Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 2

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Moral Populism: A New Political Affinity of Sexuality, the Body and Democracy / Cho Man-kit [1]

<1> This article takes its inspiration from two separate news items that appeared in the first half of 2012.[2] In January that year, a photo was widely circulated across online forums and Facebook. It showed that two male teenagers were turning their back to the camera while exposing their buttocks by slightly pulling down the pants at the ground exit of Mong Kok MTR station. Another male teenager, standing closer to the camera, was grinning from ear to ear and holding a can of beer while thumbing up towards those two men with exposed buttocks one or two arm's lengths away from himself. The photo is one of the many self-mocking acts common to teenagers. However, no sooner had the photo was posted online than a series of criticisms was provoked. A few condemned it in a contemptuous way by intentionally misunderstanding it to be a "silent protest against the hegemony of the government or developers." Many other condemnations were made on moral ground and dubbed those teenagers in the photo "useless youth." Meanwhile, some netizens launched a cyber manhunt and disclosed the true identity of the teenagers who raised this thumb up in appreciation of his friends' exposure. A number of media outlets responded to the incident in an orchestrated manner. Dozens of comments, primarily negative and condemnatory, were quoted, and solicitors and the Police were invited to advise the general public not to follow suit, for nudity in public is a criminal offense. In February 2012, the Police, following the disclosed information on the Internet, arrested two men, who are seventeen and eighteen-years-old, respectively, on the ground that they were suspected to have committed indecency in public.[3] It is these two young adults who exposed their buttock. Fortunately, the Secretary for Justice dropped the case on the condition that one of them had to take part in the Superintendent's Discretion Scheme while the other was released on bail.[4]

<2> A month later, another piece of news of almost identical nature hit the headline. Quoting from the Internet, The Oriental News reported that three young men exposed their buttocks at Yau Ma Tei which is adjacent to the city centre Mong Kok. Despite the fact that all of them turned their back to the camera, netizens still managed to dig up the personal information of one of the three men via cyber manhunt. His personal particulars including his full name, email address and the name of school he attended were made public. [5] Worse still, the netizens not only disclosed his true identity but also urged others to report to the Police. The wide media coverage finally caught the eye of the Police which identified a secondary school as the site where the photo was uploaded to the Internet. Later, based on the information handed in by that school, the Police invited a fifteen-year-old male student to a police station for inquiry and subsequently arrested him for "access to computer with criminal or dishonest intent." A social worker interviewed by Hong Kong Economic Times speculated that "These young men might have watched some western movies with scenes of exposed buttocks and took it to be an expression of attitude. What they did might be a way to express their dissatisfaction or grievances, or simply for fun."[6] Solicitor Danial Wong Kwok-tung, who has been frequently asked for comments by the media on sexual crimes, even warned that the photo could be a child pornography if the men with their buttocks exposed in the photo were under the age of sixteen. Those people who produced, uploaded and downloaded it might have committed a crime which is much more serious than that of dissemination of a pornographic photo.[7] Two months later, the Secretary for Justice stopped the case from proceeding further.[8]

<3> The development of these incidents follows a similar pattern and is facilitated by the old and new media. What is common to these two pieces of news is that both involve male teenagers taking photos of exposed body parts. The photos were meant to be circulated among friends on Facebook but somehow went viral across online forums. The more widespread they were, the more severe moral outcry was provoked. Such a high intensity invited interference from the authority and led to prosecution. In fact, quite a many cases of sexual scandals started on the Internet. At one time, photos or clips meant to be shared among friends or acquaintances on personal networking platforms such as Facebook were reposted, often without the permission of the owners, on forums that everyone could access. Conversely, at another time, a third party took photos or videos in a stealth way and uploaded it to the Internet for public access. For instance, near the end of 2011, a video clip that records a student couple having sex in a park was widely disseminated and was received rather harshly.[9] It is obvious that the popularization of the Internet and smartphones not only speeds up the rate at which information is transferred and widens the available audience but also sets up a surveillance network. With a smartphone at hand and some basic information technology knowledge, ordinary people can easily turn themselves into moral police, making anything they deem problematic known to the public by sharing and posting photos or video clips online. The magnitude of disciplining effect is therefore several times than before. Of particular note is that the resentment against the the photos and videos of sexual nature have no effect in decreasing the speed and scope that they are disseminated in the virtual space. It seems that the more disgusting and morally questionable they are, the more they are shared and reposted online. As a result, those who condemn and those who are condemned form a paradoxically intimate relationship and are in an unprecedentedly close proximity. Furthermore, the moral resentment that it provokes is no longer confined to those who know each other or a context where some forms of hierarchy is in force, such as work places, family or church. It now takes a form of a collective act made possible by hundred or thousand of anonymous netizens who launch attacks behind a computer's screen.[10] Although cyber manhunt share similarities with investigative journalism which strives to unveil the dark side of society, the former has often been used to target individuals who lack resources, power and platforms to rebut emotionally charged accusations. Without doubt, nudity in public in the two cases discussed earlier broke the law. The perceived harm, if any, that might have been caused is of a different type from and much less serious than, for example, corruption. However, the spotlight the nudity attracted and the moral resentment it received are disproportionally large. Parallel to the judicial system is one set up by netizens that provides a para-legal platform on which moral issues are to be reported, discussed and judged. Sexuality and the body are the first to be affected. I am of the view that the emergence of moral populism demands a cultural explanation and this is the purpose of the article.

