the morning to double check if he has taken the medicine.

Overall, mobile media made it possible for these children to be more aware of parents’ vulnerabilities and care demands, which contributes to their maturity and the eventual reversal of the intergenerational power asymmetry. At the same time, the abundant affordances of mobile media also enable them to impose their gaze and take on the responsibility of a main caregiver (e.g. provide emotional support or sometimes discipline from afar). In other words, the reversal of the subject and object relation between parents and children served to smoothen the migrants’ hardship of living and working abroad. It also helped the children who live with migration to fulfill their filial duty.

9.7 Conclusion In this chapter, I drew upon 38 in-depth interviews with left-behind children that I conducted from between 2016 and 2018 in Fuqing, China. The left-behind children in this study were not the mere passive objects of migration that most literature has demonstrated. Instead, they demonstrated the ability to enact agency in shaping intergenerational relationships. And this was crystalised in what I call the ‘mediated family gaze’ during their parent-children communication. By this I refer to familial power dynamics and emotional circulation within a techno-mediated context. I argue that the ‘mediated family gaze’ is not just the revival of ‘the family gaze’ (Morgan 2011), a family practice that traditionally works through physical co-presence within a relatively confined setting. Instead, it has wider implications for translocal family relationships in this digital and mobile era. As Morgan (2011) has argued, the regular availability of ‘the family gaze’ appears as the acknowledgement that a relationship exists. Although the temporal and geographical constraints have crippled the mutual gaze among dispersed families, the emergence of the ‘mediated family gaze’ has minimized such impediments of emotional circulation; the various affordances of mobile media have helped separate family members to create a sense of ‘tangible’ and ‘interactive’ intimacy, thereby reaffirming the existence of familial relationship. However, the ‘mediated family gaze’ can also contribute to new conflicts, such as depriving some children

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of their freedom as a left-behind child; reminding people of the traumatic separation; and justifying some parents’ continued physical absence. Meanwhile, the word ‘gaze’ has long been associated with negative terms like ‘male gaze’ or ‘disciplinary gaze’. For sure, this study sides with these arguments that aim to capture the power asymmetry between the gaze (the subject) and the gazed-upon (the object). But I argue that the ‘family gaze’ should not merely be construed as constraints imposed on the ‘object’. It could also be deployed by the ‘object’ as a strategy to negotiate their ‘gazed-upon’ status. The flexibility and negotiability of familial power relation is more salient in transnational family settings. The spatial and temporal distance, in this sense, does not function as constraints any longer. Instead, the unconfined translocal settings have allowed for more space for actors to exert agency to deal with family relationships. With the abundant affordances of mobile media, the ‘mediated family gaze’ has provided dispersed family members with an avenue through which they are able to manipulate interactive contents and respond to their distant family members in more strategic ways. For example, we can see long-overlooked left-behind children strategically present themselves via either a positive (constructing the distinguished self) or negative way (revealing the delinquent self) to attract their parents’ attention and change their care deficit situation. Also, there are cases of children cutting off ‘copresence’ or filtering information to negotiate the remote parental gaze, regardless if it is for self-­autonomy or an altruistic consideration. As demonstrated earlier, the ability to ‘see’ the parents’ daily life and behaviours via mobile media from afar may deepen children’s understanding of parents’ harsh lives as migrants. This in turn contributes to their maturity and the reversal of the ‘gazed-upon’ status, making them the main caregiver and even disciplinarian of their parents. The participants in this study, due to their prolonged separation from their family members, could be viewed as an extreme case of illustrating how the ‘mediated family gaze’ captures the multidimensional flow of emotion, surveillance, as well as care exchange in a transnational setting. Yet the relevance of the concept actually extends beyond transnational families. Contemporary families have been largely influenced by various forms of mobility in this liquid modern society (Bauman 2011). The absences of family members may not be necessarily caused by migration, but also could be the emergence of the so-called ‘living apart together’ (LAT) family arrangement (Levin 2004). The recent translocal familial settings include long-term separation such as intimate couples working and living in different places, or short-term ‘LATs’ like children leaving home to study or work in other cities or countries. Although grounded in various contexts, these translocal families share the similarity of facing the challenge of time-space distances while largely being sustained by the use of mobile media. The proposition of the ‘mediated family gaze’, thereby, is important to understanding how familial emotional circulation and power dynamics are reproduced and negotiated across gender, generation and distance.

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Chapter 10

Transnational Mobile Carework: Filipino Migrants, Family Intimacy, and Mobile Media Cecilia S. Uy-Tioco and Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto

Abstract  Rapidly evolving and ubiquitous digital communication technologies have played a crucial role in shaping the quality and textures of mobile intimacy in transnational family life. In this chapter, we illuminate how transnational caregiving performed through mobile devices and online platforms engenders intimate caregiving from afar. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews, we investigate how elite Filipino migrants in the United States use mobile media and a diverse range of networked platforms to deliver and negotiate caregiving at a distance among their left-behind and aging parents in the Philippines. This study extends the care circulation approach in the context of transnational familial communication through mobile media. We critically examine the role of mobile media in facilitating mediation of everyday and routinized carework, microcoordination of care, the management of tensions and conflicts, and the performance of care. Signicantly, we propose the term ‘mobile carework’ to articulate the intimate, personalised, mobile, and negotiated care practices of transnational family members that are often shaped by the fusion of socio-cultural and technological forces. In sum, this study provides critical insights on how familial intimacies and relations are sustained through the provision of digitalised and differential care routines. Keywords  Mobile carework · Elite Filipino migrants · Transnational Filipino family · Smartphone · Social media

C. S. Uy-Tioco (*) California State University San Marcos, San Marcos, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] E. C. B. Cabalquinto Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_10

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10.1 Introduction Mobile devices have played an instrumental part in shaping the quality and textures of intimacy in transnational family life. In this chapter, we re-examine intimate family relationships by paying special attention to so-called ‘elite’ migrants and how they use mobile devices to perform, embody, and negotiate transnational caregiving in the context of their dispersed families. By elite migrants we mean those highly educated and professional migrants who could either be temporary or permanent residents in their destination country (Ong and Cabañes 2011; Uy-Tioco 2017). These are the migrants who generally did not leave the homeland because of economic or political reasons, and more often than not have higher cultural, social, and even economic capital in the homeland. They are mobile and cosmopolitan, ‘prone to articulate complex affiliations, meaningful attachments and multiple allegiances to issues, people, places, and traditions that lie beyond the boundaries of their resident nation-state’ (Vertovec and Cohen 2002, p. 2). By transnational caregiving we mean the performance of care based on a person’s capacity and obligations to care for other family members that are constrained by ‘time, stage in the family life cycle, health, competing care, and work obligations, as well as cultural preferences and expectations’ (Baldassar et al. 2007, p. 3). Specifically, we uncover the ways in which ‘elite’ Filipino migrants in the United States utilise mobile media and networked communications platforms to deliver intimate caregiving among their left-behind and aging parents in the Philippines. Through in-depth interviews with 15 of these migrants, we examine the role of such technologies in facilitating the mediation of everyday and routinized carework, microcoordination of care, the management of tensions and conflicts, and the performance of care on social media. Of the 10.2  million Filipinos living abroad, 48% are permanent (immigrants, dual citizens, permanent citizens), 41% are temporary (overseas workers, students, receiving short-term work training, etc.) and 11% are irregular (undocumented workers, overstaying visas) (Commission on Filipinos Overseas 2013). Of the 4.8  million Permanent Overseas Filipinos, a little over three million are in the United States (Hoeffel et al. 2012). Despite the diversity of these ‘mobile subjects’ (Adey, Bissell, Hannam, Merriman and Sheller 2013) moving between the Philippines to another continent, much of the scholarship on Filipino migrants have focused on Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) (Cabalquinto 2018a, b; Cabañes and Acedera 2012; Francisco 2015; Fresnoza-Flot 2009; Madianou and Miller 2012; Parreñas 2005, 2014; Uy-Tioco 2007). OFWs are employed with a fixed contract and are lauded by the Philippine government as bagong bayani or ‘new heroes’ for the remittances that they send home, contributing 10% of the gross national product (World Bank 2015). While officially, the category of OFW includes all highly skilled migrants working abroad who do not have permanent resident status (e.g., H1B visa holders in the United States), the term generally refers to blue collar and service industry workers who are temporarily employed for a fixed length of time and very little chance of becoming permanent residents of the host country.

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There is less scholarship on overseas Filipinos who have chosen to reside abroad permanently. Historically called balikbayan, these are immigrant Filipinos who periodically visit the Philippines, and make an effort to maintain ties to the homeland (Rafael 1990). Over the years, however, the term balikbayan has come to mean any returning Filipino, regardless of status abroad. Nonetheless, immigrant Filipinos are diverse, ranging from health industry professionals, educators, restaurant servers, department store cashiers, lawyers, bankers, actors, and so on. In expanding the coverage of studies on Philippine transnationalism, we attempt to examine the mobile practices of intimate caregiving at a distance of those permanent Filipino migrants in the United States who can be considered elite. As elite migrants, these Filipinos are afforded with diverse and relatively stable access to a polymedia environment (Madianou and Miller 2012) to deliver transnational caregiving among their left-­behind aging parents. Our aim in critically evaluating the mediated care practices of this particular cohort is to add diversity to an existing stream of scholarly work that has stressed the fundamental role of digital communication technologies in forging and even disrupting the conduct of family life at a distance. Our study is guided by a set of research questions: (1) How does mobile device use mould intimate relations as reflected in transnational caregiving practices? (2) What are the factors that engender and undermine such mobile practices? (3) What does the delivery of transnational caregiving tell us about the conduct and sustenance of family life at a distance in a networked era? We addressed these questions by drawing on data from in-depth interviews with elite Filipino migrants in the United States regarding the way they use mobile devices to deliver care to their left-­ behind and aging parents.

10.2 Conceptualizing Mobile Carework To understand how elite migrants care for left-behind aging parents, we propose the term ‘mobile carework’. This articulates the intimate, personalised, mobile, and negotiated care practices of transnational family members that are often shaped by the fusion of socio-cultural and technological forces. We argue that this proposition enables us to unravel and critically assess the different elements that affect caregiving at a distance among family members spread across vast continents. Significantly, such a discussion contributes to the growing body of work on the asymmetries of mobile communication (Lim 2016; Madianou and Miller 2012) in the context of mediated caregiving (Baldassar et al. 2007; Merla 2012; Wilding 2006), offering ways of re-thinking the care circulation lens within a mobile domain. As a conceptual tool, ‘mobile carework’ allows us to unpack the different strands that mould the contours of caregiving at a distance in different contexts and modalities. The term ‘mobile’ describes how care is constant and always ongoing despite geographical distance. It enables us to dig deeper into the role of ‘filial piety’ as an important social value among Asian families (Dai and Dimond 1998; Sung 1998) that informs practices, affects and negotiations in a digitally mediated environment.

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Finally, locating the outcomes of user’s choices, communicative motivations, cultural values, and technological mediation in forging intimate and familial lives adds an informed and nuanced understanding of transnational caregiving in Asia. In the following sections, we discuss the theoretical frameworks that ground our conception of ‘mobile carework’. First is the literature on intimate carework in transnational households, particularly on care practices of migrant Filipinos underpinned by the virtue of filial piety. Second are the works on mobile media in everyday life, and its role in transnational family life.

