Survival, companionship, and visibility with platforms: (Re)producing solidarity in Hong Kong queer spaces

Introduction

It was the summer of 2023, and the world had entered the post-pandemic era. Diane and I met at Chapterhouse, located in a subdivided unit of an old industrial building, to discuss their next plan.¹²As Hong Kong people eagerly left the city, whether for migration or travel after the dual impacts of social unrest and the pandemic, visitor numbers to their gender-safe space declined, despite their efforts to organise diverse events and promote them on Instagram. LGBTQ+ advocacy remained a tough task as foot traffic dwindled, funding neared its end, and pressure mounted while they worked elsewhere to keep the rental afloat. Still, we believed it was important to archive the voices of LGBTQ+ people in Hong Kong and nurture more young people to engage in gender advocacy, even as civil society continued to disappear.

As a graduate student, I suggested applying for grants from universities and journal publishers in Europe and North America that supported collaborative projects with public impact by engaging both academics and community members. We identified potential funds and drafted a proposal for an alternative education programme on sexual diversity, but shortly before the deadline realised that profit-making plans were ineligible. Diane questioned whether it was possible to sustain the community space and continue advocacy online without revenue, and whether such institutional funders had ever considered that this space could not survive in Hong Kong without profits. We discussed turning to multiple digital platforms to keep the momentum of queer movement alive, though how to do so, and whether it would work, remained uncertain.

They eventually secured a new source of funding and found a space with lower rent, which allowed them to work “full-time” for Chapterhouse. However, the struggle to secure enough money to survive still haunts them. These ethnographic moments encapsulate the tensions that animate this paper: the fragility of queer space under intensifying socio-political tensions, and the uneasy reliance on digital platforms as infrastructures for connection and movement continuity. It also raises broader questions about the labour and politics of sustaining queer communities in contexts where state repression and capitalist market logics constrain public life.

Queer and feminist movements have long been connected to the critical use and appropriation of media technologies to communicate progressive values and organise political struggles. From pre-digital newsletter networks (McKinney, 2015) to more recent forms of digital activism such as data feminism (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2023), contemporary LGBTQ+ resistance has often been shaped through media infrastructures. Over the past decade, the entrenchment of digital platforms into everyday life, through their technical architectures, business models, and regulatory regimes, has prompted media scholars to investigate how institutions and social practices are reshaped by platform logics (Graham & Ferrari, 2022; Poell, Nieborg, & van Dijck, 2019; Srnicek, 2017).

Echoing this broader trend, digital queer studies have explored how platforms foster subcultural practices and imaginaries that challenge gender and sexual normativity. Yet, much of this work remains centred on North American and European contexts. In response, a growing body of Asian digital queer studies has emerged (Dasgupta, 2017; Kanchan, 2024), calling for greater attention to the complexities of queerness in “digital Asia” (Chan, Tan, & Cassidy, 2023). These studies highlight how digital practices interact with local histories, societal cultures, and politico-economic structures, configuring queer visibility, communal care, and movement sustainability in regionally specific ways.

This paper contributes to this growing conversation by foregrounding two problematics at the intersection of queer space, platform studies, and the solidarity economy. First, drawing on queer geographies of digital technologies (Miles, 2018), we examine how platforms (re)configure queer space in Asia and highlight the diverse structural and agentic dynamics that constitute “actually existing platformisation” (van Doorn, Mos, & Bosma, 2021). Second, we situate these dynamics within a pluralistic conception of the solidarity economy, recognising the diversity of goals, values, and strategies of doing solidarity economies across specific sociopolitical contexts. These two concerns guide our analysis in generative ways. On one hand, we move beyond the binary of co-optation versus subversion of platform capitalism (Sandoval, 2020), to examine how grassroots, situated practices emerge around and through digital platforms (Grohmann, Mendonça, & Woodcock, 2023). On the other, we suggest that the solidarity economy should not be seen purely as a universal challenge to neoliberal capitalism (Giovannini, 2020; Utting, 2015), but rather as locally embedded forms of resistance that respond to intersecting oppressions, such as coloniality, heteropatriarchy, and digital surveillance.

Inspired by feminist and queer interventions into the politics of social reproduction (Andrucki, 2021; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Bhattacharya, 2017; Binnie & Klesse, 2025), we argue that attending to social reproductive work with digital platforms offers a useful lens to reveal the tensions and possibilities of queer space-making as solidarity-economic praxis. From this theoretical position, we focus on two queer spaces in post-AEP (anti-extradition protest) Hong Kong, an emblematic moment of socio-political rupture in the city’s post-colonial era. We ask: What forms of social reproductive work with digital platforms sustain these queer spaces? How do they both enable and constrain queer activism in post-AEP Hong Kong? And how do they negotiate platform power, heteronormativity, and the broader urban political economy?

In what follows, we outline our theoretical positioning by engaging the critical literature on queer space, platformisation, and the solidarity economy, followed by a discussion of our ethnographic methods. We then contextualise the post-AEP moment and the two field sites before analysing three forms of social reproductive work, including material, affective, and cultural labour, carried out through and with digital platforms. We conclude by identifying key implications and proposing speculative directions for future research on platformised solidarity economies and digital queer studies in Asia.