The Formation of Moral Populism

<4> Moral populism is an emotionally charged collective behavior about moral issues but it differs from the emotion we have when we are morally offended in a significant way. To delineate the differences and its internal logic helps us answer why it deserves our attention. Commonly, we respond to things disgusting by keeping a distance; if we are unfortunate to bump into it, we would break it off immediately. However, argues Sara Ahmed, the feeling of being disgusted has been granted a special meaning and function in the contemporary politics of culture. Disgust is an affective practice that constitutes object and subject.[11] Borrowing the idea of abjection from Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, Ahmed infers that disgust is not something that resides in the things we find disgusting. Rather, it is a feeling when things come too close to us or are on the verge of contact. Close proximity not only induces the feeling of disgust but also a backward movement away form the source so as to keep the boundaries of the subject and object intact. Paradoxically, "me" and "non-me" can only come into existence at the point of contact or transgression. Because self-identity can only be founded by difference, the desire to be recognized as an autonomous self propels the emerging self to the very things that it establishes differences. Repetitive exposure or contact with something disgusting is a condition of possibility for subject/object formation. However, the subject in the making bounces back when it gets too close to the other and a feeling of disgust is therefore provoked. This is why Ahmed argues that "disgust is deeply ambivalent, involving desire for, or attraction towards, the very objects that are felt to be repellent."[12] The toward-backward-toward movement establishes a boundary that tentatively distinguishes the subject from the other. It also generates what Ahmed calls "stickiness" which links different signifiers with emotions for a particular political purpose. In other words, when something is considered disgusting, it is usually very "sticky" in the sense that the relation among certain words, emotions and values are fixed and sealed from recomposition or amendment. Since disgust, among many other affects, has been central to identity formation, it causes a displacement. Where we used to express hatred for something disgusting in private in order avoid further exposure, we now witness massive and open hatred that invites repetitive exposure from which pleasure is sometimes derived.

<5> Despite the fact that Ahmed's theorization of disgust provides a heuristic tool for understanding how politics of emotions operates, hers fails to give a contextualized account of how affect is politicized in a specific historical-cultural-economic context. To substantiate Ahmed's theoretical framework, I turn to Hui Po-keung, a Hong Kong cultural critic, for a more concrete cultural analysis that might shed light on the increasingly sex-negative social atmosphere and body taboo. Since 2005, Hui has borrowed the idea of "populist logic" that Ernesto Laclau develops in On Populist Reason to analyze the cultural landscape in the aftermath of the economic tsunami.[13] I argue that his understanding of Laclau is of help to explain why and how sexual delinquency (e.g., nudity in public and public sex) attracts such a disproportionally high moral resentment, especially when it is reported by the media.[14] Hui contends that in the last ten years populism occupies the cultural landscape where weak liberalism, if it has ever existed, retreat. In the same manner, I will argue that moral populism is the failure of liberalism in taking moral issues seriously and in offering alternatives, hopes and resolving conflicts.

<6> In retrospect, it is H.L.A. Hart who coined "moral populism". Although the context under which he deployed "moral populism" is not the same to the one I am to develop on the basis of Hui's works, a similarity between them draws my attention. Both work in some ways with the notion of "people". In Law, Liberty and Morality, Hart is at pains to argue against a view commonly held in the legal profession that the purpose of the law is to enforce morality.[15] He contends legal enforcement of morality is not only a question about the relation between the law and morality. More important is that it is a moral question in itself for enforcing morality with the law might be morally right or morally wrong. Hart argues that the the law that regulates sex can appeal to something other than morality for legitimacy.[16] Appealing to the moral preferences, or "positive morality" in his words, that people hold in a specific place and at a specific time is not satisfactory either because the applicability of positive morality is subject to higher moral principles, or what he terms "critical morality." It follows that "moral populism" rises when people mistakenly believe that by majority rule they can regulate sexual acts on the basis of positive morality.[17] Clearly, to Hart, "moral populism" originates from a misunderstanding of democracy. Nevertheless, it still works within a democratic framework and has trust in it. On the contrary, populism as Hui understands grows in a culture suspicious of democracy. Populism is the failure of democratic system in resolving conflicts. In populist politics, democracy is one of the many institutions that comes under attack. Hui succinctly summarizes Laclau's analysis of populist logic in On Populist Reason:

