Asian Queer Studies

【Now published: https://shorturl.at/dDV34 】
Coming out in queer community is widely discussed and theorized in the West. While the burgeoning research on coming out has explored many of its aspects, ranging from parental reactions (Denes & Afifi, 2014; Fields, 2001) to online identity formation (Craig & McInroy, 2015; Gray, 2009), a notable gap exists pertaining to coming out in cross-cultural contexts. In other words, few studies address LGBTQ individuals’ lived experiences of coming out in diverse cultural backgrounds. This paper investigates the coming-out narratives of four gay Indian immigrants that were elicited in interviews; it highlights how the narrators bring about their social identities as they respond to available social constructs and the sociopolitical landscape in the U.S. Heeding Rust’s (1993) call for reconceptualization of coming out as “an ongoing dynamic process of describing one’s social location within a changing social context” (p.74), I use discourse analysis to examine the narrators’ use of linguistic devices to accomplish positioning in their coming-out stories, thus illuminating how gay immigrants negotiate the challenges and evaluations they face in migrating from India to the U.S. and revealing their reflections on these contrastive sociocultural contexts.
The analysis demonstrates three significant shared features in the coming-out stories. First, in responding to the interviewer’s question “what is coming out,” participants emphasize coming out to others, a departure from the Western theorization that coming out to self is the first and most important stage (e.g., Cass identity model, 1979). Second, their engagement in local queer communities in the U.S. reinforces their openness toward disclosure of their gay identities that would be impossible in India, indicating their identification with queer discourse and their understanding of the transition from one social context to another as facilitating coming out. Finally, they cast themselves against the backdrop of marriage to resist traditional Indian heteronormativity while affirming their gay identities in the U.S.

https://tinyurl.com/queergfb

Contemporary popular culture stereotypes Filipina women as sex workers, domestic laborers, mail order brides, and caregivers. These figures embody the gendered and sexual politics of representing the Philippine nation in the Filipina/o diaspora. Gina K. Velasco explores the tensions within Filipina/o American cultural production between feminist and queer critiques of the nation and popular nationalism as a form of resistance to neoimperialism and globalization.

Using a queer diasporic analysis, Velasco examines the politics of nationalism within Filipina/o American cultural production to consider an essential question: can a queer and feminist imagining of the diaspora reconcile with gendered tropes of the Philippine nation? Integrating a transnational feminist analysis of globalized gendered labor with a consideration of queer cultural politics, Velasco envisions forms of feminist and queer diasporic belonging, while simultaneously foregrounding nationalist movements as vital instruments of struggle.

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In this essay, I examine the mobilisation of lesbian history in the construction and support of the idea of a Japanese lesbian community. I begin in postwar Japan, when we can find evidence for a sense of community among women who link their identities to their desire for other women, and when we see the first generation of women who identify as and generate a discourse about being ‘lesbian’ (resubian or rezubian). Specifically, I look at several key moments in lesbian discourse to identify shifts in the way lesbian history has been mobilised. I first examine writing on lesbianism in the popular press leading up to and overlapping with the putative start of the lesbian community in 1971, discourse wherein, reflecting sexological tradition, references to ancient Greece and other cultures remained common. I then consider popular writing produced within the lesbian community during what I label the long 1990s, a decade sometimes referred to as having experienced a ‘gay boom’ in the mass media and which witnessed an increase in visibility of what was then called the ‘lesbian and gay community’. During this period we can see a clear turn toward mapping out a modern and contemporary Japanese lesbian history, a process that has entailed overt acts of reclamation as well as omission. Finally, by way of a coda, I look at recent academic works that might be located in the gradually expanding field of lesbian studies, in which the past that has been mobilised as Japanese lesbian history has sometimes been repurposed and reconsidered, or challenged by the individuals whose stories are being retold.

This paper examines how Korean gays and lesbians negotiate South Korea's heteronormative system anchored in the heterosexual and patriarchal family through marriages of convenience ("contract marriages"). Korean gays and lesbians pursue contract marriages in order to fulfill their filial duties to marry, while maintaining their gay and lesbian lifestyles. Yet, in pursuing contract marriages as individuals but in the service of conforming to the family, they both reinscribe and transform the heteronormative values of marriage, family, and children. They also challenge the Westernized model of the "out and proud" gay or lesbian.