10.2.1 Intimate Carework in Transnational Households At the core of generating familial intimacy among dispersed family members lies the heavy and dependent use of digital communication technologies in everyday arrangements. Considered as an emotional link in everyday life (Vincent and Fortunati 2015), mobile devices afford non-proximate individuals to exchange personalised content—texts, visuals, and multimedia content—with each other. This contributes to the development and sustenance of intimate relationships, as evinced in the diverse experiences of the transnational Filipino family (Cabalquinto 2018a, b; Cabañes and Acedera 2012; Francisco 2015; Parreñas 2001a, 2005; Uy-Tioco 2007). However, we argue that intimacy can also be forged and embodied through transnational caregiving practices. According to Baldassar, Baldock, and Wilding (2007), transnational caregiving means the enactment of care by an individual based on one’s capacity to take care of other family members, fulfilment of obligations, as well as the constant negotiation of commitments. For them, transnational caregiving is often a product of guilty feelings (Baldassar 2014a), a fulfilment of obligations (Baldassar 2008), or simply manage health-related crisis in the family (Baldassar 2014b). In the context of Philippine migration, Parreñas (2001b) contends that practical, emotional and moral care are the three forms of care practices among transnational Filipino families. Practical care includes the sending remittances and material goods to address the financial and practical needs of left-behind family members. Emotional care is often observed through the ways in which migrants express their care and concern to the health, well-being and everyday life of their loved ones. Lastly, moral care refers to the ways in which family members discipline other family members. In contemporary times, digital communication technologies have revolutionised the ways in which care practices are performed and experienced. Family members living apart can utilise information communication technologies (ICTs) and new media to perform caregiving across borders and distances (Baldassar et al. 2007; Wilding and Baldassar 2018). Caregiving to aging parents is undergirded by the notion of filial piety, which shapes the production and reproduction of transnational care practices of migrant children for their left-behind aging parents. Among Asian families, fulfilling filial duty is observed by respecting and loving one’s parents, enduring sacrifices,

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s­ upporting the needs of the parents in their old age, and fulfilling obligations despite separation (Baldassar et  al. 2007; Dai and Dimond 1998; Leinonen 2011; Singh 2016; Singh and Cabraal 2014; Thai 2012). In Philippine society, Filipino children are obliged to support and address the needs of their parents as informed by the cultural value of ‘utang na loob’ (debt of gratitude) (Medina 2001; Pe-Pua 1989). There is also a cultural expectation that the children have to repay the hard work and sacrifices of their parents by providing support to them, particularly in their old age (Aguilar 2009; Benitez 2005; Francisco-Menchavez 2018; Mckay 2016; Soriano 1995). In a transnational media context, previous studies have shown that to become a dutiful child entails a constant deployment of communication at a distance (Baldassar et al. 2007; Burholt 2004; Kang 2012; Sung 1998) or sending of remittances and gifts (Aguilar 2009; Horst 2006; Singh and Cabraal 2014). Caregiving at a distance also involves sending money to cover everyday expenses (Cabalquinto 2018a, b; Mckay 2016) alongside consistent communication (Cabalquinto 2018a, b; Francisco-Menchavez 2018). In this chapter, we extend the care circulation perspective, proposed by Baldassar and Merla (2014a), to the field of media and communication. They argue that care circulation is multidirectional yet reciprocated asymmetrically. Importantly, their approach expands the discourse on global care chains (Hochschild 2000) by taking into account the performance and negotiation of caring practices among diverse individuals situated within a broader local, transnational and global sphere. However, the work of Baldassar and Merla (2014a) has not deeply engaged with how the uptake of contemporary mobile devices and networked communications platforms affects caregiving at a distance. Thus, as we discuss in the next section, we draw from extant scholarship and perspectives on mobile media technologies.

10.2.2 Mobile Media in Everyday Transnational Life The ubiquity of mobile media devices and applications has reshaped the ways people communicate, build, and maintain relationships. Katz and Aakhus, in 2002, examined the characteristics of the mobile phone and its prospects for ‘perpetual contact’. In today’s age of smartphones and other related technologies, ‘perpetual contact’ has indeed come into fruition. We no longer exist in separate plugged/ unplugged worlds, but rather are ‘always-on’ (boyd 2011). Mobile media, particularly mobile phones and their capacity for text-messaging and social media apps, provide users with a sense of ‘connected presence’ where ‘the (physically) absent party renders himself or herself present by multiplying mediated communication gestures up to the point where copresent interactions and mediated communication seem woven in a seamless web’ (Licoppe 2004, p. 135). Indeed, mobile media have paved the way for real-time communication, reordering time and space so that ‘social relations are lifted out of immediate interactional settings and stretched over potentially vast spans of global time-space’ (Moores 2000, p. 106). Such a­ ccessibility

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to one another brings about expectations that friends and family are always available through their mobile media, and we are likewise compelled to reciprocate by also always being available. In light of the vast array of mobile media now on hand, Madianou and Miller (2012) developed the theory of polymedia to describe and understand the consequences of new communication technologies. They point out that individuals choose a particular platform in relation to the features and limitations of other devices and channels and the choice of a communicative apparatus depends on emotional, social and moral consequences (Madianou and Miller 2012). It must be noted that access, cost and literacy are critical components that one has to embody in order to participate and thrive in a polymedia environment (Madianou and Miller 2012). Our informants in this study have higher levels of diverse capitals and thus live in polymedia-rich environments. The mobile phone is the most accessible and widely used ICT in the Philippines with a penetration rate of 116% (We Are Social 2019). On average, Filipinos spend the most time on social media in the world at 4.12 hours per day (We Are Social 2019). It is thus not surprising that mobile media play a tremendous role in transnational family life. In particular, cross-platform voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and instant messaging (IM) apps such as Viber, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger as well as video-chatting apps such as Skype or Facetime have made ‘doing family’ (Morgan 2011) easier. Thus, family practices are produced and reproduced in a transnational social space where ‘migrants vary their communication patterns within their transnational families according to their needs, their own or their interlocutors’ digital literacy, the equipment they possess and, of course, the family norms and obligations that transcend borders’ (Nedelcu and Wyss 2016, p. 203). Clearly, unprecedented digitalisation of intimate relations has redefined transnational caregiving in a networked era. Here, the intricacies of mobile devices and networked platforms engender and even disrupt the fulfilment of familial obligations and duties among transnational families. The affordances of platforms (Baym 2010; Hutchby 2014) generate new intimate sociality, relations, tensions and affective experiences among individual users. For instance, the mediated space of online platforms has placed individuals in a constant negotiation of performing and displaying public and private lives (boyd 2014; Papacharissi 2009). The blurring of boundaries between physical and online environments paves the way for new ways of thinking about sociality and intimacy (Hjorth and Lim 2012; Madianou 2016; Miller and Slater 2000), as well as in the context of care practices (Baldassar et al. 2016). Indeed, ‘always-on’ connectivity (boyd 2011) brings migrants and their left-­ behind family parents closer (Cabalquinto 2018a, b; Madianou and Miller 2012) but can also become a source of tensions and ruptures, as often impacted by the fusion of various forces (Keightley and Reading 2014).

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10.3 Methods of Investigation This chapter stems from a larger research project that broadly explores elite Filipino transnational migrants and their use of mobile media in navigating their ties to both homeland and land of settlement. In particular, it examines the experiences of Filipinos in the Metropolitan Washington D.C. area who are members of the alumni associations of what are considered the top three Philippine universities.1 They have permanently settled in the United States as citizens, dual citizens, or permanent residents or hold a G visa (those employed long-term in an international organizations such as the World Bank or IMF). These Filipinos work in white-collar jobs, came to the U.S. as graduate students, through work placements, or through family situations (e.g., marriage). Employed in a variety of sectors such as health and medicine, business, law, banking, education, hospitality, technology, and international nonprofit organizations (e.g., World Bank and IMF), they are the fifth largest Asian group in the Metropolitan D.C. area (Hoeffel et al. 2012, p. 21). Studying ‘elite’ migrants provides a more nuanced view of the diversity of Filipino migrant experiences (Ong and Cabañes 2011, p.  202). Further, Nader (1972) encourages researchers to point their ethnographic eye up, to people who wield power. The participants in this study are considered ‘elite’ because migration was not motivated by poverty or politics and have higher cultural, social, and even economic capital in the homeland due to their family backgrounds and their being graduates of the top three universities in the country. Semi-structured in-depth interviews (Creswell 2013; Lindlof and Taylor 2002) with 12 elite Filipino migrants were primarily conducted in May–July 2015. Follow-up interviews and an additional three interviews were conducted between November 2018 to March 2019, for a total of 15 interviewees. Interviews were between 45 and 90 minutes and conducted primarily in English, although all participants also responded in Taglish—a mix of Tagalog and English. Because media is integrated into the everyday lives of transnational migrants (Madianou and Miller 2012), on-line participant observation as modes of ethnographic data gathering was also conducted with those who gave permission to observe and quote from their social media (e.g., Facebook or Instagram) accounts. Names were changed to protect their privacy.

 While universities in the Philippines are not formally ranked, the University of the Philippines, the Ateneo de Manila University, and De La Salle University are considered to be the top universities in the country. They are regularly listed in international rankings and are arguably the most difficult to get into. Their alumni associations in the Metropolitan Washington DC area are robust and active with large memberships. 1

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10.4 Transnational Mobile Carework Elite Filipino migrants are able to carry-out ‘mobile carework’ because they have access to an array of ICTs and live in polymedia-rich environments. They are technologically literate and because cost is not an issue, they usually own various digital media devices such as smartphones, laptop computers, and tablets and utilise social media sites (e.g., Facebook and Instagram), digital apps (e.g., Viber, WhatsApp, Facetime, Skype), and VoIP (voice over internet protocol) devices (e.g., Vonage, Ooma, MagicJack) to keep in touch with their aging parents in the homeland. It must be noted all but one of our informants mentioned that their parents never asked them for financial support. For instance, according to Marga, her parents are ‘very independent, they saved for retirement, they don’t need financial help from me or my siblings, but I send presents’. In some cases, because of their higher economic and social capital in the homeland, parents in the Philippines were providing financial assistance to their migrant adult children in the United States. In the case of Rose and her husband, her mother-in-law helped them with the down payment for their house as well as their mini-van after their child was born, emphasizing that carework by these Filipino migrants is not financial, but rather the emotional care expressed by constant phone calls, text messages, and sharing of photos. Indeed, this was a common reply among the research participants of the study. Despite their age, parents in the homeland were financially independent. Any material support tended to be in the form of gifts and ranged from clothing and shoes to airline tickets to visit the grandchildren in the United States. The examples above emphasize how mobile carework for aging parents is largely emotional, at the same time illustrate how it is reciprocal and asymmetrical (Baldassar and Merla 2014a, b) as well. In the next sections, we discuss how mobile carework is performed through the provision of personalized, intimate, mobile, and negotiated care practices in diverse contexts. Mobile carework is carried out as everyday routinized care, microcoordination of care from a distance, management of tensions and conflicts, and performing and curating care.

10.4.1 Everyday Routinized Carework Mobile media have provided migrants with the ability to be in constant contact with family far away establishing a continuous ‘connected presence’ (Licoppe 2004). As such, daily life in the United States is interspersed with communication with others halfway across the globe. It is a constant navigation between the Washington D.C. area where they work and live, and the Philippines where loved ones remain. Marga, a mother of two college-aged children, explains that she calls her parents daily through the digital app Viber. She notes, ‘we have a routine, we call all the time at the same time. I call every day on my way to work.’ Given the 12-13- hour time difference between Washington DC and Manila, as Marga drives to work, her

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parents back home would have just finished dinner. This allows them focused time to catch-up and chat, tell stories about their day. When her father fell ill, the scheduled daily calls on Viber became even more important. She recalls that her father would plan the day’s activities around her 7 am voice call, setting a reminder on his phone 10 minutes before she was scheduled to call. When he was confined in the hospital, the reminders ensured that no procedures would be conducted lest he missed his daughter’s call. Here we see how the portability and mobility of the mobile phone shapes the communicative practices. No matter where she is, Marga can ‘care’ for her parents. For Sheila whose mother is in poor health and aging, daily voice calls through the VoIP service Ooma to say ‘hi’ are essential as ‘she’s too old to learn how to text’ and ‘hearing my voice makes her happy’. Similarly, Emma, who has two adult children says, ‘I call my mom everyday through Vonage… not like before it was a luxury to communicate.’ Here, Emma contrasts the ability of ICTs to facilitate daily communication that is cheap versus the expensive weekly phone calls she would make in the 1980s when she first arrived in the United States. According to Emma, conversations are ‘not limited to major news, it’s everyday news’ and that through ICTs, ‘it’s easier to be closer, to remain close’. We see here that families are able to develop routines where they ‘live their lives together across distance’ (Baldassar and Merla 2014a). Thus, a sense of ‘family-hood’ is maintained (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002) despite physical separation. For Marga, Sheila, and Emma, mobile carework allows them to continue their prescribed roles as ‘good’ daughters to aging parents in the homeland. Keeping in touch and providing care are not limited to these scheduled phone calls. Ronna points out that through mobile media, she can talk to her parents ‘every single minute. Viber, Skype, Facebook, it’s instantaneous! So, from once every few weeks or once a month [on the landline in the 1990s], now multiple times a day’. Messages vary from simply checking-in to say ‘hi’ or ‘good morning’ or to ask ‘how are you feeling today’ to stories about their day or other family members. It is through these moments of ritual co-presence that migrant adult children are able to sustain ‘intergenerational ties via media as a ritual communication to accomplish the filial obligation’ (Nedelcu and Wyss 2016, p.  209). Because messaging apps such as Viber or WhatsApp and social media sites such as Facebook or Instagram allow for asynchronous communication, Filipino migrants can reach out to their families throughout the day despite the time difference. Even if parents in the homeland are asleep when messages are sent or posted, they would have easy access to these when they wake-up. These short, scattered continuous flow of messages and calls are an ‘irregular interaction’ that are ever-present and easily activated to provide a ‘feeling of a permanent connection’ (Licoppe 2004, 141). Transnational care for parents who are in the homeland includes mobile carework with the in-laws. For Filipinos, getting married means becoming part of your spouse’s family. Their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, nephews and nieces, become yours as well. As Cecille, a mother of two teenagers, points out she is on two different extended family group chats on the messaging app Viber includes one with her family of origin and another one with her husband’s family. These

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group chats include parents, siblings, spouses, and children, crossing generations. She says, ‘You hit send, everyone gets it… it makes you feel involved in everyday life of the extended family.’ In addition to keeping in touch with her own parents, she also is able to express her care for her in-laws, noting how men are less affectionate with their parents. Through mobile media, elite transnational Filipino migrants are able to provide emotional care through regular expressions of concern and affection (Parreñas 2001b). Such emotional care is woven into the everyday, despite the challenges of physical distance and time zones. While everyday mobile carework promotes feelings of warmth and affection, at the same time, it provides satisfaction and comfort for migrant adult children that they are able to perform filial piety, accomplishing duties and obligations expected of them.

