Sexualities, Genders and Rights in Asia: International Conference of Asian Queer Studies (2005)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1885/116791

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Open Access
Brazil resolution on sexual orientation: challenges in articulating asexual rights framework from the viewpoint of the global south
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Narrain, Arvind; AsiaPacificQueer Network
In April, 2003 the Brazilian government introduced a historic resolution on ‘Human rights and sexual orientation’. The resolution itself did not go very far as it merely ‘expresses deep concern at the occurrence of violations of human rights in the world against persons on the grounds of their sexual orientation’ and ‘stresses that human rights and fundamental freedoms are the birth right of all human beings, that the universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question and that the enjoyment of such rights and freedoms should not be hindered in any way on the grounds of sexual orientation’.
Open Access
Commodified romance in a Tokyo host club
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Takeyama, Akiko; AsiaPacificQueer Network
My original paper title was “Queer Eyes for the Japanese Guy” but I changed it to “Commodified Romance in a Tokyo Host Club”. Based on 10 months of fieldwork in Tokyo host and hostess clubs that are currently doing for my doctoral dissertation, today I would like to talk a little bit about male hosts and their female clients, what kind of social context the female clients’ desires derive from, and finally what the host club phenomena means to the gender and heterosexual norms in Japan. Ultimately, I intend to demonstrate some aspects of how the Japanese host club simultaneously reinforces and destabilises prevailing gender norms, and by extension heterosexual norms in Japan.
Open Access
Condition and status of hijras (transgender, transvestites etc.) in Pakistan: country report
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Jami, Humaira; AsiaPacificQueer Network
Open Access
The creature of asexual love in 'My Name is Shingo'
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Someya, Yasuyo; AsiaPacificQueer Network
This article discusses the story of Kazuo Umezu’s book, Watashi wa Shingo (My name is Shingo) (1982-1986) within the context of asexuality. Readers see how two elementary school pupils, a girl named Marine and a boy named Satoru, fall in love and are blessed with a rather unorthodox child which happens to be a robot. This robot is called Shingo and the story recounts how its mind develops and how it travels the world in pursuit of its ‘parents’ whom it has never had the chance to meet. The reason why I would like to discuss the comic book, My Name is Shingo, is because it hints at children’s asexual reproduction, as well as child asexuality, which, I think, contributes significantly to the intensity and uniqueness of the story. In this article I would like to consider the meaning of ‘asexuality’ and whether there exists any similarities between asexuality of children and that of adults.
Open Access
Ethics of represeNtATION: media and the Indian queer
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Satpathy, Sumanyu; AsiaPacificQueer Network
Emboldened by a greater public awareness of alterity and sexual freedom whether through the technological revolution, globalisation, accessibility, or for any other reason – playwrights, film directors, and the media in general in India have begun experimenting with representation of what arguably have been hitherto forbidden pleasures and ‘realities’. Alternative sexuality is one such taboo subject in Indian cultural history. Due to the same reasons, similarly, gay and lesbian groups have gained greater visibility, and are pressing for their rights, legal or otherwise. Two key issues that feature in the title of my paper, I wish to take up for discussion in the course of the presentation. i. The idea of representation as it features in contemporary aesthetics and cultural studies and ii.The question of ethics in postmodern philosophy.
Open Access
Excavating desire: queer heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Byrne, Denis; AsiaPacificQueer Network
"How might we define the term ‘queer heritage’? We could choose to define it as encompassing the whole culture of ‘queerness’ that we have in a sense ‘inherited’ from the past. And that would include everything from our politics to our language to our literature. In other words, it would constitute the passing on of a tradition of what it has meant to be queer in this part of the world. What I am concerned with here, however, is restricted to the physical places and landscapes created or inhabited by homosexuals in the Asia-Pacific region in the past. These would include the buildings or outdoor spaces that we have lived in, danced in, or had sex in. The places where we have created gardens, painted, written novels, or fallen in love. It would include gay beaches and gay beach resorts, the sites of lesbian music camps, famous cruising areas in public parks or shopping malls, saunas and sex clubs, gay hairdressers, drag clubs, gay and lesbian discos. It would also, of course, include sites of discrimination and physical violence against us."
