Female soundwalk: Chinese female immigrants and public space in Hong Kong

Soundwalk practice began in the last century, developing from a methodological tool to include recent artistic approaches (Paquette & McCartney, 2012). Soundwalking has also been used as a feminist methodology to explore females’ sensory engagement and embodiment of hidden contexts (O Keeffe & Nogueira, 2018), through its possibility to move us from “distant panorama to vibrating immediacy” (Loveless, 2020). Gender relations are significant to space construction (Massey, 2013), feminist research explore the public space as a gendered, sexualized and racialized arena(Scraton & Watson,1998). The research for this paper puts Chinese female migrants at the centre of the creative soundwalking process, an artist-led soundwalk project being conducted in urban public spaces in Hong Kong. It aims to investigate these questions: What role does sound in urban public space play from the perspective of Chinese female migrants’? Secondly, how do Chinese females re-experience and understand public space through soundwalks, and how will they re-understanding the sounds in their familiar spaces after the soundwalk? Thirdly, what is the relationship between sound, the female body and public space?