Queer space in Asia as political-economic resistance

Queering spaces of sexualities and consumption

Queer geographers have been examining how gender and sexualities are constituted, contested, and embodied through space and in place(s), arguing that queer spaces are not merely spatial entities for gays and lesbians to reside, nor do they simply subvert dominant heteronormative norms, but often involve exclusionary practices despite being considered coherent and homogeneous (Oswin, 2008, 2013). By attending to the interwovenness of gendering, sexualisation, racialisation, colonisation, and classed processes, queer geographers continuously interrogate heteronormativity ingrained in space by scrutinising how formation of norms and categories create “multifaceted constellations of power” (Hubbard, 2013; Oswin, 2008, p. 100). Given the rise of gay neighbourhoods in the global North in the 1970s, especially in the United States (U.S.), economy has become a crucial domain in which queer scholars study how LGBTQ+ communities are connected or excluded through production and consumption.

Early works in the geographies of sexualities celebrated commercial gaybourhoods as subversive examples that challenged prevailing sexual norms (Lauria & Knopp, 1985). However, such consumption practices have been critiqued for further marginalising working-class and racialised queer and trans individuals (Rush-Morgan, 2023). Scholars like Jasbir Puar (2002) and Heidi Nast (2002) have discussed the limits of queer spaces dominated by commercial activities, as they are likely to shore up white and heteronormative patriarchies.

On the other hand, Lisa Duggan (2002) has interrogated the idea that queers would be liberated through increasing participation in the market, as it depoliticises and privatises queer life by assimilating some queers into the neoliberal governance structure, undermining solidarity across LGBTQ+ communities. Katherine Sender (2004) has extended this argument to reckon with the dilemma embedded in the interplay between LGBTQ+ politics and market, in which the positive images of gays and lesbians on media enhances their visibility and acceptance, although restricted, in the public realm dominated by heterosexuals. Consumption spaces provide the material infrastructure for gays and lesbians to build communities without behaving in accordance with mainstream gender norms. Notwithstanding, the profit-making practices of gay marketing not only continue to “[promote] a minoritised view of gayness” but reinforce, or even endorse, the privilege of certain LGBTQ+ people who conform their sexual practices within Gayle Rubin’s charmed circle of sex(uality), mostly white middle-class gay men (Rubin, 1993; Sender, 2004, p. 237). Thus, consumption practices in queer spaces have been regarded as liable to (re)create sexual hegemony, strengthening the “economic interests of [the] sexually dominant group” by rendering sexual and gender non-conforming individuals disposable under capitalist mode of production (Chitty, 2020; Cockayne, 2024, p. 1590).

Spaces of queer solidarity and economies: what have they neglected?

Despite space being heterosexually produced and reproduced through the state and market, both scholars and LGBTQ+ community members recognise the assimilationist and exclusionary tendencies of LGBTQ+ spaces, especially those of white middle-class gay spaces (Goh, 2018). In response to these structural challenges, feminist and queer communities have experimented with alternative practices to facilitate organising, safety, and community-building in times of rising neoliberal governance, austerity, and state policing. Community organisers have been reworking social enterprise models through “small acts of consciousness-raising” to mitigate the effects of labour precarity and depoliticization caused by market-driven policies (McLean, 2021, p. 257). They also interrogate the notion of inclusion in making queer spaces, where the act of including “sexual others” often conceals the fact of excluding other unwanted queers, namely queer youths of colour (Hanhardt, 2013). Instead, activists push for intersectional approaches to support LGBTQ+ individuals suffering from economic injustice, racial inequity, and violence from policing, putting the queer agenda not merely on gaybourhoods that have falsely been presumed to be free from heterosexual norms, but on a city scale for further socio-spatial changes (Goh, 2018).

A common feature of these scholarly works is their assumption of the market as a risky domain that LGBTQ+ communities should avoid, since it may subsume radical agendas under capital accumulation, intensify vulnerabilities among marginalised queers, and ultimately depoliticise queer politics. Yet, as Rush-Morgan (2023) argues, queer studies and economic geography often overlook non-capitalist and more-than-capitalist practices. LGBTQ+ enterprises, for example, may not see themselves as capitalist, even though they operate as profit-driven businesses. When we dissect the functions of these spaces not simply as accumulating capital, but as spaces for socialising with community members and performing caring work for queer and trans people, we can see the “multiple highly nuanced and multiscalar queer economies” (Rush-Morgan, 2023, p.8). How can we move beyond early queer studies that centre homonormative urban gaybourhoods to understand diverse queer economic practices that both constrain and enable queer everyday lives across different geographical contexts? If we adopt Rush-Morgan’s (2023, p. 8) agenda of diverse queer economies, how can we apprehend queer spaces in Hong Kong that make use of digital platforms, which blur the boundaries between consumption and production of LGBTQ+ economies, as more than homonormative, and as vital to queer organising in a non-Western society where liberal democracies do not exist?

Away from colonial traps of queer theory: towards geographies of queer Asia

While rights-and-recognition teleological models may be applicable in the West, where liberation for gays and lesbians is tied to legal protections following years of activism, such linear trajectories do not resonate with representations, survival, and thriving of queer lives in Asia, even when homonormative, under illiberal regimes (Yue & Leung, 2017). Kao (2024, p. 137) critiques the coloniality of queer theory for privileging Western academia and framing the U.S. as the origin of queer knowledge production, marginalising Asian queer scholarship as merely case studies and universalising queer critiques like homonormativity and homonationalism. Liu and Miao (2024, p. 4) further note that queer media studies centred on Western experiences overemphasise the “queer-capital interplay,” which often ignores the state as equally significant in supporting heteronormative governance. Queer scholarship rooted in the global North fails to capture the distinctive trajectories of sexual citizenship in Asia, inter-Asian circulations and local specificities of queer knowledge, “geopolitical and affective alliances” across regions never seen as the centre, or the pursuit of queer activism through depoliticised and unconfrontational strategies (Chiang & Wong, 2017; Liu & Li, 2024, p. 17; Tian, 2019; Yue, 2017).