10.4.2 Microcoordination of Care Ling (2004) points out ‘the mobile telephone has started to change the ways in which we organize and coordinate our everyday lives’ and ‘tighter microcoordination of our social interaction’ (p. 58). In this chapter, we showcase that microordination of decisions and actions in critical or challenging familial situations contributes to distant crisis care (Baldassar 2014b). More specifically, mobile carework includes checking on parents’ health, inquiring about doctor’s appointments, and reminders to take medication. When Marga’s father was ill, the various group chats she belonged to on Viber became more important. Because a number of her siblings were in the medical profession, they were able to provide detailed information on their father’s condition, in addition to the emotional support the group chat enabled. When her father needed blood infusions, Marga said she ‘got in touch with friends to give blood, technology allowed me to mobilize college, high school friends, and former co-workers’. Through mobile media, she was able to ‘schedule blood donations’ making sure that there was a steady influx of donated blood for her father. Marga further pointed out, ‘we would not be able to coordinate as quickly and as wide without technology’. Here we see how the specific aspect of a particular platform—group chat on Viber— that is widely used in the Philippines facilitated the coordination. Similarly, Marie used Facebook to update friends and family about her father’s hospitalization, medical condition, and eventual return to the family home. Through her social media posts, she was able to let friends and family know when it was a good time to visit and request for prayers. We thus see how through the use of mobile media, both Marga and Marie were able to contribute to the family efforts in caring for an ill parent emotionally and materially, even from afar. In the case of Sandy, she was able to utilise her family’s Viber group chat to coordinate who of her siblings would be accompanying her mother for an outpatient surgery and the 24-hours post-surgery recovery at home. As the eldest and only daughter, Sandy lamented that sometimes her brothers were unreliable. And despite

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being far away, it still fell on her to coordinate her mother’s care by ensuring that one of her brothers took a day off from work and made arrangements with his wife that he would spend the day with their mother illustrating the gendered dimension to social coordination (Ling 2004). This echoes early research on domestic telephone habits where women were found to be the ‘social administrator’ for the home and used the telephone to manage, inform, and coordinate other family members (Claisse and Rowe 1993, pp. 213–214) and mobile technology to ‘carry-out their geographically complicated responsibilities for home, family members, and paid labor’ (Rakow and Navarro 1993, pp. 154–155). Mobile technology was particularly essential in coordinating the evacuation of Marie’s invalid father during Tropical Storm Ondoy (international name Typhoon Ketsana) which resulted in massive flooding in Metro Manila in 2009. Due to the heavy rains her family’s home was completely flooded, and her father together with her sister had been trapped in their home’s upper floor with dwindling resources (medicines and food) and without water and electricity. For almost 2 days, she had no contact with them, however, through text-messaging friends in the Philippines, she was able to get information on their condition and coordinate a rescue. On Facebook, she appealed to her network of friends for information on the rising waters, a rescue raft for her bedridden father, and leads on a new place for them to live. Thus, microcoordination is done through a variety of tools and technologies (Ling 2004) in a polymedia environment where users are able to utilise digital media platforms based on their affordances (Madianou and Miller 2012). Being able to ‘do something’ assuages the guilt that migrant adult children feel. Because geographical distance hinders them from being physically there to attend to their needs, doing it remotely through mobile media technologies and platforms allows them to care for them in more concrete ways. Here we see how elite Filipino migrants use digital communication technologies to mobilise their networks and capitals to manage household crises.

10.4.3 Management of Tensions and Conflicts Mobile media use in the provision of transnational caregiving can also stir tensions and conflicts. Despite the benefits of mobile media in facilitating constant communication between distant others, conflicts also arise. At times, aging parents lose track of the time difference and call at inopportune times such as when adult migrant children are at work or asleep. According to Rose, juggling international phone calls while preparing dinner for her child is not easy. Sandy points out, sometimes her mother calls ‘at a bad time when I am at work and she gets mad I can’t talk.’ When asked how she felt about it, she replied ‘I get annoyed, and then sometimes I get guilty because she probably was missing me and needed to talk’. Sandy struggles with wanting to be there for her mother while simultaneously living her own life in the United States. She laments that sometimes her mother’s feelings are hurt when she is unable to talk or reply to text message right away. According to Sandy, her

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mother doesn’t understand ‘how busy life is in the U.S.’ but feels guilty when she is unable to talk or text back immediately. On occasion she simply ignores messages from the family chat group on Viber until she has more time. Here we see Sandy struggling with the burden of ‘doing family’ (Morgan 2011) transnationally, exacerbated by the Filipino practice of being deferential and obedient to parents, even when one is an adult child. In Rose’s case, she grew up using Filipino words of respect when addressing her parents. Interestingly, her mother called during our interview, and when Rose immediately answered the call, her intonation changed as she replied ‘Opo, Mama’ using the polite and formal version of ‘yes’ in Tagalog. Thus, we see how ‘the consumption of media technologies is both shaped by and shapes existing family dynamics’ (Lister et al. 2003, p. 236). While the ‘always on’ aspects of mobile media facilitates everyday emotional carework and microcoordination during times of crisis, communicative tensions also surface. Personal strategies are then deployed to sustain familial ties. Ultimately, mobile device use operates as a performance of filial duty and performative adjustment in a transnational household.

10.4.4 Performing and Curating Carework Mobile carework also involves the performance of care on social media sites, accessed through mobile media devices, where migrant adult children are able to curate and make visible their love and concern for far-away aging parents. On digital media, we perform our ‘front stage’ activities which involves the management of a display (Goffman 1959). In public, we’re aware of how we present ourselves, our deportment and our façade, and are minutely concerned with what Goffman calls ‘impression management’ (Ling and Donner 2009). With the rise of digital media, Goffman’s self-presentation is now ‘a reflexive practice of self-representation, with every decision visible and open to scrutiny’ (Bauman and Lyon 2013, quoted in Blum-Ross and Livingstone 2017, p. 112). Through self-representation on mobile and social media, migrants are able to choose which aspects of themselves to represent and how to represent them (Thumim 2012). Importantly, mobile media have become platforms to communicate gratitude for aging parents, as well as gratitude and love for deceased parents, reflecting ways of displaying a positive image of the household as a modality in performing filial piety (Medina 2001). Mobile media and social media platforms facilitate the public performance and self-representation of being a caring, loving, and dutiful (adult) child. For example, Marie often posted screen shots of video chats with her mother and older sister, demonstrating the tight family bond to all her social media friends. Despite being physically away, she would share photos of her parents and siblings celebrating momentous occasions such as, birthdays, anniversaries, and other milestones. For Marie, this was a way of participating in the events she was missing, but also an illustration of being a dutiful child. Even if she was far away, she could mark the special occasion on her social media feeds, making it visible for all her friends to

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see and witness her love for her parents back home. Such public and semi-public sharing on social media networks elicit comments and likes from family, friends, and acquaintances, validating their experiences of caring for aging parents. Here we see the ‘promotional practice’ of socializing on Facebook where status updates ‘share only information that bring the user in a good light, meaning that the users serve as their own PR-agents’ (Enli and Thumim 2012, pp. 96–97). Emma, on the other hand, expressed her love and devotion to her mother by sharing photos of her visiting her in Washington D.C. and their travels around the world. Her posts garnered comments from friends such as, ‘so happy to see you enjoying and bonding with your mom,’ ‘You warm my heart every time I see that you’re with your mom,’ and ‘Lucky you! Cherish these moments and have fun with her even though it’s probably difficult sometimes’ acknowledging the tensions that come with caring for an aging parent and affirming that she indeed was a dutiful daughter. Whether such self-representation on social media platforms are made consciously or deliberately, demonstrating care for aging parents in the homeland present adult migrant children in a positive way to their contacts. Through the accessibility of social media platforms on mobile devices, individuals are constantly negotiating the performance and display of their public and private lives (boyd 2014; Papacharissi 2009). When her father’s illness turned for the worst, Marga posted ‘I’m coming home, Dad’ on her Facebook account while in the airport just before boarding the airplane. According to her, mobile media allows her to express her feelings, finding ‘comfort in just venting out into space’. Although she was physically far away, Marie often posted photos of her bedridden father being cared for by her older sister in their family home in the Philippines, keeping him and other family members present in her online life. When she visited, she would share photos of herself by his bedside feeding him or holding his hand. Similarly, during a visit home, Ronna posted photos of herself accompanying her parents to doctor’s appointments in the Philippines. When her father fell ill, she too shared photos on Facebook that showed her father in the hospital, connected to tubes and in hospital bed, with a post saying how she and her siblings ‘take turns caring for him 24/7’. The death of a parent also results in new ways of expressing love and affection, as well as keeping memories alive. Social media sites such as Facebook create ‘a new setting for death and grieving—one that is broadly public with an ongoing integration into daily life’ (Brubaker et al. 2013, p. 152). For example, Ronna posted a long tribute and poem on her Facebook timeline to acknowledge father’s passing and talking about ‘making that very difficult trip back home’ to pay her last respects. Similarly, Marie, also on Facebook, shared how her father was ‘the best father I knew,’ acknowledging her grief as well as her faith that he was now with God. Over the next few days, until her flight home to the Philippines, she continued to use social media to memorialize him by sharing photos of him and the family and posting details of the wake and funeral. Grief is expresses though status updates, photos, and comments on social media, providing ‘a new space for the bereaved to engage grief that is socially situated in the daily lives of users’ (Brubaker et  al. 2013, p. 161). In addition, Marie also documented her grieving rituals by sharing photos

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of herself going to church in the Washington DC area as well as religious icons and prayers that gave her comfort. Indeed, mobile media, and the social media sites it enables, have provided new ways to grieve that are incorporated into everyday life. Grieving and memorializing continue to be evident in commemorative posts on Facebook, family chat groups, Instagram, and other social media on birthdays and death anniversaries of the deceased parent. On the first anniversary of her father’s death, Marga posted a tribute to him as well as photos of herself, her husband, and two children at a Washington DC restaurant with caption, ‘special Sunday brunch Remembering dad’. On subsequent visits to the Philippines, Marie would take photos of the crypt where her father’s remains were interred, sharing with her contacts that she ‘visited’ him. As Brubaker et al. (2013) point out, social media provides a new setting for the ‘trajectories of social engagement around death—in preparation, at the moment of passing, in the discovery of the death of a friend, and in the ongoing memorialization and grieving’ (p. 152) and become ‘sites of social and cultural production—in this case, the production of public grief’ (p. 160). While such digital commemorations of deceased parent somehow allow them to live on, they also allow adult migrant children to continue honouring them. The ubiquity of mobile media in everyday life has provided adult migrant children with platforms to publicly show their affection, gratitude, and love for aging and deceased parents in the homeland, highlighting the importance of familial ties. Through posts and sharing on social media sites, Filipino transnational migrants are able to honour parents in their old age and in death, performing filial piety through mobile media technologies.

