20 JUL 2026 (MON) 15:05 - 15:35

Pilgrimage of the Rainbow: A Study of Mainland Chinese Queer Groups Traveling to Hong Kong and Taiwan

Miss SHU Ya    

( Supervisor: Prof Benjamin Iaquinto )

Abstract:

Sinophone queer studies have emphasized community activities, migration-based forms of transnational mobility, and the representation of queer identities in cinema and media, highlighting their importance in the formation of queer subjectivities. Meanwhile, research on queer tourism, largely centered on Western contexts, has demonstrated the critical role of tourism in shaping queer identity and community.

However, these two strands of scholarship remain insufficiently connected. Meanwhile, queer tourists from Mainland China are increasingly visiting Hong Kong and Taiwan as a form of queer pilgrimage, but little research has examined this phenomenon. Understanding these forms of tourism mobility would help to advance Sinophone queer studies. 

Informed by an ethnographic approach, this research explores how queer tourists from Mainland China experience travel to Hong Kong and Taiwan as a form of pilgrimage, and how such journeys can be understood through theories of liminality, affect, and landscape. Drawing on Victor Turner’s liminality and van Gennep’s rites of passage, this study conceptualizes queer travel as a transitional process in which individuals move between social, cultural, and emotional states. Hong Kong and Taiwan are approached as “pilgrimage sites,” where travelers seek freedom, belonging, and alternative possibilities of feeling. By connecting affect theory with human geography, this study highlights how landscapes are not passive settings but are actively produced through embodied, sensory, and emotional engagement. 

The phenomenological contribution of this research lies in illuminating how queer tourism within the Sinophone world is lived and experienced, particularly through the embodied, emotional, and spatial practices of travelers. Its theoretical contribution lies in creatively integrating the concepts of liminality, landscape, and affect, clarifying the attributes of their mutual entanglement and influence, and validating them through ethnographic methods. Overall, the research contributes to work in anthropology and human geography on the implications of affective situated knowledge emerging via transience and mobility. 

Keywords: Queer tourism; Pilgrimage; Liminal Landscape; Affect; Anthropology