In this paper, we focus on the context of Hong Kong, an East Asian global city that has experienced years of post-British colonial legacy in economic and legal development. Compared with mainland China and Singapore, its colonial “sodomy law” was abolished in 1991, and the decriminalised social space provided more room for LGBTQ+ activism. Deplorably, due to the government-led legislative structure (Barrow, 2020), progressive LGBTQ+ rights are unlikely to be proposed in the Legislative Council amid increasing intervention from the PRC government. More broadly, Hong Kong, alongside mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore, is often viewed as part of Sinophone societies where cross-border networks of queer activists and academics emerge (Liu & Li, 2024). “Queer Asia” thus offers a theoretical and methodological framework to “queer” US-centric queer scholarship by “position[ing] Asia as an imaginary anchoring point” and de-essentialising “Asia as [just an] area” (Yue, 2017, p. 21), accounting for the disjunctive queer solidarity economy in Hong Kong that is moulded by the nexus of transnational linkages and inter-Asia referencing, confluence of global and local forces, disjuncture, unruliness, illiberal sexuality, and uncertainty over (geo)political conditions.

Platformised solidarity economy: the lens of social reproduction

Solidarity economies have long been linked with grassroots resistance and bottom-up organising against neoliberal capitalism. With its intellectual roots in Europe and South America, the concept of solidarity economy overlaps with social economy but revitalises a more political dimension and can refer to a set of activities striving to democratise and humanise the economy through citizen participation (Giovannini, 2020; Laville, 2023). As Utting (2015) notes, solidarity economies emphasise redistributive justice, “deep” sustainability, alternatives to capitalism, and participatory democracy driven by active citizenship and social movements (p. 2). While solidarity economies are often cast as critical alternatives to planetary capitalism, more attention is needed on their bottom-up political agency in resisting intersecting forms of oppression, such as colonialism, nationalism, sexism, and racism. Regarding intersectional oppressions, critical race and Marxist-feminist scholars (Bhattacharya, 2017; Bhattacharyya, 2018) have long argued that gendered and racial oppression are not ancillary but structurally intertwined with capitalist production.

On this basis, we argue that approaching the platformised solidarity economy requires a situated analysis of the tensions and paradoxes of bottom-up resistance within the technological power and cultural logic of digital platforms, while these dynamics are simultaneously shaped by broader structural conditions. Platform studies have interrogated the infrastructural power of digital platforms in reconfiguring social, cultural, political, and economic life (Graham & Ferrari, 2022; Poell, Nieborg, & van Dijck, 2019). Earlier work often adopted a top-down and monolithic approach to platformisation (e.g., Srnicek, 2017), in which the problematisation of the platformised solidarity economy mainly centred on whether, and in what ways, such economies are co-opted by or subversive of platform capitalism from within (Sandoval, 2020).

Alongside calls to examine “actually existing platformisation” (van Doorn, Mos, & Bosma, 2021), more recent platform scholarship has paid attention to platform frictions (Popiel & Vasudevan, 2024) to illuminate the contingencies of platform power and how local norms, policy frameworks, grassroots informality, and communal praxis around digital platforms mediate its actual reach (Qiu, 2023; Surie & Huws, 2023). As Bonini and Treré (2024) stress, platform power is inseparable from the ways users appropriate, navigate, and resist it to exert some form of agency, even though these acts of resistance are constrained by platforms, may emerge from significantly different social and political formations, and can also be driven by profit or propaganda (p. 18). In the context of cultural production, previous work has shown various ways in which content producers negotiate with platform infrastructures and governance (Duffy & Meisner, 2023; Arriagada & Siles, 2023).

Particularly relevant to our research is Karhawi and Grohmann’s (2025) study of Brazilian Marxist cultural producers, who strategically use platforms for pedagogy and political agency while being limited by platform logics. They term this paradox “struggling with platforms,” which entails two propositions of platformised resistance from below. First, the extent of platform reliance needs to be contextualised and localised in relation to the specific movement goals, imaginaries, and, if any, political agenda the cultural producers hold. Second, and relatedly, the material dimension, including labour, work routines, and business models should be taken into account in order to comprehend how platform-dependent cultural practices are sustained (or not).

Extending these two considerations, we draw on feminist and queer interventions in social reproduction to propose the concept of “social reproductive work with platforms” to examine platform-dependent solidarity economies. Feminist theories of social reproduction emphasise human labour that sustains life and reproduces social relations necessary in capitalistic society (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2020), criticising dichotomies like “productive/unproductive” and “paid/unpaid” that devalue housework, often performed by marginalised groups, by making it invisible within productivist frameworks. Hence, social reproduction sustains not only life itself but also reconstructs communities, meanings, affective dispositions, and cooperation that are essential to world-making projects (Bakker, 2007; Fraser, 2016). Queer geographers have also rethought social reproduction to understand both the subversive potential of queer care labour and its co-optation under neoliberal urbanism (Andrucki, 2021; Binnie & Klesse, 2025; Taylor et al., 2024). Later, critical scholars extended this concept beyond the household to encompass the reproductive labour necessary for political organising and prefigurative politics (Jeffries, 2018). As Salmenniemi and Ylöstalo (2024) contend, alternative spaces and experimental practices demand reproductive labour to materialise and sustain their imaginaries of a better world.

