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This chapter focuses on selected consumption spaces and their multiple characteristics in the everyday lives of the informants. It investigates how lesbian commercial spaces function as temporary sites of resistance for Hong Kong lesbians to validate their identities, form social networks, and question their political subjectivities. The chapter defines lesbian commercial spaces as businesses that primarily but not exclusively cater to biological women with lesbian desires, bisexual women, and transgender lesbians, through their marketing strategies, such as posting on lesbian websites or passing out flyers at lesbian events. These spaces include lesbian bars, upstairs cafés, and a lesbian-specialty store. Different from women-only spaces, these gendered spaces are not run for women by women, rather they do have customers or employees who identify as transgender or biologically male. High rental prices make it impossible for exclusively lesbian spaces to survive in an exceedingly competitive business environment such as that in the city of Hong Kong.

This chapter is about how extraterritoriality was elevated from the level of spontaneous awareness to a fully formed political consciousness in the 1980s and 1990s under the uncertainty of the future of Hong Kong. It argues that the sociopolitical unpredictability, irresolution, and disquietude during this period created a milieu in which individuation, subjectivisation, and autonomisation were impossible, an environment constituted by a perpetual failure of becoming: the time it takes for time to end. This chapter offers a historical account of the Sino-British negotiation of the future of Hong Kong between 1979 and 1984. After that, it analyses how such a traumatic experience was actively negotiated by a kaleidoscopic media environment from both industrial and cultural perspectives. Eventually, it departs from most scholars’ tendency to focus on Hong Kong’s successful mainstream film and television industries by examining how artists responded to these relationships in video art. It scrutinises the works of artists from an organisation called Videotage, which further developed the experimental ethos of the women (and in the 1980s, lesbian and gay) filmmakers in an intersection of three modes of extraterritoriality: as Hong Kongers, as women, and as lesbians and gay men.