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Although young men’s subjectivity continues to be defined in terms of their heterosexual performance, they feel vulnerable when women increasingly resist submission to men’s desire and control. However, the sexual objectification of women, driven by consumerist urban culture and commercial media, is rapidly pushing the boundaries of men’s (hetero)sexual expression. Men are thus compelled to renegotiate their masculine heterosexual subjectivities in response to women’s resistance and the demands of the moralistic middle-class society. Based on the performativity-performance framework, this article uses focus group data with Hong Kong college men to illustrate the ways that Chinese young men are “performatively vigilant,” resorting to different cultural and discursive resources to construct multiple and diverse subjectivities in defining manhood and responding to their vulnerabilities in different relational contexts. In this process, the hegemony of men as sexually and culturally superior to women and in control of themselves and the situation is propagated.

Immigration, living arrangement and the poverty risk of older adults in Hong Kong Using 2011 census data, this study investigated how living arrangement affects disparities in poverty between older adults (aged 65 and older) who migrated to Hong Kong from Mainland China and those who were born in Hong Kong. Our sample consisted of 29,987 immigrants and 9,398 natives, all of whom were ethnic Chinese and living in Hong Kong at the time of the census. We found higher poverty rates among older immigrants than among natives, a disparity that persisted even after adjusting for living arrangement, human capital characteristics, assimilation-related variables, household composition and demographic characteristics. We also found that living arrangement moderated the impact of immigrant status on the poverty risk among older adults, and that the impact was due mainly to the number of earners in the household. The implications of our results with respect to poverty among older adults and anti-poverty measures are discussed.

The Hong Kong population will age rapidly over the next three decades and the entailing problem of old-age poverty will put the Hong Kong government to test. While the government has been using a solely income-based measurement, the main purpose of this study is to assess poverty rates among Hong Kong's older population in terms of both income and consumption-based measurements by using both relative and absolute concepts of poverty. It also examines the association of socio-economic and household characteristics with elder poverty rates. A two-stage stratified sample design was adopted. A total of , older adults were personally interviewed in their homes, yielding a response rate of . per cent. This study contributes to the larger study on poverty in Hong Kong by revealing how income and consumption poverty rates may differ among older adults. Older adults who were both income and consumption poor were more likely to be female, widowed, living alone and to have received less than an elementary school-level education. They possessed very few assets and were most likely financially dependent on family support and welfare payments. To understand fully the economic wellbeing of older adults in Hong Kong, this study proposes that joint distribution of income and consumption poverty can better identify and explain the demographic characteristics of the poor older adults. Implications of the study are discussed based on the neo-liberalist approach that the Hong Kong government has taken in welfare provisions.

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