Queer Theory emerged as an academic term in the early nineties in North America. The mantle has since splintered into Queer theory, queer theories and “queer” as a variety of scholars, critics and activists continue to debate meanings and relevance. Broadly understood as an umbrella term for non-normative identities, Queer theory can also be read as a signal for any inquiry into the regulatory function of norms and an exploration of what lies beyond limits or boundaries for any form of thought or representation.

The Global Queer Asias series provides an interdisciplinary platform for conceptual, archival, and ethnographic research that pushes academic discussions of Asia in new directions. The series publishes groundbreaking books from both established academics and rising scholars with innovative rubrics, frameworks, and agendas. Works in this series should engage with inclusively defined “queer” issues, that is, the social and cultural dynamics of gender and sexual diversity. Though situated in geographic sites typically associated with the label “Asia,” this series pushes for comparative and global perspectives and calls for rigorous attention to themes, approaches, and social-cultural patterns that either emerge from cross-border movements or transcend regional and national boundaries. Studies in which diaspora and migration ex- periences come to the fore are especially welcome, as is research that brings critical race/ethnic theory, disability studies, and other intersectional approaches to bear on inter-regional studies outside the modern West.

Series Editors:

Howard Chiang is the Lai Ho and Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
James Welker is a Professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies at Kanagawa University.

Submissions:

Authors interested in submitting their work for possible publication in the series are requested to send materials as email attachments rather than via postal mail. Please send a message plus attachments to the Series Editors (hhchiang@ucdavis.edu; jrwelker@kanagawa-u.ac.jp) and University of Michigan Press Editor, Marcella Landri (mlandri@umich.edu).

Kindly include a prospectus, c.v., table of contents, and any sample chapters available.

This essay presents a queer Sinophone rethinking of Marx’s concept
of value. I coin the term ‘perverse use-value’ to name the reification of queer bodies as risky, socially non-reproductive, and hence perverse; alternatively, a critical reckoning of how queer bodies assume perverse
meanings can point to the ways queer subjects and cultural producers boldly occupy the negativity of perversion. Examining Cui Zi’en’s 2003 film Money Boy Diaries based in Beijing, Simon Chung’s 2009 Hong Kong film End of Love and the queer Taiwan poet Chen Kehua’s 2006 collection of poems called A Kind Man, this essay demonstrates the queer potentiality to remake lifeworlds within and against the developmental logics of neoliberalism and homonormative sexual respectability.

I focus on online posts and hashtags circulated after the news that two lesbians were caned in Malaysia. I unpack some perhaps unintended consequences of speaking from the diaspora in relation to settler/orientalist homonationalism and imperialism. I ask what are the assumptions behind 'diasporic blaming'; in what ways does such blaming exceed or conform to the discursive limits of the transnational white settler nationalism; how do people like me who are from these 'backward' places think through and criticize such blaming and how can we critically engage with the imagined 'non-West' from the location of a settler colonial and anti-immigrant (especially queer refugees) nation-state known as Canada. Content warning: the q word will be used as an act of reclaiming

Many studies have investigated the discourses of gay identity appearing within Japanese media, focusing upon the relationships between gay and gendered identity categories. However, very few studies have specifically examined the affects that consumption of media has on individual gay men’s understandings of their desires and identities. This thesis examines how young gay men in Japan engage with the media landscape anchored to Shinjuku Ni-chōme and explores how identity categories known as “Types” act as a semiotic system that influences understandings of sexuality, desire and identity. The study engages with desire as a social construct that influences processes of identification, investigating how individuals articulate their gay desires in the wider heteronormative social system, where homosexuality is constructed as unnatural and perverted.
The study draws upon two interrelated sources of data: case studies of six young Japanese gay men’s consumption of media and content analyses of gay media. Data were collected through ethnographic participant observation conducted in Shinjuku Ni-chōme, intervention interviews with 50 young gay men, a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with six principal informants, and quantitative and qualitative content analyses of gay magazines, pornographic videos, news sites and online dating services. The data were interpreted reflexively through the application of a Social Realist approach to research which posits that structural forces and an individual’s agency affect an individual’s discursive engagement with the world. To investigate the roles structure and agency played in the reflexive and historical process of meaning-making, the thesis drew upon Layder’s Domain Theory (1993, 1997) as a conceptual framework.
This study found that Typing dominated how gay desire was presented in Shinjuku Ni-chōme and the Japanese gay media. The six principal informants consumed a wide variety of this gay media, expressing that it allowed them to explore their desires in ways that challenged wider society’s conceptualisation of homosexuality, with consumption of pornography being particularly prevalent. Through their consumption, they learnt about Typing and viewed it as a method to understand individual and personal identity. However, as a classificatory system, Typing reduced desire to normative modes of consumption and identity was consequently reduced to the ascription of physical appearances and associated gendered performances. The study established that Japanese gay media promoted heteronormative understandings of masculinity as desirable, privileging hegemonic masculinity and youth whilst marginalising effeminacy. In particular, the figure of the heterosexual male was fetishized throughout Japanese gay cultural production, situating discourses of desirability within a heteronormative gendered binary. This privileging inculcated in some informants the normalcy of hard, rough masculinity and caused anxiety to those who felt they could not live up to such gendered ideals. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the dominance of Typing in Japan’s gay sub-culture limits the agency of young gay men in Japan, forcing them to fit their identities within its system in order to become desirable to others. Through this discussion, the thesis expands our knowledge of Japanese conceptualisations of sexuality, gender, masculinity and race, challenging dominant, Western-centric understandings of sexuality that underpin much queer studies research.