As a political logic, populism consists in three conditions: first, a frontier that divides people and the powerful is formed; secondly, the multiple and contradictory needs of the people are subsumed under a common demand; and thirdly, a system of signification is created to cater for the common demand of the people. Because "the people" are extremely intricate, it is difficult to straighten out all of the concrete demands. Therefore, an empty signifier such as "neoliberalism," "small government big market," "welfarism" are more useful than any precise concepts to express concrete but contradictory people's demands.[18]

<7> Similarly, the presence of populist logic in the field of sexuality can be felt in the urge to distinguish the self and the other on the basis of sexual orientations, sexual preferences and sexual acts. That urge comes with a powerful exclusionary force that covers up any challenges to the existing moral order by newly emerged sexual subjects. To achieve this, "children" and "family" are turned into empty signifiers that affix the anxiety of middle-class parents over their children, the sense of uncertainty as induced by the transformation of intimacy and the political complicity between the Central Government and the Hong Kong Government.[19] In other words, moral populism grows in a defective moral system which fails to address polymorphous sexualities in a rational manner. In a culture that lacks in tolerance of sexual diversity, critical morality gives way to positive morality that authority is often invited to suppress anything disgusting or moral sanctions are imposed through cyber manhunt and public ridicule in the name of "people." The brutal attack against sexual dissidents comes with enormous emotional investment. As the two pieces of news discussed at the beginning of the article show, those who relentlessly shared and commented on the "indecent" photos are often the same people who found them objectionable and disgusting. That moral resentment takes a form of masochism is indicative of how shallow liberalism is in Hong Kong. We are unable to treat with indifference things morally offensive but compel ourselves to be fully preoccupied with them. By making one's own moral resentment public on, for example, online forums and/or Facebook, one often puts herself/himself in a position that while one is condemning what s/he has just posted, the object that s/he finds repellent is the very foundation that constitutes him/her to be a person with a particular moral outlook.

<8> The two types of moral populism, the one deduced by Hui's reading of Laclau and the other proposed by Hart himself in 1963, are in a diametrical relation to democracy. The former is a reaction to the failure of democratic institution and is discarding it altogether while the latter is a misunderstanding of democracy but still works within its framework. However, these two types work in tandem in the politics of sexuality in the last decade. For example, many netizens who participate in public ridicule in a populist way oppose regulation of virtual space by the government and the church in the battle against online pornography. The ambiguity of moral populism in relation to democracy lends it a shield against any criticisms for being too populist as well as not democratic. It can defend itself by appealing to the "people" for the very idea of democracy is rooted in the "demo." When it is said to be incompatible with democratic principles, populism can easily justify itself by eliciting the widespread dissatisfaction with democratic institution for its low efficiency and high social costs. Of particular note is that, as Hui argues, populist logic works across the political spectrum. It goes beyond the conventional division of political parties into the left, right and centre triumvirate and makes itself present in all political geographies. Its footprints can be found in parliamentary politics, government decision-making processes and even in civil society. In the following, I will use the public consultation of the Control of Obscene and Indecent Article Ordinance in 2008 as an example to analyze how populist force is weakening the democratic system and principles, and the impact on sexuality.[20]

Populist Move Against Pornography and Anxiety in Late Modern Society

<9> The system that censors pornography in Hong Kong is a duplex that carries out administrative classification and legal determination. If the author, publisher or distributor of an article is in doubt as to whether the article is indecent or obscene, s/he can submit it to the Obscene Articles Tribunal for an administrative classification. There are three classes: Class I is non-indecent and non-obscene; Class II is indecent and Class III is obscene. Those classified as Class II or III are subject to regulation. Indecent articles have to be wrapped in a transparent plastic bag with a statutory warning on the front and can only be sold or published to people at or above the age of eighteen. Class III articles are prohibited from publication to anyone. The holder of an article that is deemed indecent or obscene by the Tribunal in its administrative classification exercise upon the holder's submission constitutes no offense unless s/he publishes that article without complying with the regulations corresponding to the classification the Tribunal makes. Possession of Class II and III articles in private and for private use is legal. The Tribunal is composed of about 300 adjudicators who are appointed by the Chief Justice. The term of office for adjudicators is unclear as it is not spelt out in the Ordinance but subject to the opinion of the Chief Justice. The criteria for selection have never been made known to the public either. A list of adjudicators is archived on the government website. Except their names, no other information such as their age, gender, social position, occupation and religion are provided. As a result, it is not possible to determine whether the pool of adjudicators is over-represented by people with a particular social class or religious faith. The lack of transparency is not proportional to the power they have in prohibiting articles they find objectionable from publication.[21] The Obscene Articles Tribunal handles cases transferred by the Office of the Communications Authority, Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department, the Police and any other Courts. Failure to comply with the regulations is a criminal offense liable to fine and imprisonment up to three years.

