David Kwok Kwan Tsoi

My previous work focuses on the intersection of sexualities, gender, and class in neoliberal economies. My ethnographic work investigates the labor conditions, moral systems, and modes of intimacy of middle-class queer sex workers in Hong Kong. My research has examined how sex workers produce their own value system of ethics vis-à-vis money, sex, and love; how a growing intimate economy built on desires changes what it means to be a respectable citizen; and how an emerging group of middle-class gay sex workers reproduce class and gender inequalities, in form of homonormativity and gay misogyny.

Extending my previous research, I am working on two projects focused on transnationalism, governmentality, citizenship, and the intimate life of citizens in Hong Kong and other diasporic Chinese communities. They address the following issues:

A) The emerging forms of collective sociality in post-2019 Hong Kong. This project studies the new models of value system generated in the aftermath of the 2019-2020 political contingency in Hong Kong. It examines how the notion of trust is reconfigured amidst authoritarian yet neoliberal governance, and how it circulates locally, as well as digitally and transnationally in the post-2019 emigration wave. Looking comparatively at the public sphere (workplace) and the intimate sphere (network of intimate relationships) of middle-class, university-educated, and highly mobile Hong Kongers in their late twenties and early thirties, I ask how intimacy, broadly conceived, serves as a social resource for ordinary people to (re)construct a shared civil identity under political oppression. 

B) Chinese migrants who emigrated to Peru in the 1990s. This project examines how various groups of southern Chinese immigrants in Lima, Peru, mobilize their local social ties, cultural capital (particularly cooking skills), and transnational kinship network to actualize their diasporic aspirations. I am interested in how various forms of Chineseness are divided along the lines of class, spatial divide, sociocultural integration with Peru, and connections with Chinese bureaucracy. This project investigates how the stories about cooking, traveling and education of ordinary Chinese people in Peru reflect China's geopolitical positioning in the global South. This project has been supported by Tinker Field Collaborative Fellowship.