Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

political statements and opportunists can capitalize on these for publicity and popularity. The ambiguous
policy of “No Support, No Oppression, No Advocacy” for queer social movements seems to symbolize official
permission for queer liberation in China, and a number of queer songs have been released, but the dual
logics of avant-gardism and commercialism in queer representation control the structure of ambiguity and
maintain a heteronormative politics and social order beneath a flamboyant queer visuality.
Keewoong Lee Living Home Abroad: Deterritorialized Musical Practices of Western Migrants and Production of
Cosmopolitan Cultural Space in Korea
The Hongdae area in Seoul has been the epicenter of Korean indie music. However, it has often been
neglected that the Hongdae indie community has been a product of translocal cultural exchange. In
particular, western migrants have been important agents in the making of the community, at first as clubgoers,
sidemen in Korean-led bands or their friends. Lately, however, their involvement in the scene became
deeper and more central. There emerged all-expat or expat-led bands, expat-run record labels and live
venues, expat event organizers, bloggers and music crews. This rapidly expanding network is creating a new
scene and changing cultural geography of the neighborhood. This paper traces how and why this change
came about; what forces were in play in its happening; and what effects it produces. Based on in-depth
interview, this paper argues that it produces a cosmopolitan space where new rules, aesthetics and
sensibilities are being made.
4G
Collective urban practices (Chair, Karma Chahine)
Åsa Bäckström* & Karen Nairn* Sweden’s gender (in)equalities: how young women skateboarders materialise
femininity in public space
Sweden prides itself as a country where young women can enjoy gender equality. Yet many young women
skateboarders experience harassment in public spaces. Drawing from a sensory ethnography, and inspired
by the material turn in the social sciences, we analyse how women skateboarders experience the material
environments of urban public space, while paying attention to the social and cultural context of Sweden. The
urban environment with its smooth marble or rough asphalt surfaces, its alarming sounds and tingling
smells, shapes the experience of skateboarding and the construction of femininity. The construction of
femininity is also shaped by a social and cultural context that assumes “gender equality” is secure. This paper
contributes new empirical findings on what it means to skateboard in public spaces as a gendered minority,
and adds to the debate on how a material feminist theory might be developed without overlooking the
significance of social and cultural contexts.
Nikhil Thomas Titus
Mumbai
Infrastructure, Cinema and the City: Migrant narratives, democracies and the film ecology of
Cinema and the city of Mumbai are undergoing a process of gentrification in its infrastructures and
corresponding narratives. When a few criminals were traced to video parlours in Mumbai, the police decided
that banning video parlours was a solution to the problem. The prolific coverage that such cases receive in
the “breaking news” culture of today, combined with middle class morality convey an image of
perverseness. Under the guise of infrastructure development for a modern cityscape, the cultural
ostracisation combined with neo-liberal development ideologies, result in certain forms being kept out of
the mindscapes of the burgeoning elite, also in mass scale displacements of marginalized populations unable
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