<10> In carrying out its function of legal determination, the Tribunal will convene a closed-door meeting for interim classification of an article transferred by the Administration and other Courts. If the proprietor of that article makes no appeal within a statutory period, the interim classification will deemed final. In fact, the whole procedure violates the common law principle that requires justice must be seen to be done and the presumption of innocence. First, during the interim classification, the proprietor of an article has no legal standing in the meeting to defend himself/herself. Adjudicators only rely on their own moral preferences to classify the article. In Tong Sai Ho v Commissioner for Television and Entertainment Licensing, the Court laments that the Tribunal adopted a lax approach to handling cases of interim classification without strictly following what the Ordinance requires them to do.[22] The interim classification as a closed-door exercise that deprives proprietor of the right to defend him/herself runs contrary to the common law principle that justice must be seen to be done. Secondly, if the proprietor of an article which is classified as class II or III can apply for a review. However, the Ordinance prescribes that adjudicators need not give reasons to the classification they make. It seriously jeopardizes the proprietor's ability to prepare for the review and work our her/his legal strategy. Although there an exemption clause in the Ordinance (section 28), it is the sole responsibility of the proprietor to justify that the article in question is in the interest of science, literature, art or learning, or any other object of general concern. It is clear that proprietors of articles that are classified as indecent or obscene in interim classification or determined to be so in legal proceedings are systematically disadvantaged. Therefore, the whole censorship system contravenes the rule of law that a democratic society holds as one of its cornerstones.

<11> In October 2008, the Administration began the first phase of consultation about the Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance. The consultation document is entitled Healthy Information for Healthy Mind: Please Participate in the Review of the Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance. Judged from the title, one can clearly understand that the Administration takes pornography to be inherently unhealthy and dangerous. Its anti-porn position is even prominent when the title is read together with the document's cover design where three teenagers, two girls and one boy, all in white shirts, are grinning from ear to ear in front of a background composed of smartphones, video games, computers and the Internet. The cover vividly epitomizes the belief that pornography harms children. It also predicts that the struggle over pornography censorship will be centred around the cultural symbol of "children." In effect, the populist mobilization in the name of protecting children is exceptionally successful. It is powerful enough to override due process, evidence-based and logical inference that a democratic society respects. As discussed, populist logic works through empty signifiers so as to fuse diverse social needs and demands into a single but vague symbol. It applies to the field of sexuality as well since "(protection of) children," "members of the public" and "society" are ill-defined symbols that can provoke strong emotions. For example, the consultation document repeatedly makes use of these symbols to cover up the preordained position of the Administration on the one hand and on the other guides the public to come to the desired "consensus" without taking the risk of being impartial. The documents lay out these highly misleading "main issues" for the public to ponder:

"There are public views that the right to seek an OAT classification ruling should be opened up." (20, author's emphasis)

"The community seems to consider that there may be a need to tighten up the classification system. There are views that the coverage of Class II (Indecent) article under the existing regime seems to be too broad." (28)

"Given the emergence of new forms of media, particularly the growing popularity of the Internet, members of the public consider it important that measures are taken to protect youngsters from the dissemination of obscene and indecent materials on such new media systems" (38, author's emphasis)

"Some members of the pubic would like to see all offending articles in the market be identified and enforcement action be taken by the enforcement departments." (56, author's emphasis)

"Some members of the public have expressed the view that greater attention should be placed on new forms of publication which have growing popularity among youngsters, for example, electronic game products, computer games, etc." (59, author's emphasis)

"Some members of the public consider it important to enhance the deterrent effect of the COIAO." (64, author's emphasis)

"The public recognize the importance of stepping up publicity and public education to combat the harmful effect of indecent and obscene articles, in particular in relation to new forms of media with growing popularity among youngsters." (72, author's emphasis)

