Digital Intimacy

How do young women navigate intimacy in an age of digital ubiquity? This inter-Asia study adopts a qualitative approach to understand young women’s engagements with digital technologies in four major Asian metropolitan sites with accompanying discussions of media representations and policy documents relating to digital use. The four chosen sites, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Singapore and Bangalore are important nodes within cris-crossing local, national, regional (Asian) and global configurations and circulations of culture, economy and technology. The authors’ multi-sited research in Asia enables analysis of how such circulations of technology intersect with the lived experiences of young women situated within local/national contexts and histories without making the ‘West’ the default reference point. Drawing on collaborative research conducted across these sites, the book reveals how digital intimacy practices intersect with histories of gendered modernities and neoliberal transformations in these globalizing ‘aspirational’ cities.

Offering fresh perspectives on how digital cultures are reshaping the central role of young women in processes of social transformation in contemporary Asia, this volume will be essential reading for scholars and students of gender and feminist studies, Asian studies, media and cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and sociology.

The chapters in this volume were previously published as a special issue in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.