In this light, we argue that progressive culture, ideology, and sociality do not survive on their own but require social reproductive work, which includes not only paid labour but also unpaid, unacknowledged, and undervalued work in capitalism. By studying social reproductive work with platforms, we can assess how platform power penetrates solidarity economies, and how activists leverage platforms for alternative practices in specific technological, cultural, and economic conditions. Grounded in this theoretical position, this paper examines how queer space in post-colonial Hong Kong functions as a solidarity economic strategy dependent on social reproductive work with platforms.

Methods and setting

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in and around two youth queer spaces in Hong Kong from 2023 to 2025, referred to here by the pseudonyms SexyComrade and Chapterhouse. To explore the mutual constitution of digital and urban spaces (Lane, 2018), we focus on the connections and discontinuities in the fluid interaction between digital and physical spaces (Hine, 2020). SexyComrade and Chapterhouse were chosen for their distinct orientations towards spatial and economic practices, despite their shared vision of queering Hong Kong society. Their different trajectories help illuminate strategies for maintaining queer spaces with digital platforms, especially Instagram, which is popular and increasingly infrastructural in Hong Kong.

SexyComrade advocates that sex is normal and ordinary, and should be openly discussed to help individuals seek their authentic selves, aiming to break the taboo against talking about sex in the public realm. Founded by Ada, she gathered like-minded friends to create both physical and digital spaces where people could freely explore sex-related topics based on six core values: space, safety, self-awareness, consent, choice, and communication.³In addition to renting a commercial unit, they also manage a Discord platform where participants can enter chatrooms under different themes, ranging from love and intimacy, sexual practices, to mundane activities like sports and films, and mingle with others anonymously, whereas organisers of SexyComrade act as administrators to ensure dialogues are in line with their values. After a year, some of Ada’s friends left to focus on their personal lives, and the physical space closed. Betty and Catherine later joined to start the “second generation” of SexyComrade in a new physical space while maintaining the same digital platform on Discord. However, the physical space has recently closed due to a decrease in visitors in 2024.

Chapterhouse is a gender-safe space founded by three queers in the same year as SexyComrade. Started in a small subdivided industrial unit, they offer a welcoming environment where visitors can explore books on sexual diversity, feminism, and gender issues, fostering dialogue and community-building among LGBTQ+ individuals and allies. With their activist experience, the space aims to challenge binary gender norms and essentialist thinking, nurturing social transformation through creative engagement and connection with wider public. They have continued their operation through securing fundings as a social enterprise, providing them monetary resources to organise larger events and setting up a community academy for gender issues.

Due to the second author’s personal connections to two queer spaces, we gained access to both spaces for onsite observations and informal chats with participants and volunteers. We also joined several WhatsApp and Discord groups as passive observers, though we respected users’ privacy by not disclosing specific conversations from those groups. In total, we spent thirteen months engaging with queer activists offline and online, as well as participating in offline activities organised by these queer spaces, along with fieldnote writing. Apart from participant observation, we conducted semi-structured interviews with queer organisers to understand the motivations and rationales behind their platform-based activism. In addition, we also paid attention to the visual and audio content on these platforms. Interpretive discourse analysis was conducted to understand how queer activists perform their platform communications and narratives around queer activism and queer spaces.

Our analysis began with a close reading of the research materials. Through this process, we identified work/labour as a central theme that sustains queer communities and their everyday lives. In subsequent readings, we coded all descriptions of work, paying close attention to interlocutors’ interpretations and metaphors in relation to digital platforms and physical spaces. Finally, we identified three key forms of social reproductive work, which will be unraveled and contextualised in the following discussion. To situate the making of queer spaces with digital platforms as both a means of alternative economic and political resistance, we will historicise the socio-political circumstances of queer activism in post-colonial Hong Kong, particularly in the aftermath of the 2019‒2020 mass protests in the next section.

Historicising queer activism in Hong Kong: a post-colonial city of protests

The LGBTQ+ movement in Hong Kong started with the quest to decriminalise male homosexual conduct. As a former British colony, Hong Kong’s legal system was based on British legal provisions (Wong, 2021). Same-sex sexual activities, specifically anal intercourse, were subject to severe penalties in the legal system during the early British colonial period (Kong, 2012). The death of John MacLellan, a Scottish Royal Hong Kong Police officer who was “charged with acts of gross decency” and found dead with five gunshot wounds in his residence in 1980⁴, sparked off public debates on homosexual conduct and the need for decriminalisation (Kong, Lau & Li, 2015, p. 191). As such, the MacLennan Incident is often regarded as the starting point of queer activism in Hong Kong (Kong, Lau & Li, 2015).