<12> The consultation document leaves no clue as to how it collects the public views and what criteria it adopts to address some while not the others. In the section that follows the "main issues," the focus is on deliberating how to amend the existing system so as to meet the quoted "public views" as if they were consensus and unproblematic. Apart from a brief mention in the introduction, freedom of speech and freedom of press and publication have never been addressed in the main text when it comes to tighten up the scope of the Ordinance and step up the statutory punishment. "The public," "community" and "members of the public" seem to replace evidence-based deliberation and human rights considerations. Throughout the document, not a single academic study on the effect of pornography is ever cited. Harm is assumed to be synonymous with pornography. Without qualifying the harm it is assumed to must induce, it is also unclear if the harm, if it really exists, is grave enough to be addressed by making publication of pornography a criminal offense. The problem of proportionality, which is central to criminal law, has never been an issue. Worse still, the language of the Ordinance lacks precision. In the first round of consultation, the Administration refuses to give a more precise definition of what constitutes "indecency" and "obscenity," because as they argue, morality changes with time. For these reasons, the Administration, which should be well aware of the fallacy of circular argument, explains on the consultation web page that "According to the Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance (COIAO), 'a thing is obscene if by reason of obscenity it is not suitable to be published to any person; and a thing is indecent if by reason of indecency it is not suitable to be published to a juvenile.' 'Obscenity' and 'indecency' include 'violence, depravity and repulsiveness.'" Such a fallacy is not made by mistake but a sign of an anti-intellectual predisposition cultivated by a populist culture.

<13> During the first round of public consultation, the Administration received over 18,000 submission, among which thirty-seven templates were found. Deducting multiple submissions by same individuals, 6,533 out of 12,417 were from these thirty-seven templates. One template's title reads, "Obscene and Indecent Articles Harms Marriage and the Next Generation." It starts with "I am a wife" who criticizes that pornography distorts sex and makes many husbands have unrealistic demands on wives. When wives get old or lack in sexual skills, their husbands will visit prostitutes. Their family will therefore be smashed into fragments and the next generation suffers in the end. For this reason, this template asks:

I have the right to protect the eyes and the mind of my husband from contamination. If the Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance is to be weakened or repealed, then I am not able to guard against the imposition of values from other people onto my family.[23]

<14> For the sake of family integrity, this worrying wife asks the Administration to classify all information that advocates or supports "persuading others to abortion," "splitting of sex and love and celebration of sexual pleasure (for example, persuading others to use sex toys)" and "neglect of the moral responsibility of sex" to be class III obscene articles, which are to be prohibited from publication at all. Clearly, what this wife is asking for goes beyond the remit of the Ordinance. Neither can her request be entertained in a liberal society for private sphere is immune from public intervention as long as it does no harm. Ironically, she employs human rights rhetoric to invite authority to regulate how others lead their sexual life in private on the assumption that men are born with a relentlessly insatiable sexual drive, which can only be tentatively curbed by removing external stimuli. She sees this a justified ground to allow encroachment of private life in the form of tightened regulation of pornography. Such a request not only calls for an end to the division of public and private spheres that shields against arbitrary intrusion from the government, it also signifies the emergence of an ever expanding private sphere which is encroaching and compressing the public one. In this light, what the wife wants is simple but highly destructive: the public sphere where her husband might go should be as (sexually) pure as her home.

<15> On 21st January 2009, the Legislative Council convened a public hearing on the consultation and invited groups of Christians and parents representatives to speak before the legislators. A wife recalled that "Just like my elder son. In an interview of a pre-kindergarten education, he refused to accept a candy from the principal because he had never eaten one. When I gave birth to my second son, he was taken care by my mother-in-law as I was hospitalized. In order to pacify him, my mother-in-law gave him a variety of candies. Since then, I had no way to suppress his desire for sweets. However, noble moral principle is not like this. It is based on suppression of desire."[24] A faith-based group, "Balanced Human Rights Monitor," listed some "basic facts" in its submission to the Legislative Council. Four items echo the worries of the mother and somehow provide an explanation how the mother justify her request for tightened COIAO by her frustration at suppressing her son's desire for sweets. These four "basic facts" are that "many parents do not have time, maturity, education and methods to help their children develop a correct sexual value," "some parents have problematic sexual values themselves," "some parents cannot set up a non-violent example because they are violent themselves" and "quite a many parents lack I.T. competency in how to use computer, access the Internet and install filtering softwares." Clearly enough, similar to the wife who is always feeling anxious of her husband having extra-marital affairs, these worrying parents seem to ask the government to take over their own and others' private life because they fail to discipline their children effectively. However, in effect, they are imposing their own (desired) private sexual values and the corresponding domestic sexual arrangements at the expense of others' right to be different in private. In their struggle for a tightened censorship law, "children" resounds but the voice of children is rarely heard. In other words, an anti-porn populist movement in the name of children is, according to Hui, a simulated politics, for the movement does not treat children as a political subject.[25]