10.5 Conclusion The ‘generational contract’ where parents care for them when their young, who in turn care for them when they age (Bengston and Achenbaum 1993 cited in Baldassar and Merla 2014a, p. 7) is clearly present in the minds and hearts of elite Filipino migrants. While geographical distance hinders them from physically being there to care for or supervise care of aging parents in the homeland, they are able to perform carework through mobile media technologies and continue the intimate bonds of parent-child relationships. As shown above, care by elite adult migrant children are largely emotional, carried out in the everyday expressions of care, the microcoordination of care, and the management of communicative tensions and conflicts. Such forms of care from a distance has become easier and more convenient due to mobile media. Furthermore, the ubiquity of mobile media technologies has made care for aging parents visible and performative, garnering comments and praise from others. It has been shown that the uses of various media technologies become ‘embedded in everyday life and its domestic and urban environments … permeating all the mundane activities’ (Lister et al. 2003, pp. 219–220). More than this, mobile device use in sustaining family life at a distance is primarily far from being banal. It paves the way for the performance, embodiment, and negotiation of caregiving at a

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d­ istance, which we conceptualize as ‘mobile carework’. Mobile practices demonstrate how performativity in sustaining transnational familial relations reflects the entanglement of particular socio-cultural values and the technological affordances of networked communications platforms. In conclusion, the integration of ubiquitous smartphones and networked communications platforms into the daily life of transnational families showcases how modes of caregiving can be enacted and experienced through digital networks, dynamics and spaces. However, communicative benefits are often intertwined with tensions and conflicts that are constantly managed. By acknowledging such contradictory and asymmetrical landscape of mobile carework, this research ultimately offers a vantage point on how we might critically reflect upon and articulate caregiving at a distance in the age of smartphones and mobile social media. Acknowledgements  We would like to thank Vincent Pham and Cheryll Ruth Soriano for the insightful comments and feedback they gave during their review of this chapter. We are also grateful for comments received during presentations of early versions of this chapter at the 2019 Immigration and Diaspora Studies Symposium at California State University San Marcos and the 2019 Cultural Studies Association conference at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

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Chapter 11

Mobile Media and Kirogi Mothers: Place-­ Making and the Reimagination of Transnational Korean Family Intimacies Young A Jung

Abstract  This chapter examines the role of mobile media in Korean kirogi (wild goose, 기러기) families, a distinct kind of transnational migrant family that splits their household for a temporary period of 6 months to more than 10 years so that the children can be educated in an English-speaking country. Typically, dual-continent households, they consist of a mother and children living in an English-speaking country while the father lives on his own in Korea, sending money to support and maintain their lifestyle. This chapter looks particularly at mobile media’s role in the place-making of these kirogi families. Through an examination of two distinct Korean communities in Northern Virginia in the USA, I show that these technologies play a key role in enabling the achievement of familial goals regarding children’s education, transforming conceptions of family, and cultivating a sense of belonging and community for kirogi mothers. All in all, I underscore how mobile media play an important role in place-making for transnational families like the kirogi. Keywords  Kirogi mothers · Transnational families · Place-making · Emplacement · Mobile media

11.1 Introduction This chapter examines the role that mobile media play in place-making for Korean educational transnational families. Known as kirogi (wild goose, 기러기), these families show a distinct family migration pattern. They split their household for a temporary period that can range from 6 months to more than 10 years in order to

Y. A Jung (*) George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_11

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educate the children in an English-speaking country. In this kirogi family arrangement, it is typical for the migrant mother to be with the children in the English-­ speaking county and to have the father stay in the home country. Such families differ from other forms of transnational families who usually have working class backgrounds and are motivated to migrate by potential economic opportunities. Kirogi families are instead usually middle or upper class and are primarily motivated by their desire to seek better educational opportunities for their children (Chee 2003; Huang and Yeoh 2005). Apart from this, many working class transnational migrants send money back to their families in the home country. The direction of remittances for kirogi families is the opposite of this, as the mother and the children abroad are financially dependent on fathers who work in Korea. Extant research on the specific dynamics of Korean kirogi families have focused on the relationship between the specific motivation to move for education and its effects on adaptation as well as on issues of family separation and adjustment (Cho 2004; Choi 2006; Kang 2009; Lee 2008, 2010; Lee and Koo 2006). However, these studies have often been unable to situate kirogi families in relation to the broader phenomenon of transnational families and have particularly not looked at the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in transnational family dynamics. This is something to which this chapter pays attention. Central to understanding the prevalent practices of kirogi families is that it is embedded in the development of mobile media technologies in South Korea. The country is a leading state in terms of ICTs and accessibility, with a globally unsurpassed 95.1% of the current population using the Internet through various technological platforms (Statista Research Department 2018). Many Korean and overseas Korean smartphone users are online particularly via KakaoTalk, a mobile application (app) developed by the Korean venture company Kakao Incorporated (Yoon 2016). Here transnational families chat, send pictures, voice recordings, movies, and have real time audiovisual conversations. Many of these users have an especially strong preference for KakaoTalk chat or Kakao audiovisual conversations. In this chapter, I contend that emplaced transnational family studies and transnational communication studies—that is, an emplaced approach to the study of transnational families by adopting sense of place and sense of belonging and a contextual approach to the study of transnational ties with the lens of communication—have a unique potential to illuminate how adaptations and belongings are affected not only by social class, but also by sense of place and mediated interaction. Through an emphasis on emplaced parenting with transnational media, this study opens up questions that can lead to more contextualized explanations of the distinctive forms of transnational migration of kirogi families (cf. Portes et al. 1999; Kivisto 2001; Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). This chapter’s focus on emplacement complicates the scholarship in the field of transnational migration studies, which tends to focus on the borderless movement of migrants and the formation of transnational fields among immigrant communities (for example, Smith 2006; Vertovec 2004). While existing scholarship often discusses the bright future of new migrants by focusing on their enhanced movement, double lifestyles, and flexible identities, they do not pay much attention to the costs

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and effort that transnational migrants spent to maintain dual lifestyles. This chapter also contributes to works on transnational communication and media studies that go beyond the promises of the expansion of pluralized experiences of place (Moores 2012). It builds on studies that acknowledge the continuing difficulties that accompany transnationally mediated lives (for example, Cabañes and Acedera 2012; Lim 2014; Madianou and Miller 2012; Platt et al. 2016; Uy-Tioco 2007, 2017). In particular, it teases out something that is present but not necessarily emphasized in these works: the importance of emplacement in the lives of migrants. Two contrasting field sites were selected for this study: Centreville and McLean, which are both in Fairfax County, Northern Virginia. The significance of Centreville is that it has been part of a transformation characterized by ‘suburban immigrant residential patterns’ (Price and Singer 2008, p. 139). The area’s foreign-born population increased 323.5% between 1990 and 2000 (Price and Singer 2008, p. 141) and Asians were 51.3% of the total population in 2010 (Washington Post, Interactive: Mapping the Census). Importantly for this chapter, Centreville has seen a significant growth of its Korean population. Indicative of this is that together with the dramatic increase in the number of businesses in the area, there has been the rise of over 500 South Korean and Korean-American owned businesses (Korean American Foundation-Greater Washington 2009). As for McLean, what makes it significant is that it has experienced the least change since the influx of immigrants in Fairfax County. This is even if the suburb as a whole is a popular suburb for recent immigrants, with 71% of its populations being foreign-born (Price and Singer 2008, pp. 140–142). McLean has a mostly middle-and upper class white population and the foreign-born population increased only 10% between 1990 and 2000, with the area being home to famous international diplomats and many former federal U.S. government employees. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s though, Korean diplomats and media correspondents have also begun settling in the area. All in all, this study contributes to expanding studies on transnational migrant families and mobile media by showing that it plays a role in place-making for migrant families. This is particularly true for key aspects of their family intimacy: their ability to achieve familial goals, transform conceptions of the family, and cultivate a sense of belonging.

11.2  Kirogi Families and Transnational Korea It was during South Korea’s push to globalize in the 1990s—a period characterized by then-President Kim Yeong Sam’s motto Segyehwa (globalization, 세계화)— when the South Korean media coined the term kirogi family (see Finch and Kim 2012; Kang 2012). It was meant to capture how the growth in the number of Korean transnational families was no longer just confined to the working class but had already spread to the middle class. It particularly spotlighted South Korean professionals who sought to educate their children in an English-speaking environment.

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One key driver for the phenomenon of kirogi families was the rise of ‘English fever’ in Korea, that is, the belief that English competency, alongside academic performance and test results, is a key marker of class and mobility (Paik 2018). This English fever can be traced to the pro-English educational policies enacted by the Korean government during its abovementioned 1990s push for the country to catch­up with the trends in globalization (Lee 2006). At the time, the country’s public schools sought to expand and strengthen their English education curricula to ensure that Koreans acquired English communication skills at par with the language’s native speakers. The schools began English language courses earlier—from the third-grade year of elementary schools—and they changed their education curriculum policy from being writing intensive to being conversation-focused. Performing ‘real’ English became the prominent goal of Korea’s education policy. Along with this government-initiated English education policy, the private English education industry mushroomed in Seoul and in other major cities around the country. The number of English hagwons (cram schools, 학원) saw much growth (Park 2009). These English education businesses targeted not just school aged students but also kindergarteners, preschoolers, and adult businessmen. Attending English kindergartens that offered immersive English-speaking class environments became so popular among upper class parents’ educational choices that ‘real’ English competency was transformed into an important class indicator in contemporary Korean society. These developments led parents who had lived in English-speaking countries as a foreign student, a correspondent, a transnational corporation employee, or a diplomat, to think about sending their children abroad to learn ‘real’ English (see Lee and Koo 2006). Thus, the Korean educational transnational family, that is, the kirogi phenomenon, emerged. Parents reasoned that educating their children in an English-­ speaking country would be a more effective way of acquiring ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ English than sending them to private kindergartens or hagwons.

11.3 Transnational Family Intimacy, Place-Making, and Mobile Media The kirogi phenomenon has transformed the traditional dynamics of familial intimacy among Koreans around the world. One key change, for instance, is that many South Koreans now find the temporary separation of family members in pursuit of a better education for children an acceptable living condition. That said, the physical absence of family members creates emotional and material needs that require new routines and forms of communication in order to maintain familial bonds or create new senses of belonging. Here mobile media play a key role in making the practice of family separation accepted in contemporary Korean society. Indeed, Korean kirogi families often seek to maximize their technological resources and their know-­ how of mobile media practices across many activities: from the onset of deciding to

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have a transnational family setup, to selecting where to move, and to strategizing about how to adjust to new environments. This chapter zeroes in on the role of mobile media in the desire of Korean kirogi families to create new family conceptions based on place-making. It focuses ­particularly on the place of these technologies in how kirogi mothers construct a sense of place and belonging in a new destination. Here I take belonging to be socially constructed through a continuous process of negotiation; just as identity is partially constructed by differentiating oneself from others, belonging is often shaped through experiences of not-belonging. Because the split nature of kirogi families produces myriad social belongings, the usage of everyday mobile media can become important data about fluid constructions of belongings. To conceptualize the multidimensional aspects of the mediation of place and belonging among these migrants, this chapter draws on three theoretical terrains: sense of place studies, social capital studies, and the technology domestication theory.

11.3.1 Sense of Place and Sense of Belonging One set of literature that is important to this chapter is that of sense of place studies. This literature is shaped by various disciplinary approaches such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, and folklore, and these fields share a common interest in the relationship between humans and place. Among these scholars, the contributions of anthropologists and cultural geographers in particular provide relevant humanistic frameworks for looking into the relationship between place and human experiences (for example, see Buttimer and Seamon 1980; Cosgrove 1984; Lowenthal 1985; Relph 1976; Tuan 1977; Cresswell 2004). From the abovementioned literature, I particularly engage with the concept of ‘emplacement’. This pertains to a process or a structure of place-making. To be sure, transnational activities have become more visible and frequent with the advent of new technologies in transportation and telecommunication. These developments have made it possible to communicate across long distances easier, faster, and cheaper than the past. However, as Geoff Mulgan (1997) importantly notes, there is still ‘a role for connections based on place’ (p. 98) even in a highly advanced world. Transnational migrants do not live in abstract spaces, but rather make meanings and values in places where they perform activities and connect with others. I also engage with the scholarship concerned with the politics of place and placelessness, especially in relation to movements in the form of exile, diaspora, displacement, and conflicting borders. What I find especially valuable is the work of critical anthropologists who emphasise that belonging is a fundamental human motivation and need that becomes even more heightened during turbulent, mobile, and uprooting times (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Mulgan 1997). They also acknowledge that this sense of belonging is a socially constructed process that is not geographically bounded (Harvey 1996; Keith and Pile 1993; Massey 1994; Morley and Robins 1995). They highlight how people’s place-identities emerge through

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their negotiations with their own cultural values and meanings. Influenced by Heidegger (1971) and Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) philosophies to understand place and places or placelessness through meaningful experiences, these perspectives view places as not just things but a way of understanding the world (Cresswell 2004). As I discuss later on in this work, in the Centreville and McLean areas of Fairfax County, Korean kirogi families create different senses of place and belonging, expressed through adjustments and parenting styles. Even though both are educational migrant communities, there are visible differences of everyday life patterns around parenting styles and school districts. Additionally, the two communities display different ways of interacting with other migrant Korean families, depending on their senses of place and social networking characteristics.