Following the decriminalisation of same-sex sexual conduct in 1991 and facing the uncertainties brought by the handover of sovereignty of Hong Kong to China, queer activists saw the urgency to register as society⁵before 1997, leading to a blossoming of LGBTQ+ organisations established in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, Western queer theory has been introduced and localised in Hong Kong, which provides abundant discursive resources to the local queer community⁶. After the handover, LGBTQ+ activists joined the wider civil movement for democracy. The July 1 march in 2003 was one of the triggering points that accelerated discussions on democratic processes within the local queer activist community. These discussions expanded from democratic policies to include topics such as new immigrant policies, women’s rights (particularly the discussion on new immigrant women and single mothers), and sexual minorities. Thus, building upon the foundation of identity politics and queer activism emerged in the 1990s, together with the landmark ruling of the 2004 judicial review case of Leung TC William Roy⁷, and the prevailing beliefs amongst political parties at the time that that there was still sufficient room within the existing legal system for advocacy, adjustment, and change, the queer movement in Hong Kong placed a significant emphasis on utilising legal techniques and policy advocacy as means of resistance until the outbreak of the 2014 Umbrella Movement.

After experiencing a downturn in the democratic movement after 2014, a sense of powerlessness filled among the activist community. LGBTQ+ organisations gradually diverged from the wider political movement and shifted their focus towards community building. In May 2019, the anti-extradition protests (AEP) began, with their reverberations continuing to the present day. In response, the government enacted the National Security Law (NSL) in 2020, aiming to curb growing collective action. The law dramatically transformed the social landscape by fundamentally eradicating the possibilities for various social movements, a situation worsened by distancing measures during the pandemic. Traditional forms of civil resistance, such as public gatherings and mass protests, common in Western liberal democracies and employed by queer activists since 2000, have become difficult to undertake. Meanwhile, the broader pro-democracy movement has shifted toward an everyday, community-based approach since the later phase of the AEP (Chung, 2020). Organisers of major LGBTQ+ events such as International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia (IDAHO) and Pride Parade attempted to revive the marches but ultimately failed, resorting to indoor private venues for gatherings when distancing measures became laxer with continuous oppression from the government. Thus, in this context, actions using digital platforms become common tactics widely adopted by younger queer community organisers. In other words, the space where queer activism in Hong Kong has mainly taken place has moved from physical space, i.e. street counters, campaigns in campuses, and public space to the reliance of digital space in the post 2019-era.

As such, we situate our study within the dialogues of queer Asia and postcolonial doubleness (Wong, 2021, p. 108; Yue & Leung, 2017) to make sense of the tactics and strategies utilised by queers in Hong Kong on digital platforms that have been conditioned by British colonial legacy, especially the legal regimes, and increasing authoritarian governance of the PRC government in China, as well as learning and borrowing from neighbouring regions and cities in Asia.

Reproducing queer spaces with digital platforms

Surviving with platforms

One of the first things that struck us was how our queer interlocutors described their work as “doing business,” along with the everyday labour required simply to keep that business running. In the Hong Kong context, the Cantonese phrase zousaangji (“doing business”, 做生意) is commonly associated with profit-making and capitalist enterprise. At first glance, this framing seems to contradict the anti-capitalist visions often associated with solidarity economies.

However, for grassroots and activist spaces operating in post-2019 Hong Kong, “doing business” is better understood as a pragmatic and strategic economic practice for survival within an increasingly autocratic socio-political and legal environment. Since the British colonial era, it has been common for social movement organisations to formally register with authorities to avoid being classified as illegal or illegitimate entities. In post-colonial Hong Kong, there are typically three formal registration options: as a society (setyun 社團), a charitable organisation, or a business. Choosing between these categories is always a political decision.⁸

As Ada from SexyComrade explained, registering as a society or charity exposes groups to greater scrutiny from police and government agencies. To mitigate this risk, they opted for the business route: “We (SexyComrade) actually intentionally used a business registration system to run our space, rather than registering as a ‘society’ at the police force, or a ‘charitable organisation.’ … We chose this ‘sneaky way’ (zauzingmin 走精面) because we felt that there were some legal considerations involved.” ⁹Ada’s use of the term sneaky captures the tactical nature of their choice. Rather than signaling a straightforward embrace of capitalist logic, business registration functions as a shield, an infrastructural workaround that enables queer activists to continue building community while minimising exposure to state repression.

Yet while “doing business” in a politically hostile environment may reduce legal and political exposure, it simultaneously introduces new economic precarity amid the city’s extractive rentier capitalism. It also demands ongoing manual and administrative labour, often self-exploitative in nature, to sustain daily operations, in which digital platforms both enable and constrain organising. At the two queer spaces we studied, income was primarily generated through membership subscriptions and paid educational workshops on sexual health and queer knowledge. Online sales of sex toys and other gender-progressive products served as supplementary revenue streams.

However, as our interlocutors revealed, the time and energy required to maintain these efforts were far greater than anticipated. Managing Instagram inquiries, confirming payments, and responding to hateful messages consumed significant, often unrecognised labour. Unsurprisingly, these revenue sources offered only minimal economic support for sustaining the space.

As Betty reflected, “We’re not making a profit. In fact, we’re putting in our own money. Without income, but still wanting to do a good job, I’m still thinking about whether it counts as work.” Recalling her experience organising at SexyComrade, she described the quiet anxiety of invisibilised labour: “I treat it like a project and strive to perfect it, but if not many people attend, I start questioning whether the topic wasn’t attractive enough or our promotion wasn’t good enough.” She sometimes jokingly called it “a second shift”, referring to the unmeasured time she devoted to SexyComrade after her full-time job.

Betty’s articulation of work-related anxiety and her explicit invocation of the “second shift” resonate with broader feminist critiques of unpaid labour, value, and recognition (Fraser, 2001; Hochschild & Machung, 2012; Federici, 2018). Her experience underscores how affective investment and entrepreneurial precarity converge within queer organising under hostile conditions.