<16> In sum, the core values central to liberalism have been gradually vanishing from the hands of wives who worry their husbands would compare them with female protagonists in pornography. The values are also losing their importance when parents are overwhelmed with fear of having children being indulged in sex. Moral populism rises in times when Hong Kong was bombarded by a series of economic crises (e.g., economic tsunami), health threats (e.g., SARS) and political upheavals. The netizens who launched public ridicule of the half naked teenagers and the worrying parents who ask for a more stringent law are epitome of a general anxiety and dissatisfaction in the late modern society. What makes parents anxious is that they have lagged far behind their children in terms of I.T. competency. When teaching and learning are largely conducted by means of computers, the Internet and many other high-power and compact electronic devices, they have become a necessity. Barring children from accessing the Internet is plainly not an option. Even if having filtering softwares installed, parents are almost always short of the knowledge that their children could have in a few clicks to disable it. Similarly, the source of anxiety for wives originates from the fundamental transformation that intimacy, especially the sexual one, has undergone in the last few decades. Intimacy, including marriage, is no longer guaranteed for life if both parties are not willing or not prepared to treat it as an open project subject to incessant negotiation. Hindered by a culture that sees sex as taboo, women lack the opportunity to gain sexual experience and by which to develop a sexual identity. Such a deficiency is particularly troubling when they come across pornography. In addition to general anxiety, the attack against the buttock-exposed teenagers is mixed up with ressentiment. These teens are labeled as idlers, a stereotypical representation of the 1980s and1990s generations. Although netizens' attack against them is rather harsh, it is more or less indicative of the netizens' own dissatisfaction with depressing work environments and conditions. Nudity in public is more than fun, but transgresses the boundary between decency and vulgarity which most workers might have reluctantly embodied so as to fulfill the "norm" of work ethic. As a result, the plurality of choices released in the late modern society, as Anthony Giddens predicts, is unbearable to some netizens, wives and parents for making choices is risky and negotiation is time-consuming. To them, freedom is not only dangerous but also disturbing. So, they are willing to abandon freedom in exchange for routinized way of life and sense of security because freedom can only be acquired if they need not plan what to eat, what to wear, how to speak, how to have sex and how to mould themselves as a sculpture.[26] To respond to populism, organic intellectuals need to rethink what "morality" could be meant to social movements and to recognize the importance of their own role in moral debates.

Conclusion

<17> Sociologist Anthony Giddens persuasively argues that industrial capitalism fundamentally transforms the social fabric, instilling awareness of risks into the private sphere. What he identifies in the contemporary social world is not fragmentation but ever pervasive unifying features that cut across public and private spheres. He contends that there is a built-in disembedding mechanism in contemporary social institutions which is a consequence of (1) the reorganization of space and time in the way of emptying time and making time less relevant, (2) the de-localization of capitals and information. For example, with advanced communication technology, capitals and information are no longer bound by place. Media plays an important role in the way we connect ourselves with the rest of the world so much so that very single piece of experience is mediated. This disembedding mechanism launches a full-blown attack to traditions so that the old-day power structures and hegemony are scattered. Life prospects and social order are no longer guaranteed. One of the most discernible consequences is the pervasive and day-to-day life experience of doubt and feelings of insecurity. In sum, the demise of tradition that once guaranteed the meaning of life, the decentring of authority and its internal dispute lead to another social consequence: the heightened awareness of risks which constitutes "a general existential dimension of the contemporary social world."[27] Authority crisis together with the emergence of risk culture is a consequence of modernization; these effects, however, act on modernization itself as a routinized back-and-forth exercise. Giddens terms it reflexivity. In his own words, "[M]odernity's reflexivity refers to the susceptibility of most aspects of social activity, and material relations with nature, to chronic revision in the light of new information or knowledge."[28]

<18> With no guarantee offered by traditions and a heightened awareness of risks (and their utilities), leading a life means constantly addressing ontological insecurity by making pragmatic decisions among competing truth-claims and the plurality of choices. It follows that we have to make choices as to what to eat, what to wear, how to present ourselves etc. Giddens, therefore, argues the existential question and people in modern society ask is how we should live instead of who I am. The proverbial question, "who am I?" posits that there is a true self out there to be found, to be dug out while the question "How should we live?" understands that the small and big decisions we make in our ordinary life constitute the meaning of life. As such the self and the body become a reflexive project, an ever on-going project that needs to be reflexively made and organized. In Giddens' own words, personal life has become an open project. We are forced to choose and to be passively creative.

<19> Giddens' analysis poses challenges to progressive and queer-identified intellectuals as to how to respond to "how should we live" on the one hand and resist Christian Rights' monopoly of the meanings of "family", "goodness" and "ethics" on the other hand. However, activists who have been in various emancipatory movements might find it uncomfortable because "should" signifies the social norms that classify people into good or bad and grant them rights and social recognition unequally. In this light, releasing people from constraints seems to be the goal that activists aspire to while imposing on what others "should" do necessarily runs counter to emancipatory movements. If it is the case, then the common vision of all emancipatory movements would be a society free from constraints. When it comes to the politics of family, there has been a voice within progressives that despite emphasizing how diverse forms of family could be and how differently ones can envision family life, the struggle for the right to form family still gets trapped within a regulatory framework that imposes norms. It is argued that the family as an ideology must be reproduced and strengthened in the very practice of forming family. Is there a new way for progressives and queer-identified intellectuals to rethink what it is meant by "norm"?