11.3.2 Social Capital A second of set of literature with which this chapter engages is social capital studies. I anchor my perspective on educational capital and its advantageous transmission particularly on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984). As Bourdieu uncovered life trajectories to show class indeterminacy, I also seek to discover class variations and mobilities that are not reproduced only by conserving social capital. I aim to go beyond an analysis of educational capital that is focused solely on the relationship between deterministic social agents and generational lineages on one hand and parenting styles, school accomplishments, grades, and rate of dropouts on the other hand (see Kwong 1987; Wong 1995; Lareau 2003; Louie 2004; Lew 2006). What I do is put in dialogue Bourdieu’s work with the critical geographers who have accounted for the ‘sociospatial configurations of capitalism’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.185). This means thinking about social capital, but in a way that acknowledges two things. One is that place-making is not necessarily bounded within a locale but can be connected to transnational localities through cognitive perceptions of belonging and imaginative home making. The other is that transnational localities should not be seen as static places for nostalgic imaginations but as sites of changing social and spatial relations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).Through this dialogue, Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital become useful for understanding Korean kirogi families’ differentiated place-making and sense of belonging, in that they suggest stratified social space and class habitus. Although habitus is most commonly associated with cultural taste and preference, it also can be more generally applied to any differentiated disposition (Bourdieu 1984, p.  170, also see Lareau 2003, pp.  275–278 and Robbins 1991, pp. 117–131). As such, I use it to explore the differentiation that kirogi families have in their investment in educational capital and the emotional and perceptional attachment that they form around spaces related to that investment. Later in this chapter, I talk about how social capital very much figures in how Korean kirogi families decide the localities in which the mothers and children settle.

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11.3.3 Technology Domestication Also crucial to this chapter is the literature on technology domestication from the field of media and communication studies (Silverstone et  al. 1992). Contrary to deterministic perspectives on technology adoption, domestication theory focuses on the users’ contextual environment, including the materiality of their surroundings and the degree of agency they possess in utilizing technologies (Berker et al. 2006). It argues that users get through four processes when they engage with technology: appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion. In this work, I hope to build on studies that have expanded domestication theory by seeking to incorporate cultural differences and diversity in the use of media and technology. For instance, Lim (2008) has done research on the relationship between the domestication process and family priorities and cultural values among Chinese and Korean middle-class homesteads. Similarly, Cabañes and Acedera (2012) have looked at how Filipino family values and internet values interact with each other in everyday life. Closer to the study at hand, Yoon (2016) has also analyzed how young adults from transnational South Korean families in Canada appropriate specific mobile apps. Later in this chapter, I talk about how mobile transnational families formed networks using the internet, smart phone, and on-site Korean churches. I underscore how transnational migrants’ selective media practices illustrated their appropriation and conversion of mobile media technologies. While they are adjusting to a new place, Korean kirogi mothers try to utilize all possible resources, including their home country networks, contact information for a new place and a new school, and on-site Korean church communities. They selectively use mobile instant messengers and online social networking platforms on their smartphones to manage everyday lives and children’s scheduling.

11.4 Method For this study, I did ethnographic interviews and observations in the two communities of Centreville and McLean, which were both located in Fairfax County, Virginia, right outside Washington DC. I conducted the original field work between October 2011 and February 2013 and revisited some informants during the summer in 2016 and 2017.What facilitated my data gathering was that I myself was a Korean mother who had access to the Korean community in Virginia. It was through this access that I learned about the McLean kirogi mothers’ monthly gatherings and the Centreville kirogi mothers’ frequent lunch meetings. Together with this, one of the mothers I interviewed in Centreville introduced me to another group of kirogi mothers who supported a local youth orchestra in the community. I completed a total of 40 interviews during my field work across the two communities. Of that total, 20 were with Centreville kirogi families and the other 20

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with McLean kirogi families. I utilized snowball sampling, and changed my informant per every four interviews to reduce data variations and to avoid partiality of data content. All interviews were conducted in Korean, transcribed, and translated into English. All informants and interviewees were identified with pseudonyms. I used an open-ended questionnaire and tape-recorded interviews that each lasted from between 1 and 3 hours. The questions I asked were geared towards eliciting information about the kirogi mothers’ family history, migration, settlement, social networks, usage of mobile media, and transnational connections. I also asked specific questions about their parenting, sense of belonging, family relations, and the changes that they had experienced in the United States and Korea.

11.5  Kirogi Families and Mobile Media Through my fieldwork examining kirogi mothers in two distinct Korean communities in Northern Virginia, mobile media play a key role in the place-making of their kirogi families. In the discussion below, I show that these technologies are crucial to the emplacement of these families as regards three specific things: enabling familial goals regarding children’s education to be met, transforming conceptions of family, and cultivating a sense of belonging and community for kirogi mothers through KakaoTalk.

11.5.1 Achieving Familial Goals The selective use of social network services enable kirogi mothers to achieve their familial goals regarding their children’s educational needs. The importance of social networks among Korean kirogi mothers is evident. Even before they consider embarking on a dual household lifestyle, kirogi mothers start collecting information using these networks. While many of them are mobile and transnational, kirogi parents create information sharing communities primarily among people in their own school districts. Crucial to these information sharing communities is the online sharing of information not only about education-related concerns, but relocation-­ related concerns as well. An example of such an online community is the Facebook group called Mencius Mothers’ Education formed by kirogi mothers in the Northern Virginia towns of Centreville, Fairfax, and Manassas. A well-known Chinese philosopher from 300  B.C., Mencius was raised by his widowed mother who moved their small household three times in order to find the right environment to raise her son. She eventually settled on a home next to a school where her son could be inspired by the scholars around him. As such, it is not surprising that this group holds up the ‘Mencius mother’—someone who relocates her children in order to raise them in a good educational environment—as an exemplary female figure. On a more practical

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level, this online community is a space for Korean mothers to share various kinds of information with each other. This includes information about school districts and news, school volunteering opportunities, teacher biographies, gifted and talented programs, cram schools, tutors, extracurricular activities, and even work opportunities for themselves. Within this one Facebook group, there are a number of sub-­ groups for the different school districts. There are also many sub-group contents, such as ‘AAP (Advanced Academic Program) Application’, ‘S Hagwon Teachers’ Profiles’, ‘English Tutors List’, ‘Part-time Job List’, ‘C School District’s Housing’ etc. When you open each sub-group, there are hundreds of threads written by participating kirogi mothers. Despite the busy lives of the kirogi mothers, they still dedicate time to providing thorough information on the Facebook group. They believe that their contributions online help their fellow women in their journey to live up to the role of an ideal mother. Centreville kirogi mothers in particular have less leisure time than the McLean mothers because most of Centreville mothers need to work to maintain the kirogi life while McLean mothers are fully supported financially by their husbands and family members. But still, they try to maximize their time and effort in building up this social network formed through their exclusive sisterhood. One example of a very grateful kirogi mother is Mrs. Kim (from Centreville), who says, I acquired critical information about how to apply for AAP (Advanced Academic Program) in this Facebook group. Many of us have difficulty in interpreting school information written in English, but this group offers Korean translations and specific guidelines. I also get useful information about school teachers and extracurricular activities for my kids. Because all the members of this group are kirogi mothers, we know what is important and what do we need to know. I can trust these Facebook group friends more than any other friend.

Here we see how the Mencius Mothers’ Education Facebook group provides kirogi mothers with a space to build community relationships with other mothers who share the same familial goals. Easily accessible through their mobile devices, kirogi mothers find the information they need and form bonds with each other as they navigate the complexities of the American K-12 school system. As such, they are able to develop a sense of belonging for themselves and their children in their new home. It should be noted that the Mencius Mothers’ Education Facebook group is a secret group—one must be invited to participate. This has to do with the complicated migrant status that some of the mothers have in the USA. Because they do not have employers to sponsor them, many Centreville kirogi mothers need to be enrolled in the ESL (English as a Second Language) program at the C Academy. Apart from the program helping them to develop their own English competencies, its other significance is that it makes them eligible for an F-1 (full-time student) visa. This is often the path the mothers use so that they and their children can establish temporary residence in the country. But at the same time, they cannot be employed while on an F-1 visa, rendering any work they do in the country as a violation of their visa. Despite these complications, the mothers in the online community are proud of their ability to balance their responsibilities as a mother, student, and long-distance wife. They see each other as striving to be the ideal ‘Mencius Mother’, doing all that they can to better their children’s futures.

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Here we see that for kirogi mothers, mobile media is an important lifeline in achieving family goals. Through mobile media, they are able to access information and find support groups to navigate the complexities of transnational life. In addition, finding information and building community aids in their place-making in Northern Virginia, emphasizing Mulgan’s (1997) point on the value of place-based connections.

11.5.2 Transforming Conceptions of the Family Central to the transformation that the kirogi families are going through are the adjustment experiences of the kirogi mothers. It is in relation to these experiences that one can most clearly see the role that mobile media play in what the notion of a family means. For the McLean kirogi mothers, their key adjustment issue is that they feel that their belongingness in the USA is confined to their school community and their exclusive social groups, a far cry from their upper class lives back in Korea. So, while they are more cosmopolitan than their Centerville counterparts and so are initially more familiar with and adjust more quickly to life in the USA, they increasingly express ambivalent feelings towards their new place. Indeed, these mothers feel more and more that they are experiencing a downgrade in their status. It is for this reason that they need the constant support of the kirogi fathers, who live faraway back in Korea. The way that the McLean kirogi families mitigate this is that the mother and children often make trips to Korea during school vacations. The fathers also visit them in the U.S. more than once a year. Thirteen of the 20 McLean kirogi mothers in this study say as well that they tend to use mobile media for regular transnational communication with their husbands. For the less-privileged Centreville kirogi mothers, meanwhile, their key adjustment issue is that they increasingly feel like they should invest more in their lives in the USA and less on the kirogi fathers back in Korea. Many of these mothers tend to experience disorientation at first, followed by experiences that help them feel more and more like they are part of their new community. So, although they also experience downward class mobility, they tend to selectively assimilate into the Korean immigrant community, making a new home in the United States. The downside of this is that also partly due to financial constraints, the Centreville kirogi mothers and their children do not get to see the fathers for 2 years or even more. Also, only six of the 20 mothers say that they have regular communication with their husbands. On balance, neither the McLean nor Centreville kirogi families have an arrangement that is better off than the other. Whether there is more or less meet-ups and more or less mobile mediated communication, both amount to something similar: familial relationships that are made more complicated by living kirogi lives. For the McLean kirogi parents who communicate more, the problem is that they see their relationships with each other as increasingly functional. According to them, their frequent use of mobile media apps such as KakaoTalk and Skype plays

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an important role in this development. As an example, one can look at how these parents constantly communicate online to ensure that their children are eventually able to get into a good university. The McLean kirogi parents—especially the mothers—vigilantly collect educational information about institutions of higher education in both the United States and South Korea, so as to see where their children can be best placed. So, while the children are free to take time off during their breaks from school, the parents are busy with private education concerns. Even before the mothers and children visit South Korea during summer breaks, fathers will often pre-register their children at a hagwon in Dachi-dong, a district of Gangnam, Seoul. This part of the city is always full of students taking classes to strengthen their academic performances and get the newest information on the college entrance exams. During the time when a kirogi father is researching summer hagwon options, the parents are constantly in mediated contact through KakaoTalk. Mrs. Choi, a kirogi mother from McLean, reports that she and her husband spent 1 hour on Skype every night during that winter when Mr. Choi was doing research on private institutions. She asserts, I don’t think I have a communication problem with my husband because we speak on Skype every morning. But, his night time is my morning time. He wants to relax from the day by chatting with me, but I have to start my day. In a way, I feel like I am closer to my kirogi friends than my in-laws or my mother in Korea. We share everything we need here. We deeply understand each other’s concerns and loneliness. What support do I receive from family? My in-laws just tell me to do my responsibility. They do not understand my situation in the USA at all. While I still struggle to adjust to the American way of life and to support my children, I also feel lots of freedom. This is probably because I am liberated from fulfilling the role of the eldest daughter-in-law.

