On Sundays the Filipinos would sit in Central and the Indonesians in the Victoria Park and meet their friends who also come from the same motherland. Thousands of Indonesian migrant women occupying the Victoria Park has become a part of human landscape in Hong Kong. In fact, the identity of Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong is worth exploring. On one hand, they are part of Hong Kong as they penetrated into the local family and many of them have already lived in Hong Kong for at least a decade. On the other hand, they are regarded as outsider due to their ethnicity. The gap between these two could be explored through the race, class, labor perspectives, which are always adopted by the journalists and the union.
And yet, a more comprehensive discussion should be done on the gender and sexuality perspectives if we want to emphasis and understand the subjectivity of this group of women. For example, how the Indonesian women become a migrant worker in order to support their family, how they are betrayed by their husband in Indonesia. Nonetheless, these discussion always portrayed them in fulfilling a traditional female role, which is homogenous as it neglected the rich dimension of gender and sexuality. In daily lives, we could always see some Indonesian domestic workers dressed up like a man in Hong Kong, which might give us some hints of their complex gender identity. In fact, many of them are engaging in lesbian relationship in Hong Kong. Though LGBT movement is prevailing in Hong Kong, their faces seldom appear on the Chinese news. Their class, ethnicity and sexual orientation have made them very marginalized.
Therefore, we would like to explore the lesbian relationship among Indonesia domestic workers in Hong Kong. Our research questions would include: How is their experiences of homosexual and relationship in Indonesia and Hong Kong? Given their limited space, time, money, etc. How do they sustain & live out their romantic relationships? And how do migrant lesbians make use of online social media?