<20> The ways that progressives and members of LGBTQ communities relate to social norms has been a key issue that has preoccupied the works of feminist-cum-queer theorist Judith Butler in the last few years. In Undoing Gender, she poses a question that might of help to our deliberation on the relation between social transformation and norms.[29] She asks: if gender is a regulatory fiction that restricts life choice, is undoing gender a goal that feminists should support? Judith Butler replies in her typical style: yes and no. She argues that because of the limitations of grammar, when we speak of doing and undoing, we often assume that there is a subject behind the act of doing and undoing. Gender is understood, on this assumption, as a script that can be rewritten by the author at will. However, Butler argues that gender is a not construction that we can make and remake at will. It is a social norm that is prior to our very existence and beyond our arbitrary manipulation. For example, even if I resist being named as a boy or girl, I still have no way to shield myself from the social expectations, discipline and power relations with which the label is associated when that label is forcefully assigned to me by, say, a medical doctor. Gender, to Butler, is considered a natural(ized) human attribute which forms one of the basic criteria for defining humanness. If we fail to comply with the criteria, we would lose the status of being a human and its concomitant rights, the rights that are said to be entitled to human form only. If who I am is performatively formed, then the regulatory norms that restrict our performativity are the very conditions of our being, or in Butler's world, they are the conditions of possibility of living.

<21> Butler argues that denying these conditions of possibility that forms who we are is the same to denying the agency that they grant us because agency is paradoxically derived from those conditions of possibility. She observes that any social norms are inherently contradictory in their effect in that they subject us to their rule while subjectivate us into a subject with agency. So, the problem is how "I" which is performatively formed by the regulatory fiction can keep a critical distance from and transform the very regulatory fiction? Here, Butler highlights the conflicts between intersex and transgender movement.

<22> For Intersex movements, children who are born with genitalia of two sexes are forced to undergo sex assignment surgery so as to make it fit into the either/or gender system. Intersex movements advocate that parents and doctors should postpone and leave it to the children if they want to have their body complied with the mainstream dichotomous body schema when they grow up. They ask medicine to return the right to gender to people with gender ambiguity. However, some transgender people oppose the very process of demedicalization that intersex movements are asking for because it would make sex reassignment surgery unaffordable if it is no longer a disease that justifies the use of public money. The dilemma is that cancelling the medical authority in defining gender can reduce necessary surgeries performed on intersex children but makes sex reassignment surgery no longer a treatable disease that public medical care or health insurance would cover. For those who are so eager to have sex changed, it would simply reduce the chance of passing in another gender. The question that Butler would like us to ponder is whether undoing gender; i.e., dissolving it altogether, as a regulatory fiction can release more livable space or not?

<23> Contradictory as it may seem, intersex movements and transgender movements are taking pains to gain more agency in determining who they are. Nevertheless, as argued below, agency is only made possible by rounds of negotiation with the norm that constitutes the self. Without norms, we can hardly be recognized by others as the way we desire. Without challenging the very same set of norms, we cannot be said to exercise agency. As such, Butler argues that "What precisely autonomy means, however, is complicated for both movements, since it turns out that choosing one's own body invariably means navigating among norms that are laid out in advance and prior to one's choice or are being articulated in concert by other minority agencies."[30] The paradox of norms and agency lies, on the one hand, in the fact that more autonomy is fought by making rights-claims to established social norms such as human rights discourse. On the other hand, the very social norms have to be challenged and revised in order to accommodate more life options which is the basis of what autonomy really means. Argued in this way, Butlers sees no inherent contradiction but dialectic between norms and agency. They do not cancel out and constitute each other. Or, in other words, each is a condition of possibility of the other. We have no way to free ourselves from social norms once and for all at will because it is the norms that constitute the basis on which we organize experience, build self-identity and form community. Nevertheless, to gain more autonomy, we need to transform those norms to the effect that they are dissolved at one point of time while reinstated and renewed at another.

<24> Moral populism makes use of the misunderstanding and dissatisfaction with democracy. It becomes more rampant in late modern society where anxiety prevails. Encroachment of the public sphere by the private is facilitated by anxiety actively mobilized by religious groups and political parties. The rise of moral populism has brought to the fore moral issues, or the political dimension of morality, that queer-identified activists and intellectuals urgently need to intervene.

End Notes

[1] Cho Man-kit is a lecturer at the Gender Studies Program of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Executive Co-director of Nu Tong Xue She, one of the active LBGTQ groups in Hong Kong.

[2] Oriental Daily, January, 28, 2012.

[3] Apple Daily, February, 22, 2012

[4] Apple Daily, March, 20, 2012

[5] Oriental Daily, April, 24, 2012.

