Digital intimacy: young women in inter-Asia

The Introduction lays out the context and the concepts that undergird the multi-sited inter-Asia research project concluded in 2022 on college-going women and digital intimacy that is the basis of this special issue. We draw on the frameworks of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies to argue that inter-referencing, through multiplying reference points across our four sites within the region, orients our research through local/national/global routes that not only push against normative nationalism, but also create alternative routes for comparative thinking beyond those whose trajectories pass willy-nilly through the West. In-depth ethnographic interviews were conducted in four “smart cities,” Hong Kong, Singapore, Guangzhou and Bangalore. Through a feminist lens, we discuss how the hypervisibility or publicity of the digital space can actually generate a form of privacy. We talk about the entanglements and oscillations and relationalities that can be called digital intimacy, experienced differently across families and friends and romance. While acknowledging the proliferation of digital technology in the contemporary world, we lay stress on the long and deep histories of gendering and subject formation on each site, entangled with colonialism and post-colonialism, socialism and post-socialism. We suggest that the presence of the digital everyday and neo-liberal globalisation in each site should not conceal from us the uneven modernities that have shaped our four cities.