For the Centreville kirogi parents who communicate less, the issue is that their marriages sometimes become more imagined than real over time. Since kirogi couples do not live together and rarely see one another, they begin to depend on memories and long-distance communication. Unfortunately, the longer the period of separation drags on, the more the conjugal relationship becomes distant. Take the case of Mrs. Ju, a kirogi mother from Centreville: I understand [my husband] needs to take care of himself as well but when we decided to pursue this life style for our daughters, he promised to support us financially. My mother-­ in-­law said he was promoted two years ago but the money he sends us has been cut in half since then. How am I supposed to interpret this change? I suspect something is happening, and I have heard things from my sister in Seoul. I never imagined this kind of happening because we had such a tight relationship. But things have changed. Out of sight, out of mind.

According to Mrs. Ju, although Mr. Ju has created a Skype username, he is usually offline whenever she wants to speak with him. While she has suggested that they schedule a regular Skype meeting on weekends, he has responded that this is not possible because he participates in a night climbing club on weekend nights. Since Mr. Ju’s last visit to Centreville, they no longer talk about their everyday lives. Mr. Ju only calls once in a while now, and when he does, he only asks about how their daughters are doing at school. It is clear that their relationship as a couple has changed.

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In both cases, it is evident that the kirogi couples find that maintenance of their increasingly transforming relationships difficult. Still, they do try their very best to maintain their family relationships. And for both good and bad of their conjugal relationships, mobile media technologies enable these couples to continually ‘reconfigure their parenting roles in light of the challenges brought about by their transnational family set-up’ (Cabañes and Acedera 2012, p. 927).

11.5.3 Cultivating Belonging for Kirogi Mothers The frequent use of mobile media apps enables kirogi mothers to cultivate belonging. At social gatherings and group meetings, kirogi mothers’ narratives usually took the form of suda (수다), defined as to chit-chat or everyday talk among women which can range across topics and themes (Kang 2005). While these events usually take place at a house, church, or a park, it also has a virtual form that takes place among the Korean smart phone users. Korean kirogi mothers construct new senses of place by sharing widely known Korean sayings, suda among women, and life histories. This kind of narrative belonging shapes kirogi parents’ ‘patterns of thought’ (Ryden 1993) so that they prioritize their current place and educational environment. The nature of the face-to-face version of suda creates an audience for storytelling. Compared to one-on-one conversations, the ways people interact and communicate in these group gatherings are more diverse and active. In this context, women easily open up about their experiences without thinking about the structure of their narrative. Since any kind of trifle could become a topic, most suda are long-winded conversations and monologues. The dialogue below is a typical conversation that took place in the living room at a private residence where there was an informal gathering of kirogi mothers. A: Unni [older sister, 언니], why are your eyes so red? Couldn’t you sleep last night while you were thinking something that? B: How did you know that? (with a big smile) I’ve always been thinking it. Everybody laughed. Someone clapped loudly and others whispered each other talking about their experiences. A: Unni, have you registered your children for a summer camp? B: No, I didn’t. I am still researching. C: I heard about a good one from Sohee unni. The O Korean church is offering a really good academic camp this summer, but no one knows how or when to register. The website doesn’t have any information about it. I may have to call one of our friends who attend the church. D: I have a good friend who is a member of the church. I can ask her for information about the camp. E: Oh, summer camps are always headaches. Why don’t the schools offer trustworthy academic summer camps? I would rather just pay the school for a good quality summer camp. There are so many competing churches and community centers with summer camp programs but there are few good ones.

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As this scene illustrates, kirogi mothers’ suda creates a conversational carnival. Anyone can join suda without any hesitation and a topic can move from one to another without any relation. Kirogi mothers do not have to keep a social manner or a woman’s appropriate etiquette that is usually required at other social settings in Korea. They can even verbalize a very private topic and use it to create a liberating atmosphere. While they try to keep feminine behavior expected by Korean men and women in other social fields, kirogi mothers release themselves from this kind of self-oppression at their own gatherings through suda. The virtual version of suda often happens through the mobile messaging app KakaoTalk. What makes this communicative platform popular is its instant accessibility, exclusive group chat rooms, and various in-app emoticons. Similar to its face-to-face counterpart, this app also strengthens the ties among parents belonging in the same school district. This is especially because kirogi mothers can chat with each other anytime during the day on their mobile devices, whether it is about sharing educational and parenting information or alleviating their feelings of loneliness or emptiness. According to Mrs. Lee, a kirogi mother from Centreville, I feel like KakaoTalk is one of my family members because I use it to communicate every day. A lot of the time, I speak with other Kakao users more with than with my husband. As you know, we have a lot of common topics to share and to discuss. We feel a tight connection with one another because we share concerns and interests. Sometimes, we just chitchat without any specific topic. This ‘girl talk’ relieves the stress and loneliness.

Suda, both in person and over digital communication devices, clearly provides a space for kirogi mothers to speak about the emotional stresses related to the lone parenting. But more than this, these narrative performances help them construct a place identity. Through repeated storytelling about why they moved to a new place and how they came to make a place there, these women assert a sense of individual and collective belonging in a school district community. In so doing, they are able to rationalize their settlement in a new place and strengthen their sense of identity as a part of that place.

11.6 Conclusion This study sought to examine the role of mobile media technologies in the place-­ making of Korean kirogi families in Northern Virginia. In particular, I focused on how kirogi mothers were able to develop a sense of belonging in their new home, away from husbands, extended family, and support systems. I initially thought that the kirogi families in working class/lower middle-class Centreville and middle-class McLean would be very different from each other. What my findings emphasize, however, is that while there are distinctions among the parents in the two different communities, they have more in common and both use mobile technologies in creating a sense of belonging and place-making in the United States.

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Both Centreville and McLean kirogi mothers are united in the fact that they stretch their limits to provide what they believe is the best education for their children including transnational family lives. This chapter demonstrates that in the middle of this kind of often difficult mobile life, selective media practices are crucial for maintaining the social ties of kirogi families. By utilizing different mobile media platforms depending on their attachment and informational needs, Korean kirogi families appropriate media use for their own purposes. By examining two distinct Korean communities in Northern Virginia, this chapter illustrates that these technologies play an important role in allowing kirogi mothers to deal with the many challenges that come with their desire to help enable familial goals, their need to address transforming conceptions of family, and their attempts at cultivating a sense of belonging and community through KakaoTalk. The stories of these kirogi mothers demonstrate the myriad relationship between place-making and senses of belonging of transnational educational migrant families. Decision making, splitting parenting roles, separation, adjustments, and reorganization of life goals is an ongoing series of negotiations often involving the use of mobile media. In this sense, kirogi mothers’ belonging is not reliant upon social capital, but rather is a strategic belonging that is negotiated and renegotiated through human relationships, mobile media, and physical places following their life trajectories.

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Chapter 12

K-Pop Male Androgyny, Mediated Intimacy, and Vietnamese Fandom Ha Hoang

Abstract  This chapter explores the Vietnamese fandom of Korean popular culture in relation to the recent developments in mobile and social media. It particularly looks into the Facebook-based fan communities of K-Pop star G-Dragon to examine fan receptions of his androgynous look. It attends to the specific way that K-Pop elements—such as androgyny for example—work with the digital fabrics in affecting emotional realms of fans in socio-geographically dispersed contexts. I argue that with the affordances of mobile media and Facebook, mediated androgynous K-Pop male idols engender a range of feelings and emotions within fan communities at both individual and collective levels. I also argue that it is through these feelings and emotions that fan intimacies are generated and altered. The findings I present provide a nuanced account of what is not adequately explained about the role of social and mobile media in the transnational success of K-Pop. This chapter offers a ‘microscope’ through which emotions are uncovered and intimacies are revealed through a particular case study of Vietnamese fan communities, adding often-overlooked nuances to the wider picture of K-Pop fandom. Furthermore, the chapter provides more examples and insights for the emerging studies of the affective fabrics of digital cultures. It shows how K-Pop fandom is a fascinating site at which we can examine how emotions and feelings can become intensified, contagious, and then achieve their collective dimension in the digital world. Keywords  Intimacy · Androgyny · Digital cultures · Fandom · Mobile media

H. Hoang (*) Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 J. V. A. Cabañes, C. S. Uy-Tioco (eds.), Mobile Media and Social Intimacies in Asia, Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1790-6_12

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12.1 Introduction As I took a midnight flight back to Sydney from Hanoi in April 2017, I had a chance to witness a send-off offered by fans to the South Korean (hereafter Korean) boy band Snuper. I had heard of the group for the first time just a few days before and got to know that they were having performances and fan sign events1 in Hanoi. Their appearance was to be a part of ‘Korean Days in Hanoi 2017’, which was the 25th anniversary celebration of the Korea-Vietnam diplomatic relations. What surprised me was the excitement of a few dozen fangirls about the Korean group who, to my knowledge, were not popular in Vietnamese fan communities and was there to perform only for the first time. They made the trek to the airport, even if it was a one-­ hour drive from Hanoi’s city centre. These fangirls looked like students. With mobile phones, tablets, and cameras on hand, they excitedly captured as many photos and videos of their idols as they could. And carrying the posters and signs that they brought, they tried to exchange a few farewell words with the young, tall, good-­ looking Korean idols who had donned Vietnamese conical hats on their heads. The fangirls did not mind the difficulty of getting physically close to the idols, who were checking-in in a separate area and were being escorted by security guards. The enthusiasm and the joy of the girls reminded me of one fanboy who came back from the same airport on a different night. He had expressed disappointment because he had been unsuccessful in his attempt to see his idol, a member of a well-­ known Korean group, Big Bang, who was rumoured to be arriving in Hanoi for a personal trip. This fanboy went full effort for this, as he had high hopes of finally seeing his idol. He lied to his parents and said that he was hanging out with some friends, took a long taxi ride to the airport, and, stationing himself there, carefully monitored the influx of arriving passengers. By midnight, he had to reluctantly go home. Nevertheless, he continued to get updates about his idol’s whereabouts via Facebook and news websites. When did the international airport become such a desirable encounter point between fans and Korean pop stars? When was the admiration for Korean idols established, and how has it affected the emotional lives of Vietnamese youngsters? So many Vietnamese young people nowadays find themselves immersed into new kinds of joy, pleasure, longing, and sadness all aroused by their fandom of Korean idols and crucially, significantly mediated by mobile technologies. In this chapter then, I explore the mobile media use of Vietnamese ‘passionate’ fans of Korean popular music (hereafter K-Pop) and the ways that this shapes their reception to the androgynous male idol look. I focus on the fans who participate in the Facebook-­ based communities for the K-pop star G-Dragon, who is a member of the popular group Big Bang. In so doing, I aim to delineate how the affordances of mobile and social media affect the intimate realm of fandom, both individually and collectively.  A fan sign is an event where idols offer their signatures to fans, often to promote their newly released products like music albums, singles, movies, concerts, books, etc. Fan sign events are different from fan meetings that are organised at a larger scale with more activities than signing. 1

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12.2 Passionate Fandom – Mediated Fandom Passionate fandom for Korean popular culture was kindled in Vietnam in the late 1990s. At the time, the Vietnamese Communist Party had been seeking to respond to global and regional socio-political changes that started in the 1980s. To do this, they instituted massive socio-political transformations in the country, which is often referred to as the Reform and colloquially called ‘Đổi Mới’ (literally meaning ‘opening to the new’). Central to the Reform was the shift from a totally state-­ subsidised economy to a more ‘open’ one. Amongst other things, this included reopening the private sector and calling for foreign investment and cooperation. The opening up of the economy then led to a broader liberalisation of culture and society (Beresford 2008; Drummond and Thomas 2003; Forbes et al. 1991). It was in this context that the 1990s saw the arrival into Vietnam of imported television dramas from Japan, China, Mexico, the U.S., and Korea. These dramas began airing on the main national television channel VTV1 and became an unprecedented success for Vietnamese television (Drummond 2003). As regards the entry of Korean popular culture into Vietnam in particular, the very first Korean television dramas were sponsored by Korean corporations like Samsung and LG. They thought that these would help with their brand’s own initial marketing efforts in the country (Park 2017). Although the first Korean television dramas were broadcast in a limited number of terrestrial nation-wide television channels, several of them became immensely popular (Lee cited in Cho 2011). These well-received Korean television melodramas helped initiate the Vietnamese audiences’ enthusiasm about Korean popular cultural products. Although this new fandom of Korean television melodramas in the 1990s has not been sufficiently examined within Vietnamese media studies, it is reasonable to assume that these popular cultural products affected the intimate sphere of the everyday life. This was a new everydayness in the country that had been emerging since the Reform. As is common with most soap operas, these television melodramas contributed to producing a ‘tragic structure of feeling’ (Ang 1985) and was able to permeate the intimate realms of many lives without direct domination (Nguyen 2019). To be sure, Korean television melodramas led the first phase of the so-called ‘Korean Wave’ or Hallyu2 1.0. But from the mid-2000s onwards, K-Pop has led the second and more global phase of the ‘Korean Wave’, now called Hallyu 2.0 (Jung 2015). The transnational success of K-Pop owes much to the recent robust developments of mobile and social media in the world (Lee 2015), as could be observed in phenomenal successes such as Gangnam Style (2012), and more recently, the boy band BTS (2017). In Vietnam, which is the seventh largest country of Facebook users in the world (Phuong 2017), it is commonplace for fans to access Korean television dramas and popular music via social media platforms, such as YouTube and  ‘Korean Wave’ or ‘Hallyu’ is a term coined by the Chinese media in the middle of 1998 to delineate the sudden craze among Chinese youth for Korean cultural products. ‘Hallyu’ literally means ‘flow of Korea’. 2

