Queer Bonds at Work: A Dialectical Approach to Understanding Workplace Relations Among Sexual Minority Employees in Hong Kong

This article contributes to the organisational literature and queer scholarship by analysing Chinese sexual minority employees’ experiences of building queer bonds at the nexus of tensions between continued heteronormativity at work and the emerging neoliberal politics of diversity and inclusion in Hong Kong. Through in-depth interviews with sexual minority employees, this study identified three types of queer bonds, defined as bonding based on shared experiences of marginalisation that questions established social structures: ‘queer bonds at a distance’, ‘bottom-up queer bonds’ and ‘queer bonds in-between transgressing and maintaining boundaries’. The dialectical approach to mapping queer bonds foregrounds the tensions facing Chinese sexual minority employees – struggling between conforming to local cultural values and fighting for inclusion in workplaces. Sensitive to self/other entanglements and the tensions between resisting and accommodating, this dialectical approach broadens our understanding of what it means to be ‘queer’ and reveals diverse forms of bonding.