Temporality emerges here not only as an implicit register of endurance and exhaustion but also as a structuring force in the life cycles of queer space. As discussed, SexyComrade operated on a self-sustaining model largely funded by the organisers themselves, with only limited income generated through member contributions and consumption. This model, shaped by the organisers’ shifting career paths and care responsibilities, ultimately led to the closure of the physical space in February 2025 after two years of experimental operation. In its wake, they transitioned to platform-based organising through Instagram and Discord, a tactical shift shaped by both material constraint and strategic foresight.

While SexyComrade illustrates how digital platforms mediate infrastructural survival through self-exploitative labour, this does not necessarily mean that alternative funding models are less burdensome. Chapterhouse, for example, has chosen to build a local queer community through a social enterprise model that relies not only on financial support from members but also on external funding from private corporations and even governmental agencies. As the case of Chapterhouse demonstrates, reliance on external funding may paradoxically intensify the pressure to maintain a vibrant and hyper-visible digital presence, further amplifying the emotional and technical labour required to stay afloat.

Interestingly, our interlocutors often minimised these labours, referring to them as “just minor details,” regardless of the extensive time and energy they required. This disavowal of labour gestures toward two additional layers of work we observed across both spaces: affective boundary work, which we define as the emotional labour of cultivating bounded yet intimate forms of companionship; and cultural work with platforms, understood as the labour of managing intersectional identities as queer activist, professional worker, and social entrepreneur navigating a contested platform capitalism in a patriarchal culture.

Accompanying around platforms: affective boundary work and companionship

Maintaining queer-friendly safe spaces with platforms requires not only material labour and daily administrative work to ensure economic survival, but also the continuous reproduction of cooperative relations and sociality (Weeks, 2007). Throughout our fieldwork, we observed how interactions on online platforms often evolved into real-life meetups. For example, on the SexyComrade Discord server, members used various channels, such as those for clothing-making, adult topics, and movies, to manage everyday communication and coordinate offline interactions organically, without requiring administrative oversight from the organisers.

In addition to free activities initiated by both organisers and members, small-scale economic activities also took place in these two queer spaces. Although several of our interlocutors acknowledged that selling or purchasing sex toys and other products provided substantial economic support, these consumption practices were not merely transactional, but also deeply meaningful in terms of social capital “gains” and long-term affective “investments.” This appropriation of financial vocabularies reveals the strategic understanding of economic resistance we highlighted earlier, while also underscoring the importance of cultivating affective bonds within the community.

Sustaining these social ties requires ongoing boundary work, across both physical and digital terrains, to navigate the tensions between collectivisation and differentiation. As sociologists Lamont and Molnár (2002) contend, boundary work involves the making, maintaining, and remaking of social and symbolic boundaries to “define who they are” (p. 171). In our ethnographic encounters, such boundary work was deeply affective, echoing broader feminist and indigenous activism, where sustaining community spaces often requires everyday emotional work that is at once protective and generative (Kolehmainen, Lahti & Lahad, 2022). These boundary work cultivates bounded yet intimate forms of companionship under precarious and surveilled conditions, balancing openness to newcomers with the need to safeguard trust.

In our ethnographic visits and follow-up interviews, we found that the idea of companionship plays a critical role in shaping members’ self-identification and communal positioning. Coincidentally, and tellingly, both SexyComrade and Chapterhouse refer to their members as bun (伴), a term that, in Cantonese, can mean both “companion” or “peer” (noun) and “to accompany” or “to be with” (verb). This shared lexical choice encapsulates a relational ethos central to the reproduction of queer kinship and solidarity.

The actual practice of companionship often stands in contrast to the ideal of openness and inclusiveness anchoring the two queer spaces. While the founders have their own ideas about gender identities and sexual orientations, they share a participatory view that queer space should embrace authentic diversity. “A queer space can be a space that is filled with straight men coming to learn about what sex is.” For Betty, queerness is not about strict identity boundaries but about the “interactive effect” and openness to difference.

A telling moment at SexyComrade illustrates the tension of maintaining an inclusive space while also navigating the expectations and vulnerabilities of queer visitors. Early on, their Instagram stated, “we welcome anyone to talk about sex,” but there were no explicit signs like rainbow logos or flags. When a visitor asked online if the space was gender-friendly, the organisers initially felt confused and wondered why such a question was necessary. Only later did they come to understand the deeper context: one visitor shared they had previously encountered exclusion in places that claimed to be queer-friendly. In one painful instance, a heterosexual café owner told them, “I find it really annoying when two guys are holding hands on the street.”

This moment prompted the queer organisers to rethink how openness is communicated. Even though they felt their space was inclusive, the absence of visible queer symbols created uncertainty and emotional risk for some visitors. From this encounter, the organisers realised that boundary work is not only about who is allowed in but also about how care, safety, and recognition are actively signalled and reproduced. As Ada put it, “Since we support everyone anyway, why not make them feel more comfortable?” In response, they added rainbow decorations and posted explicit statements of support online. Somewhat paradoxically, SexyComrade later implemented a vetting procedure and appointment system to screen visitors, illustrating how openness and control coexist in the labour of queer space-making.