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Facebook, and by pirating websites. Although Korean actors and actresses have long been a familiar topic in Vietnamese media, only with the popularity of K-Pop did the Vietnamese fandom of the Korean Wave become widely debated in the media. The first time that Vietnamese media widely reported the enthusiasm of K-Pop fans was when K-Pop concerts were organised at a large scale in 2012. These included six musical events involving the participation of some of the most commercially successful Korean acts at that time: Big Bang, Super Junior, and T-Ara. The news reports described the Vietnamese fans as crazed for ‘oppas’ and ‘unnies’ (meaning brothers and sisters in Korean). They showed photos and videos of ‘obsessive fans’ overexcitedly crying in joy, shouting the names of their idols upon their arrival at the airport, and even obstructing road traffic by chasing after a ride carrying their idols. A great number of news articles and comments on social media judged the fans’ excitement as ‘fanatical’ and ‘irrational’, generating a ‘moral panic’ (Phong 2015; Van 2014). K-Pop fandom has clearly emerged as a media topic that has drawn significant public attention. However, it has received insufficient scholarly exploration. At this juncture, it is useful to explain my choice of Korean media products and their fandom in Vietnam as a case study of how mobile and social media mediate fandom intimacy. While Asian popular cultures from Japan, Hong Kong, and India have also established a prominent presence in the world, they have not really had a product that has been phenomenal at a global scale as is the case with Gangnam Style for example. Neither have they really become widely recognised as major ‘waves’ in transnational cultural flows. Although these popular cultures possess bold identities that clearly distinguish themselves from Western popular culture, their success has been somewhat limited within their national borders and within their ethnic diasporas. The Korean Wave, on the other hand, has successfully made transnationality as one of its core characteristics. In fact, the term ‘Korean Wave’ originally referred to a craze among audiences in one foreign country (China) and only in recent years has it been expanded to mean the success of Korean popular culture in many countries around the world. The Korean Wave is indeed a rare non-­ Anglophone transnational cultural flow. Meanwhile, Vietnam, is a fascinating site of study because of its distinct geo-political position and recent socio-economic transformations, which I discussed above. While popular cultures especially from U.S, U.K, China, Japan, India, and Thailand all have fans in Vietnam, only K-Pop fandom has become a focus of substantial public discourse in the country. This is primarily due to the unprecedented level of passion and enthusiasm of its fan communities. And in this chapter, it is this ‘passionate fandom’ that I will focus on. Despite relatively negative judgements in the media, this is the first time such a passionate fandom has emerged in Vietnamese media since the Reform. The passion of K-Pop fans not only indicates the penetration of K-Pop in the country; it also reveals how intense the fandom has become. While it is widely agreed that K-Pop has specific characteristics that set it apart from other Asian and western pop cultures, the way that social and mobile media have changed the ways fans follow their idols, organise and engage in fan communities also play a significant role in forming its passionate fandom in Vietnam.

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12.3 Facebook-Based Fan Communities and Mediated Intimacy The affordances of Facebook exemplifies how social networking sites  – increasingly termed as social media – significantly help users create and strengthen ties between families, friends, and other social connections such as in fan communities. The recent development of social media is substantially leveraged by mobile media and especially by mobile phones, which have become ubiquitous. Now that social media have come to be progressively navigated through mobile phones, together they have ‘t[aken] digital interactions off a computer screen and into people’s pockets, transforming internet communications from something associated with selected tech-savvy users, into a taken-for-granted method of maintaining everyday practices and routines’ (Pertierra 2018, p. 101). The encounter between the portability of mobile phones and the sociality of social media engenders particular kinds of intimacy that can be conceptualised as ‘mobile intimacy’ (Hjorth and Lim 2012). This involves the tensions around salient and transitory modes of intimacy because mobile phones, as ‘a technology of propinquity (temporal and spatial proximity)’ [emphasis added], constantly helps blur and reinstate the boundaries between public and private as well as work and leisure (Hjorth and Lim 2012, p. 477). While the inwardness of intimacy is apparent as ‘to intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures’, mobile intimacy is met by a corresponding publicness (Berlant 1998, p. 281). So, it is valid to say that a kind of ‘mobile publicness’ is produced in relation to social media use on the mobile phone. Facebook, with its own characteristics as a social media platform, can work as a fascinating site to investigate how the intimate and the public relate to each other and are intermingled at some points, through which new kinds of intimacy and publicness are produced. While the role of social media like Facebook in relation to K-Pop fandom has attracted a certain number of studies, the role of mobile media such as mobile phones and tablets has been largely overlooked. As discussed earlier, the propinquity of mobile phones has drastically improved the accessibility of social media. For example, according to We Are Social (2018), in Vietnam, 97% rate of adoption of mobile phones is over double the 43% of laptops or desktop computers while the weekly visit to a social network via smartphones is also over double that of computers, 52% and 21% respectively. From this, we can surmise that fans access Facebook fan pages largely through mobile media devices. Furthermore, the multi-­functionality of mobile phones substantially helps fans to actively engage in fan communities. Smartphones, in particular, increasingly have cameras, a diverse range of applications, and continually improved memory capacity. This multi-functionality makes it more seamless than ever for fans to participate in Facebook-based fan communities: from constant checking, taking then posting videos and live-streaming on the spot of idols’ events, to archiving fan-made products. While works focusing on social media like Facebook barely take into account the propinquity and multi-­functionality of mobile media such as mobile phones, it is useful to keep in mind this distinctive-

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ness of mobile phones when examining mediated intimacies of Facebook-based fan communities. I argue that there is a certain heightening of intimate feelings fans experience when participating in Facebook fan pages via mobile phones. Fan communities, of course, have long existed both online and offline before the advent of mobile and social media. Fan communities of the Korean pop stars in Vietnam can be traced back to the early 2000s in small news and classified ads in the most popular teenage magazine, ‘Hoa Hoc Tro’ (Students like Flowers). Since then, fan communities have also found their spaces on several online forums, websites, and local social networking sites. They started migrating to Facebook not long after Yahoo!360, the erstwhile most popular platform in Vietnam, was officially terminated in 2009. What makes Facebook distinct as a virtual space for fans to express their fandom is that it goes beyond allowing users to set up their own fan pages and groups with different privacy levels. Through its algorithms, it makes increasingly easy for users to see posts that align with their interests, as well as to see and add friends who share their interests or who come from the same social circles. Indeed, the more one engaged with Facebook (post, check, like, share, comment, etc.), the more you would find posts related to your interests and be connected to people similar to you. This affective economy based on the logic of sharing, affinity, and closeness has arguably produced in Facebook a kind of ‘intimate public’ (Berlant 2008). This refers to a public sphere wherein there is ‘an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience’ (Berlant 2008, p. viii).

12.4 ‘Pretty/Flower Boy’ and Androgyny Within the growing literature about the Korean Wave, several studies have highlighted that Korean actors and actresses and K-Pop idols have particular looks and a stage presence that set them apart from American and other Asian pop stars. These arguably help to establish the Korean Wave as a transnational success (Laforgia and Howard 2017; Maliangkay and Song 2015; Oh 2014, 2015). There are quite a few terms that are often used by fans to describe the predominantly male prototypes in K-Pop, most noticeably, cute ‘pretty boys’ and ‘flower boys’. These refer to males who have pretty ‘feminine’ facial features such as smooth fair complexion, silky hair, feminine manners, and cute expressions. So, ‘pretty/flower boy’ literally implies that the boys are graceful and pretty like a flower. Moreover, the effeminate appearance of ‘flower boys’ does not mean the stars have feminine personalities or identities that match their appearance. It is not necessarily linked to homosexuality, as it would more often be in the case of the West (Oh 2015). Jung (2011) traces the connection between ‘flower’ and ‘boy’ with two Korean terms, ‘kkonminam’ and ‘bishonen’. ‘Kkonminam’ is a combination of two Korean words meaning ‘flower’ and ‘beautiful man’ and is widely agreed to originate from the pretty boy characters

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of girls’ comics. ‘Bishonen’, meaning beautiful boy, on the other hand, originates from Japanese pretty boy images of Shojo manga, which are comics about the lives of teenage girls and their romantic relationships with beautiful boyfriends. Jung (2011) also sees the ‘pretty boy’ image as part of a ‘soft masculinity’ and relates it to the images of scholar-officials in old Confucian Korean and Chinese societies. In Vietnam, the term ‘mỹ nam’ (pretty boy) has recently emerged in both mainstream and social media. It is surmised that the term was coined with the influence of the variations of ‘pretty/flower boy’ image of the East Asian popular cultures such as famous K-Pop stars like EXO, Got7, BTS, or G-Dragon. This image of the ‘pretty/flower boy’ in K-Pop connects strongly with the notion of androgyny. This primarily denotes a gender-blurring subjectivity; it focuses on the ‘surface’ of the body–how the body looks. While it is not necessarily connected to homosexuality, it suggests an idea of becoming non-normative. For instance, in a pioneering work by Robertson (1992) on female androgynous bodies in Japanese theatre, androgyny is used not to refer to a physiological condition, which means an intersexed body, but a mixture of gender markers/signifiers such as clothes, gestures or speech patterns in a way that undermines the stability of a sex-gender system based on a male-female, masculine-feminine dichotomy. This conceptualisation draws on Butler’s idea of the ‘surface politics of the body’ (Butler 1990). Additionally, Butler (1988) also argues that: ‘Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (p. 519). Having been promoted by the K-Pop industry as a particular kind of ‘stylized repetition of acts’ via the image of ‘pretty boy’ idols, androgyny becomes a sort of gendered aesthetics of K-Pop (Laurie 2016, p. 214; Oh 2015). Furthermore, the gender-blurring look of androgynous K-Pop idols has the potential to give rise to new feelings and emotions through which individual and collective intimacies are mediated.

12.5 Methodology This chapter draws on data collected during fieldwork I did in Vietnam in early 2017 and in early 2018. In this case study of G-Dragon’s fan communities, I employed a mixed research methods approach to elicit insightful and comprehensive data about fan communities and to find useful ‘naturalistic’ data. I have based my insights on eight semi-structured interviews, conventional ethnography, and digital ethnography. Here I wish to stress two key principles that underpinned the digital ethnography I did: ‘non-digital-centric-ness’ and ‘openness’ (Pink et al. 2016, pp. 9–12). While ‘non-digital-centric-ness’ refers to a de-centring of digital media in order to acknowledge the ways in which they are inextricable from other realms of everyday life, ‘openness’ emphasises the processual and collaborative characteristics of digi-

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tal ethnography. These principles helped to guide me through investigating various dimensions of Facebook-based fan communities. This included a combination of both online and offline activities during fieldwork, from interviewing, to participant-­ observing in fan ‘offline events’ (where members of Facebook-based fan communities meet in real life and celebrate idols’ birthday, debut anniversaries, or screening events), to frequent conversing with fans then following them on Facebook, and to ‘mining’ data in Facebook fan pages that have their access set to public.