An essay on the visual culture of the Pink Dot movement in Singapore, focusing on its pink gradient. Over the past ten years, the Pink Dot—as an event and monochrome visual iconography—has produced a changing sense of imagined community. The Pink Dot has been widely analyzed over the past decade through various legal, activist, and linguistic perspectives. To these approaches, I offer a reading of the Pink Dot’s photographic and visual culture. In doing so, this essay maps the trajectory of its social gradient on the ground to pictures taken from above, following the Dot across physical, aerial, and digital spheres to examine the effect of its monochrome, both on and between bodies, as it moves queerly upon the ground of the state.

For the 2022 Hamburg Photography Triennial (Hamburg, Germany: 2022), published in the digital journal, Allegories of the Visible. Text online at URL: https://www.phototriennale.de/de/allegories-of-the-visible/contributors/jeannine-tang/

This paper takes a spatial approach to the question of social inclusion for LGBQT people in South Koran popular culture. The last two decades have seen the emergence of a more open gay scene in Seoul, the growth of queer community activities such as the LGBQT Film Festival and Seoul Pride, and increasing—albeit often ambivalent—visibility for queer characters in South Korean media. While the acceptance of LGBQT lifestyles are increasingly accepted by the Korean public, especially in younger demographics, public queer cultural events and political debate of LGBQT rights often faces vehement opposition from conservative and Christian groups. Moreover, the emergence of queer identities in South Korea should be understood as subject to the complex antinomies of Korea’s 'compressed modernity’. Contemporary Korean queer identities are constructed through a nexus of earlier Korean queer community habitus, globalised queer cultures, localising practices, and the circulation of western and other Asian queer people, images, and ideas. Korean queer identities also negotiate gradients of privacy and publicness, and inclusion and exclusion across social environments shaped by competing traditional and emerging ideologies of familism, the importance of affiliation networks in contemporary Korean society, and the individualism of neoliberal culture. At the same time, the digital communications and dating practices through which individual/group relations are mediated in queer communities often have socially atomising effects, and the range of queer community meeting places is limited by the commercialised production of space in neoliberal Seoul. How, then, do Korean queers position or imagine themselves within the urban fabric of the city?

This paper maps the spaces of queer life in Seoul constructed in Korean queer films. It suggests that two spatial tropes predominate the spatial imaginary of Korean queer film: Queer heterotopia and tactics of temporary spatial appropriation. Michael Foucault theorises heterotopias as other spaces that stand outside the regime of norms of disciplinary society. Queer places, such as gay bars and clubs and gay ‘room salons’, function as ‘transgression heterotopia’s in which gender and sexuality evade the discipline of heteronormative society. Foucault separates space into that of norms and ‘other places’. Michel De Certeau theorises that even within the power structures of normative space, the ‘powerless’ can deploy their own tactics of spatial usage, albeit always through temporary appropriations. Such tactics are also common in Korean queer films. They are deployed in deserted buildings, waste ground, remote rural spaces, cars parked under bridges on the banks of the Han River, and in quiet public toilets at night. Indeed, the ‘dark night’ becomes a chronotope of and metaphor for a covert queer subjectivity. Yet, with its heterotopias and spatial tactics, Korean queer film obscures the spatialities of (what Gillies Deleuze terms) ‘control societies’ that function so differently from the spatialised prohibitions of disciplinary society. The paper concludes by asking how Korean queer film addresses the experience of the queer neoliberal subject in contemporary Seoul.

