Creative industries, showbiz, and sexualized young women: The Hong Kong book fair

This article investigates the annual Hong Kong Book Fair, where lang mo—sexy girls who would not qualify for conventional fashion modeling but appear almost ubiquitously in the city—and their sexy photo albums, calendars, cushions in their body shapes, and high-profile presence, have been causing public debates and moral panic. Drawing on material published during the media battle that started in 2009 and culminated the year after, I argue that the lang mo and the controversy surrounding their presence transformed the real place of the Book Fair into a heterotopic space where other sites were juxtaposed, where utopian ideals were constituted and contested, where young women and men were celebrating their moments of freedom and conjuring regimes of control.