Abstract

This article analyzes Ray Yeung’s 2019 film Suk Suk to examine what it means to live in modern-day Hong Kong, where overt homophobic violence is rare, but the experience of precarity is acutely felt. The film follows two elderly gay men in Hong Kong who find romantic solace in each other but are forced to part ways due to family obligations. Focusing on the film’s emphasis on the everyday minutiae and its use of banality as an aesthetic and narrative strategy, I contend that the absence of explicit anti-queer aggression in Suk Suk reveals a culturally specific form of queer precarity articulated through sexual minorities’ compulsory performance of heteronormativity. Drawing on the literature on homophobia in East and South-East Asia, queer film studies, queer theories, and the theory of utterance, I posit the concept of “heteronormality” to highlight the banal aesthetics and everyday temporality of heteronormativity that naturalize this state of repression as a quotidian experience. Furthermore, I analyze Suk Suk’s spatial representation of this particular form of heteronormativity by examining the urban experience of Pak and Hoi. Attending to Hong Kong’s hybrid global-local status, I argue that while this hybridization has afforded Hong Kong’s urban space new forms of queer sociality and cultures, it has also intensified and created novel kinds of queer precarity that further the marginalization of the already vulnerable individuals like Pak and Hoi.