[6] Hong Kong Economic Times, April, 26, 2012.

[7] Hong Kong Economic Times, April, 26, 2014.

[8] Oriental Daily, June, 5, 2012.

[9] Singtao, December, 9, 2011.

[10] See Daniel Solove, The future of reputation: gossip, rumor, and privacy on the Internet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

[11] "The Performativity of Disgust", The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 82-100.

[12] The way Ahmed explains the mechanism of fear production is strikingly similar to how Eve Sedgwick and Diana Fuss understand hetero/homosexual definition. They argue that homosexuality and heterosexuality seem to be contradictory to each other but, in effect, mutually dependent. Graphically speaking, the boundary of heterosexuality (i.e. that heterosexuality is defined or understood as such) can only be established by filtering non-heterosexuality inside out. Such an inside/out movement temporarily stabilizes the boundary that circumscribes heterosexuality inside while homosexuality outside. The effective boundary of the positive term, i.e., heterosexuality, is always circumscribed by the repressed term that it repels. It follows that heterosexuality (the subject, the inside) is defined by homosexuality (the other, the outside). Therefore, the other (the repressed term) is an indispensable interior exclusion to the positive term. It is indispensable because the meaning of heterosexuality depends on it. It is, at the same time, interior because it is constitutive of and central to the definition of heterosexuality. It is an exclusion because, irrespective of its centrality to heterosexuality, it is excluded. Understood as such, homosexuality is like a specter that always threatens heterosexuality. Diana Fuss "Inside/Out," inInside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 1-10. And Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

[13] Hui Po-keung, Farewell to Cynicism: the crisis of Hong Kong's liberalism (Chinese) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[14] In fact, Hui noticed that populist logic has spread to gender and sexuality issues but he did not make further deliberation but briefly touched on it by way of a number of incidents in relation to gender and sexuality. Hui, 2005,134.

[15] Law, Liberty, and Morality (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,1963).

[16] For example, Hart argues that paternalism might be a legitimate ground for regulation of sex. Ibid., 30.

[17] Ibid., 79.

[18] Hui, 135

[19] See Cho Man-kit, "Closely Connected: Homosexuality and the Politics of Family," in Connections: Trans-local Exchanges on Chinese Gender/Sexuality (Chinese), ed. Josephine Ho Chuen-juei (Chungli, Taiwan: Center for the Study of Sexualities, National Central University, Taiwan, 2010), 277-304 for how "family" is made an empty signifier by the HKSAR government, the mainland government and the religious rights in Hong Kong.

[20] See P.Y. Lo, "Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance (Cap 390)," in The Annotated Ordinances of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Butterworths, first issue in 1996; revised in 2006).

[21] The guidance given by the Ordinance prescribes that adjudicators need to consider the "standards of morality, decency and propriety that are generally accepted by reasonable members of the community" when exercising their administrative as well as legal functions. However, no mechanism has ever been suggested to ensure that adjudicators are able represent the standards of morality, decency and propriety of the general public instead of his/her own preferences or bias. Worse still, such a guidance is inherently discriminatory against minority from the start because it takes the majority as the standard. Even if there is such a standard and classifying articles in question on that standard is valid, violation of the standard is no more than offending other's moral sentiment and therefore does not justify to make it a criminal offence.

[22] On 21st October 2008, the Court of First Instance ruled that the appeal lodged by the student union of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Mingpao against the determination of the Obscene Articles Tribunal was allowed. The Court quashed the determination and lamented that the Tribunal adopted a rather lax approach to fulfilling the legal requirements set out by the Ordinance.

[23] http://www.coiao.gov.hk/b5/archive/public_opinion.htm, accessed September, 1 2012

[24] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO5cpfUnK9I, accessed September, 1, 2012.

[25] Hui, 142-43.

[26] Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

[27] Ibid., 3.

[28] Ibid., 20.

[29] (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).

[30] "Introduction: Acting in Concert" (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 7.

Works Cited

Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge.

Fuss, D. (1991). "Inside/Out," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss, 1-10. New York and London: Routledge.

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hart, H. L. A. (1963). Law, Liberty, and Morality. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Lo, P. Y. (2006). Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance (Cap 390). in The Annotated Ordinances of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Butterworths.

Cho, M. K. (2010). Closely Connected: Homosexuality and the Politics of Family. in Connections: Trans-local Exchanges on Chinese Gender/Sexuality (Chinese), ed. Josephine Ho Chuen-juei, 277-304. Chungli, Taiwan: Center for the Study of Sexualities, National Central University, Taiwan.

Hui, P. K. (2005). Farewell to Cynicism: the crisis of Hong Kong's liberalism (Chinese). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Solove, D. (2007). The future of reputation: gossip, rumor, and privacy on the Internet. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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