This politics of boundary work is not limited to individual encounters or local configurations. Rather, it extends into the transnational space of queer activism. The very act of defining and curating queer space on platforms becomes entangled with cross-border networks of recognition, legitimacy, and solidarity. Through platformised organising, both SexyComrade and Chapterhouse have built cooperative ties with Sinophone queer activist communities across mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore (Liu & Li, 2024) and have also developed connections with queer youth collectives in Southeast and South Asia (interview with Ada; interview with Chapterhouse). In this way, digital platforms serve as infrastructures for transnational solidarity, while also mediating the complex boundary politics that accompany queer visibility and inclusion across different cultural and geopolitical contexts.

Queer(ing) culture through and beyond platforms

Alongside material and affective labour jointly reproducing the social infrastructure of queer space, reproduction of queer culture, from symbols, collective memories to counter-narratives, plays a pivotal role in both individual’s life meaning and collective struggle (Bammer, 2012; Federici, 2018). Through our fieldwork, we found that the main organisers of SexyComrade and Chapterhouse act as “queer cultural producers,” creating alternative cultural discourses and gender imaginaries to envision what a queerer Hong Kong could look like.

Though often described as “side work,” cultural labour, such as preserving visual records, circulating event materials, is far from supplementary. We understand these practices as queer archival work for survival that actively (re)produces subjectivities, sustaining radical relationality, and keeping memory alive under precarious political conditions. These practices build platform archives as sites of radical struggle over queer historical knowledge (Arondekar et al., 2015; Cvetkovich, 2003) and contest nationalist anxieties around queer expression (Dasgupta, 2017, on digital queer spaces in India). In Hong Kong, queer archives are similarly entangled with contested nationalist notions of Chineseness, where marginal queer voices are often denied legitimacy (Liu & Li, 2024).

These archival practices also operate as visibility politics and informal pedagogy. Instagram, in particular, becomes a key site for mediating companionship, disseminating queer knowledge, and broadcasting events to both community members and broader publics. Organisers are acutely aware of Instagram’s commercial and extractive logics, as well as its algorithmic regulations. Still, they tactically appropriate its mechanisms, using trending hashtags and ambiguous language to expand reach while avoiding content takedowns. In this sense, they mirror broader patterns of platform resistance among cultural producers (Duffy & Meisner, 2023; Bonini & Treré, 2024).

Yet what stood out in our research was not only the tactics of resistance but their cost. SexyComrade repeatedly experienced shadow bans, as Instagram flagged certain event visuals as sexually explicit, despite ambiguity around platform standards. As Betty and Ada emphasised, it is unclear what qualifies as a “legitimate” body display, and previously effective strategies for circumventing bans often failed under shifting algorithmic standards.

These tensions surfaced during a conflict on SexyComrade’s Discord, exposing the emotional toll of maintaining openness in a queer digital space. In an 18+ channel (adult channel), one member shared an intimate story, unaware that their partner, also in the group, would feel exposed. The partner requested the post be deleted, and organisers attempted to comply. Yet due to Discord’s technical constraints, traces of the post remained. Archiving the channel did not help. Eventually, they deleted the entire channel, sacrificing valued exchanges to protect a single member’s emotional well-being. Although the channel was reopened later, participation never returned to earlier levels.

These ethnographic moments illustrate the uncertainties of platform dependence. Aware of these limitations, organisers began experimenting with queering cultural practices beyond platforms. In 2022, Chapterhouse launched a “Gender Equality Ambassador” programme, recruiting individuals, many of whom did not self-identify as queer, but were interested in promoting gender justice and lacked experience in public engagement.¹⁰Through workshops, zines, exhibitions, and community events, the programme pursued two goals: first, to document LGBTQ+ histories in Hong Kong, particularly around the 2019–2020 mass protests, and to preserve memories that had disappeared or still persisted through creative means; and second, to empower individuals to “bravely speak out for themselves and their communities” using creative, and not exclusively digital, media practices.

These goals reflect the organisers’ critical response to the saturation of both mainstream and digital media with misogyny, homophobia, and toxic gender stereotypes, conditions that further marginalise queer communities amid “political sensitivity” to gender issues in Hong Kong. Taking place in physical space, the ambassador programme breaks away from conventional, top-down models of passive knowledge transfer. Instead, it fosters a grassroots pedagogy that empowers participants to become autonomous agents of change, promoting gender justice on their own terms. As Diane, one of Chapterhouse’s founders, shared, “I still hope that they [the ambassadors] together will form a strong queer community. But right now, their actions are rather individualised. The collectivity is not obvious.” This tension highlights the challenge of sustaining queer solidarity under increasingly atomised and repressive conditions.

While digital platforms often function as capitalist infrastructures for communication, the everyday practices of our interlocutors show that queer(ing) spaces are also co-constituted as sites of reproductive labour, solidarity-making, and survival in precarious queer lifeworlds. Beyond liberal narratives of digital empowerment, these practices in Hong Kong are shaped by algorithmic surveillance, patriarchal policing, and the aestheticisation of violence and queerness. In line with Sayak Valencia’s (2018) analysis of gore capitalism, where violence is enacted, commodified, and made consumable, we observe how violence against queer bodies is framed as a defence of hegemonic masculinity, while selective, depoliticised forms of queerness are commercialised through mainstream entertainment.¹¹Our study highlights queering practices grounded in social reproduction that resist both patriarchal repression and commodification. These fragile yet strategic acts of world-making show how queer spaces endure not through visibility alone, but through relational and cultural work that reclaim survival at the digital-urban margins.