12.6 Androgynous G-Dragon and Mediated Intimacy In what follows, I argue that with the affordances of mobile and social media, the K-Pop androgynous body affected the emotional realm of the everyday life of fans at an individual level. This, in turn, engendered intimate feelings, particularly a sense of closeness/proximity. I attend to how fans engaged with the images of gender-­blurring appearance of G-Dragon and see what kind of feelings and emotions these circulated ‘stylised repetition of acts’ generated. G-Dragon is the stage name of Kwon Ji Yong. He is the rapper, sometimes-­ singer, producer, and leader of Big Bang, one of the most successful K-pop groups in the past decade. The media and G-Dragon’s fans describe G-Dragon as a ‘trendsetter’ and a ‘fashionista’, with ‘chameleon-like’ styles that are often gender-­ blurring. Because of this, he has become an icon of Korean contemporary popular culture (Jung 2018; Peng 2017). This is, of course, also true in Vietnam. It is not unusual for Big Bang fans to perceive G-Dragon’s outfits and demeanours as ‘feminine’ or ‘girly’. G-Dragon even put on dresses and skirts in Big Bang’s concerts and fan meetings, and in advertisements for fashion and cosmetics brands for women. His Vietnamese fans would then circulate pictures and short video clips of him wearing such clothes but do so affectionately and jokingly. They would call him ‘công chúa’, which means ‘princess’, and also describe him as ‘bánh bèo’, which connotes femininity of outfits and gestures. Here, I scrutinise several pictures that were collected and shared by the Facebook fan page, ‘Hội Những Người Mê Mệt Big Bang’ (The Group of Those Who are Passionate about Big Bang). With over 460,000 followers in March 2019, it is the most followed Facebook fan page of Big Bang in Vietnam. This fan page was founded in 2010, is run by a group of loyal fans, and has its access set to public. The fan page often posted photos in albums along with Big Bang’s events and activities. They captioned these pictures with ‘cre on pics’ (credits on pictures) to indicate that they did not own the pictures and that names of the fan sites who owned the pictures were inserted into the photos. These photos were some of the most favourite topics posted about and commented on in the fan community. Importantly, the personal comments under these photos revealed how individual fans found the circulated images of the androgynous G-Dragon either funny or amusing.

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One interesting fan-made image came from one of G-Dragon’s largest Korea-­ based fan sites, Always-GD.3 It was part of an album titled ‘27.04.16 Fan Meeting in Fukuoka’, which included 43 photos collected from several sources and showed Big Bang at a fan meeting in Japan in 2016. The image was a photo collage comprised of three smaller photos of G-Dragon. In the collage, G-Dragon, who is often described as of medium height, slim build, and with elegant demeanour, was wearing a blue lace shirt, pink lace pants, and white-coloured hair. In each of the three smaller photos, he was doing different things: standing and gazing attentively at an unidentified object in one, making heart shapes with his fingers in a second one, and beaming in a third. Some commenters teased G-Dragon particularly about his pink lace pants, implying that they were too feminine for a man. One commenter joked, ‘Today, the princess wears a lace shirt but let’s skip the pants’. Another commenter similarly said, ‘G wears more auntie pants’. Another photo collection consisted of 323 photos from several sources and was named ‘[1.1.2016] BIGBANG TẠI FANMEETING Ở BẮC KINH’ (Big Bang at a fan meeting in Beijing). This album displayed Big Bang members onstage at one of their fan meetings in Beijing in 2016. Nearly a third of 323 photos in this album presented the cute or ‘aegyo’4 moments of ‘princess’ G-Dragon. In one photo, he was depicted as coy, with his lowered head and his hand covering a grin on his face. In others, he was shown as cutesy, with puckered lips and puffed cheeks. In response, one comment thread discussed how G-Dragon was the cutest in the album. As previously discussed, the gender-blurring look of an androgynous body gave rise to new feelings and emotions, especially in comparison with the other personas of the same subject. This was complicated by the mediation of mainstream and social media. While fans found G-Dragon’s bold experiments with his gender-­ blurring appearance ‘different’ and ‘unique’ compared to other K-Pop idols, they also had ambivalences about this sometimes. For instance, one of the informants, Thuy, a 22-year old female from Hanoi, told me a story about how she and other Facebook fans once received the photo of gender-blurring G-Dragon when he had a pink hair: They [fans] call CL5 ‘oppa’ and GD ‘unnie’.6 GD7 is really like a princess many times! When [G-Dragon] was in Paris, they [fans] called him ‘pinky princess’. He wore a flaming pink hair then walked like a sissy on street. Oh My God…People see how strong and impressive he is onstage, then he turns into a true princess offstage.

 This fan site’s posts are often re-posted or referenced by Vietnamese Facebook fan pages.  ‘Aegyo’ culture in Korea and the equivalent ‘kawaii’ culture in Japan refer to a cute display of affection often expressed, but not limited to, through childlike voices, facial expressions and bodily gestures. 5  CL was the leader of the now-disbanded girl group, 2NE1 – label mate of Big Bang. CL is wellknown for her feminist image. 6  Oppa means older brother and unnie means older sister in Korean. 7  G-Dragon is called by many names that are variations and translations of ‘G-Dragon’ such as ‘GD’, ‘G’ (in English) and ‘Gờ’, ‘Rồng’, ‘Long’ (Vietnamese equivalents for Dragon), to name a few. 3 4

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Thuy did not really like G-Dragon’s flaming pink hair and, in another case, his curly brown hair. Interviewer: Do you like that kind of GD? [with gender-blurring and a princess-like image] Thuy: It depends. He looks cute, indeed. But there are times, like, when he had curly hair. Oh God! It did not look like anything at all. It depends…My bias8 is GD… Because he is different [from other K-Pop idols]. He can be very effeminate like a princess this time but swagger at other times. He is really versatile.

In our discussion on G-Dragon’s androgynous look, Phuong, a 20-year old female from Hanoi, another Big Bang fan, and I also talked about the prospect of his self-identifying as a homosexual. From my observation and Phuong’s account, homosexuality is still a taboo for a K-Pop idol. Phuong did not expect G-Dragon to ever come out as a homosexual. It even seemed a scary thought for a loyal fan like her: I do not discriminate against gays but because if it were the case [if they were gay] they would suffer, and their families would suffer, too. As I had experienced during their scandals in 2009 and 2011 [referring to G-Dragon’s controversial performance in 2009 and Big Bang members’ involvement in a fatal car accident and an illegal marijuana incident in 2011], I do not want anything bad to happen to them anymore. As I live far from them, if something happened to them, I would not be able to protect them. If something happened, I would only be able to follow online and do nothing for them… I am not confident that I could protect them from tribulations, so I want them to have as normal a life as they can.

What Phuong said reveals how much she cared about her idol. During our conversation, she talked about G-Dragon as if he were a close friend or a brother. She had been a Big Bang fan for 10 years since she was in junior high school and shared with me how she had gone through ups and downs with her idols during those years. While Phuong’s fandom surely brought about pleasurable experiences, an insecure feeling overwhelmed her every time she thought of possible ‘bad’ incidents that could happen to her idol such as admitting to being homosexual. Phuong fully believed that such a revelation would shock the whole K-Pop world and would irreparably damage the idol’s career. I could see she became emotional and almost cried while talking about the past and possible incidents. Big Bang fans like Thuy and Phuong developed a special bond with their idol through their regular engagement in social media platforms. While the widely circulated gender-blurring images of G-Dragon provided them amusing and funny experiences, they also gave rise to complicated feelings of ambivalence and insecurity.

 The English word ‘bias’ is a commonly used slang by fans to indicate his/her most favourite member in a K-Pop band. 8

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12.7 Participatory Fandom and Perpetuated Intimate Feelings The process in which, with the affordances of social media like Facebook, the gender-­blurring images of G-Dragon altered fans’ intimate feelings was further complicated by the fact that fans are arguably the most participatory audiences. Additionally, Vietnam’s weak legislation and implementation of copyright enable major fan pages and benefit-driven websites to subtitle, re-produce, and circulate Korean reality television shows featuring K-Pop stars on social media. Other than appropriating existing media content of idols, Vietnamese fans also circulate fan-made content, like ‘fan-cams’ and ‘fan-accounts’. Fan-cams are videos shot by fans at events related to their idols like concerts, fan meetings, and airport arrivals, while fan-accounts are reports and descriptions of such events by fans. From my observation, ‘fan-cams’ and ‘fan-accounts’ are widely used terms in K-Pop fan communities. Thanks to the prevalence of smartphones, tablets, and handheld camera, these ‘fan-cams’ and ‘fan-accounts’ have now become common fan practices. Moreover, it is now common for fans to post these kinds of content on their personal social media accounts that, in turn, get picked up by fan sites to be shared to wider communities or to be reproduced as memes. The avid Big Bang fan, Phuong, told me about her first overseas trip that was to Korea to attend a Big Bang concert for the first time. Having been using mobile phones for her daily engagement in social media-based fan communities, Phuong relied on her smartphone for a good number of photos and videos of Big Bang, especially, her most favourite member, G-Dragon, she took in the concert. She kept them in the phone and posted several of them to her personal Facebook and Instagram as fan-cams and fan-accounts. From time to time, Phuong turned back to these materials to recall the rare experience and intense emotions she had that night when she was so close to her idols. While it is evident that the gender-blurring images gave rise to different emotions and feelings, it is important to note that within the multidimensional user-experience of fans, enhancements and applications in smartphones have turned this specific technology into mobile archives of memories and intimate feelings. This insight resonates with other research. For example, Zhang and Fung (2017) discusses the significance of availability of mobile devices and their apps like Aidou in retaining Chinese fans’ emotional attachments to Big Bang as part of an emotional economy. As shown in the previous sections, in the case of G-Dragon’s fans, the gender-­ blurring images worked with the multidimensional user-generated social media to produce seemingly contrasting personas of G-Dragon  – the cute, princess-like G-Dragon and the cool, swagger G-Dragon. Moreover, this process was further complicated by ubiquitous smartphones that were equipped with increasingly enhanced multi-functions and expanded apps stores. The more fans immersed in their fandom through the affordances of mobile and social media, the clearer they felt about their closeness to the idol and the more complicated their intimate feelings became. These feelings perpetuated fans’ desire towards, and fantasising of,

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the idol, not only individually but, more importantly, collectively as well. In the next section, I focus on how the androgynous G-Dragon video clips were received and circulated by fans in communities and how they worked with the logics of Facebook as a participatory social media platform to produce affective Facebook-based fan communities.

12.8 Androgynous G-Dragon and the Affective Fan Community In this section, I argue that the androgynous look of G-Dragon worked well with Facebook’s logics of sharing and circulating. This engendered contagious feelings and emotions that helped turn Facebook-based fan communities into intimate fan communities. In order to demonstrate this point, I analysed two video clips chosen from two different Facebook fan pages and fans’ comments and reactions to these clips as well. The first was a five-second muted clip of G-Dragon at a fan meeting in Hong Kong in September 2017. It was posted on the Facebook fan page ‘G-Dragon Fans in Vietnam’ in May 2018. By March 2009, this public fan page had over 242,000 followers while the clip was shared 803 times. Though the owner is not credited, with its long and low camera angle as well as its unsteady video images, it can be surmised that the original video was a fan-cam shot with a mobile device such as a handheld camera or smartphone. The clip showed G-Dragon wearing a stylish haircut, some makeup, a small flower pinned on his left ear, and a stylish, delicate black and red outfit. The clip focused on his adorable expression as he was startled onstage by a staff member trying to hand him a microphone. The clip’s title, originally captioned in Vietnamese by the fan page’s administrator, translated to ‘dying of that cuteness!!!’. This clip and similar ones of the same moment were shared on several fan pages; many images were also captured from these clips then circulated by fans. Most comments were exclamations of how cute and polite his expression was and how lovely and feminine he looked. Photos and clips of cute and androgynous G-Dragon became part of everyday feeds for many fan pages. But this clip stood out among the others as it showed G-Dragon as ‘authentic’, catching his genuine reaction to an unexpected situation. Fans often perceived such a reaction as reflective his real personality, at least more than the persona he often performed in music videos and onstage. Fans would, as such, express surprise and amusement upon encountering an adorable G-Dragon with a gender-blurring look, as it was strikingly different from the swagger and distance of G-Dragon onstage. One fan playfully commented on how cute he was, then asked, ‘where is the onstage coolness?’ Several other fans jokingly responded to the comment, which made for a cheerful chit-chat. Another top comment attached with an image captured from the clip also humorously expressed utter amazement, saying, ‘Save me, save me please, save me, other-

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wise, I would die, omg’, which was then punctuated with three shocked-face emoticons. Other commenters also used their favourite images and emoticons to either jokingly tease out effeminate elements of G-Dragon’s appearance or ask permission for them to reuse the image. While the second clip conveyed a similar story—a cute, pretty G-Dragon—it was noticeable that this was a backstage video clip from one of the concerts during their world tour MADE in 2015. The clip had an original Vietnamese caption that translated as ‘