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This essay examines four books recently published as part of the Queer Asia series, launched by Hong Kong University Press in 2008. These multidisciplinary monographs and edited collections offer a glimpse of the increasing diversity of scholarship in Asian queer studies, and they attest to the significance of queer knowledge production within and about a loosely defined Asia. In addition, these works help trouble the centrality of “Western” culture and theory within queer studies as a whole, and — via their juxtaposition within the series — suggest the potential of intraregional dialogue as an important tool to advance that project.

My first memory of Mark McLelland is still very strong. We met in 1999 at an international Queer Studies conference in his hometown of Manchester in the United Kingdom. At the time, he had either just finished or was about to finish his PhD on male homosexuality in Japan at the University of Hong Kong.[1] In collaboration with Mark Johnson-whose PhD had been on transgenders in the southern Philippines and who was then at the University of Hull in the UK-I convened a panel on queer Southeast Asia at that conference. Neil Garcia from the University of the Philippines, Diliman, and Ronald Baytan from De La Salle University in Manila also participated in what was perhaps one of the first panels on comparative Southeast Asian Queer Studies convened at an international conference. The conference organisers contacted Mark Johnson and me and told us that they had received an individual paper on male homosexuality in Japan by Mark McLelland. They asked if we would mind if his paper was included in our panel. We were delighted to add another element of comparison to our panel and agreed enthusiastically.

Abstract:  The objective of this ethnographic research is to offer an introductory summary of a Subculture Within A Subculture.  This research will endeavor to offer powerful social and historical content for the subject’s social emergence, seek to demystify Fetish/Kink/BDSM (Bondage, Dominance, Sadism, Masochism), to challenge the DSM-5 Paraphilic  Disorder, reframe the A & B diagnostic criterion classifications, to explore the subject’s underground lifestyle from a psychosocial point of view, to offer sixteen (N=16) personal interview findings from sexually variant women of color in the fetish/BDSM lifestyle, and to advocate for inclusive sex-positive awareness acceptance.

Our panel description describes "queer Asian studies" as an "emergent" field. [...] We might ask, from where does queer Asian studies emerge? What are this field's origins? One reading of the phrase "queer Asian studies" would point to the word "queer" as marking the new, emergent thing that has come to modify an older thing called "Asian studies." But what if we were to invert the positions of this new/old dichotomy? What if we took "queer" to be a centuries-old designation for a variety of concepts that are historically prior to this new, upstart field called "Asian studies"? What if we were to read the phrase "queer Asian studies" as following the order in which its words appear? What if queer comes before Asian studies? 1 I would like to thank Grace Ting for organizing and chairing this panel under the auspices of the Society for Queer Asian Studies (SQAS).

Inspired by the commentaries on Brokeback Mountain, especially Chris Berry's assertion of Boys Love mimicry, and my observation of the multiplicity of Chinese "gay" films, this essay attempts to situate three modalities of "gay" film - tongzhi film, BL film and gay exploitation cinema vis-à-vis yaoi subculture and gay identification.

In this introduction, we highlight the developments and transformations that have been put forward and situate our examination of Queer Asias within that context. We then turn to the contributions in this special issue, which collectively examine the intricate and imbricated flows of capital, power, intimacy, citizenship, sexual politics, and categories of gender and sexual (self-)identification in and across Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the United States. The articles in this special issue take up the following questions through an exploration of local genealogies of sexual practices, intimacies, and meanings in people’s everyday lives: What forms of categories, politics, and activism have gender and sexually diverse peoples across East and Southeast Asia embraced, constructed, and challenged in the 2010s through the early 2020s? What new theories have scholars developed and to what end? Whose politics are now being advocated and how might their activism contest older strategies and discourses?

Abstract:  The objective of this ethnographic research is to offer an introductory summary of a Subculture Within A Subculture.  This research will endeavor to offer powerful social and historical content for the subject’s social emergence, seek to demystify Fetish/Kink/BDSM (Bondage, Dominance, Sadism, Masochism), to challenge the DSM-5 Paraphilic  Disorder, reframe the A & B diagnostic criterion classifications, to explore the subject’s underground lifestyle from a psychosocial point of view, to offer sixteen (N=16) personal interview findings from sexually variant women of color in the fetish/BDSM lifestyle, and to advocate for inclusive sex-positive awareness acceptance.