Concluding discussion

This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of queer struggles with digital platforms, highlighting how these platforms both enable and constrain solidaristic agency from below. Using the cases of two queer spaces in post-colonial Hong Kong, we propose studying social reproductive work with digital platforms as a generative approach to unpack the tensions and potential of platform-dependent solidarity economies in an Asian context. Specifically, we contextualise queer space-making within the socio-historical conditions following contentious city-wide protests and identify three forms of social reproductive work, offering insights that extend beyond queer movements to other struggles increasingly shaped by platform ecosystems.

Our findings lead to three major implications that contribute to the existing literature on queer geographies, platform studies, and solidarity economy through the lens of social reproduction. First, we emphasise the centrality of social reproduction in progressive politics beyond the household, arguing that digital platforms both enable and constrain the sustainability of queer spaces. This approach builds on feminist and queer calls to (re)politicise social reproduction (Andrucki, 2021; Weeks, 2007), while examining how bottom-up practices negotiate the frictions emerging from platformised solidarity economies.

Second, we advance a situated conception of political agency in platformised solidarity economies, considering how practices around platforms interact with platform power, patriarchal culture, and urban political economy. This aligns with the recent shift in platform studies toward informal, socio-historical, and constructionist approaches (Chen et al., 2024; Qiu, 2023; Surie & Huws, 2023), which foreground how power is enacted, resisted, and reshaped through grassroots’ everyday engagements with platforms in socio-historical contexts. Our study shows how platform-dependent queer spaces in Hong Kong rely on material, affective, and cultural work to build relational infrastructures, adding to scholarship that challenges universal narratives of platform governance and technological domination in solidarity economies against platform capitalism.

Third, by critically engaging with the socio-political context of post-AEP Hong Kong, this research contributes to the queer Asia paradigm (Chan, Tan, & Cassidy, 2023; Chiang & Wong, 2017) and the broader intellectual movement to de-westernise communication and media scholarship. As both an intellectual and political project, de-westernisation calls for a shift away from Eurocentric research agendas, theoretical frameworks, and academic infrastructures, and instead centres diverse epistemologies and ontologies from the Global South (Waisbord, 2022). With reference to this movement, queer Asia as an emerging critical paradigm in media studies seeks to denaturalise Asia as a homogenous region by countering Western- and Northern-centric assumptions in queer theory as they inter-reference each other, placing queerness at the centre of research in and about Asia, and highlighting multiple, unstable, and dynamic cartographies of (queer) Asia (Yue, 2017; Eguchi, 2021).

Hong Kong, as a contested postcolonial city marked by intensified authoritarianism and rising homonationalist exclusions, provides a critical site for examining how platformised queer spaces are shaped by struggles over visibility, survival, and belonging. This context invites a deeper critique of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000; Segato & Monque, 2021), which structures global systems of knowledge and affect beyond formal colonial rule. As Maldonado-Torres (2007) notes, coloniality comprises long-standing patterns of power that continue to define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production (p. 243). From a decolonial feminist perspective, we position gender and sexuality as central to this matrix. Segato and Monque (2021) argue that colonialism transformed “low-intensity communal patriarchy” into a “high-intensity colonial-modern patriarchy,” characterised by more extractive, violent, and racialised control over (women) bodies and social reproduction. This framework informs our understanding of heteronormative violence and patriarchal governance in Hong Kong as shaped not only by British colonial legacies but also by the city’s autocratisation and the consumerist logic of platform capitalism. By tracing intersecting forms of social reproductive work that sustain and rework queer space, our study shows how queer world-making with platforms resists both digital exploitation and the deeper coloniality that governs bodies, desires, and epistemologies.

To conclude, we suggest two analytical issues for future research on variegated platformised solidarity economies and digital queer spaces for the Global Majority. First, the socio-technological complexity of platforms should be theorised contextually to capture the extent to which, and in what ways, specific platforms become integrated with other social institutions that condition the formation, continuity, and decline of solidarity economic practices. For instance, recent work on platform labour unrest has mobilised the concept of platform architecture to examine how the technological, legal, and organisational dimensions of control and management in the labour process reconfigure solidarity and collective resistance (Chan, 2025; Lei, 2021). In a similar vein, the intersection between platform architecture and the solidarity economy, including queer and other progressive movements, offers a key theoretical and political opening for rethinking the praxis of technology-dependent social movements. Relatedly, future research might explore alternative queer(ing) approaches to conceptualise the reproductive infrastructures and everyday labour that sustain digital solidarity economies. Our study extends the concept of queer space to account for the material, affective, and cultural labour involved in platformised resistance. This turn to the everyday aligns with recent developments in the capabilities approach within queer studies, which emphasise the recognition and promotion of erotic choices and freedoms as part of lived experience (Tsui, 2024).

Another possible dimension to be explored is to rethink radical care in Asia through the queer spaces emerging not from institutional neglect but institutional refusal in which the government and conservatives proactively create anti-queer and anti-trans* narratives that puts queer and trans* lives to premature death (Hobart & Kneese, 2020; Spade, 2020). In other words, in times of heteronormative violence and patriarchal governance in Hong Kong, we need to ponder what kind of queer infrastructures are essential to provide material relief and support coalitional work and platformised solidarity economies when attempts to build alternative systems will be too overt to trigger state oppression or retaliation. That is, should radical care be practised through utilizing existing systems, despite the risks of co-optation, when the red lines are ever shifting? In the fragile infrastructures of queer space, it is social reproductive work – quiet, persistent, and strategic – that sustains communal care, affective companionship, nonconfrontational narratives, and the possibility of life at the digital-urban margins amid an uncertain present.