Open Access
Flying the rainbow flag in Asia
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Sanders, Douglas; AsiaPacificQueer Network
Fifty years ago homosexual acts were illegal in all the countries that trace their legal systems back to the British common law. Public authorities, media and social attitudes throughout the West treated homosexuality as illicit, often unmentionable. There was a tradition of seeing homosexuality as a foreign vice – the Greek vice or the French vice or an Oriental vice – not a local vice. In 2005, after forty years of reforms, criminal laws that target homosexual acts are gone in the West. Entry into the European Union is conditional on laws prohibiting discrimination in the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Marriage has been opened to same-sex couples in the Netherlands, Belgium, the state of Massachusetts, Canada and Spain. Same-sex marriage was a major issue in the 2004 American presidential election. ‘Human rights’ play an important role in modern states. Respect for ‘human rights’ is a marker if the legitimacy of regimes. The globalising agenda is clear in Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s well-known description of human rights as the “common language of humanity”.
Open Access
From enter the dragon to enter the mullet: exploring filmic representations of east Asia butch dykes by Asian queer women filmmakers in contemporary Canada
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Lin, Hui-Ling; AsiaPacificQueer Network
This paper is like a pilot project for my doctoral research and it is very much a work in progress. In my doctoral research I am looking at the filmic representations of transmigrant East Asian queer women in contemporary Canada. While addressing sexuality, the term “queer” also encompasses the intersection of multiple identities such as race and gender. I use the word, “transmigrant” rather migrant or immigrant, as Martin Manalansan suggests, to address “the multi-stranded relationships” (Manalansan 2000: 185) such mobile groups have with both their home and settlement countries. I especially want to focus on two aspects of this research. The first is an examination of how the racialised, queered, and gendered body is presented, appropriated, or subverted in films about and by Asian queer women. Secondly, I want to look at the “monolithic” representation of Asian women in much Western discourse and how differences are delineated by Asian queer women from their own perceptions and interpretations. I will mainly look at the work of transmigrant queer women from filmmakers from Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong who identify themselves as non-heterosexual, and who live or stay in two highly multicultural Canadian cities: Vancouver and Toronto.
Open Access
Gay specificity: the re-working of heteronormative discourse in the Hong Kong gay community
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Lau, Hoi Leung; AsiaPacificQueer Network
This qualitative research is a study on the specific culture of the gay community in Hong Kong. Mainstream academic research in Hong Kong gay community has mostly focused on the construction and formation of gay identity and gay culture especially under the postcolonial context of Hong Kong. By adopting narrative analysis of the life histories of gay men, the research focus has been placed upon their self-recognition of gay identity, closet practices, coming out process, and sexual and intimate relationship. In response to this mainstream agenda, this study purports to two relatively neglected empirical phenomena concerning Hong Kong gay community, namely the adoption of zero-one role division and the marginalisation of the sissy gay men. These two contentious issues define my research focus.
Open Access
How should Hong Kong courts rule on the constitutionality of gay sex?
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Ip, Cliff; AsiaPacificQueer Network
"As the Hong Kong (HK) court held that certain Crimes Ordinance provisions which provided for a different age of consent were unconstitutional in August 2005, a large part of the presented paper no longer seemed very relevant. However, the court did not discuss if cultural relativism and Confucianism were relevant in the judicial analysis. The following seeks to answer this question. This paper casts doubt on a general cultural relativist argument, as, for example, advocated by Dr. Joseph Chan. If this is wrong, homosexuality may still be compatible with Confucianism, the influential school of thought in HK, because I) the latter can be “re-interpreted” to protect homosexuals‚ interests and II) other Confucian places take homosexual rights more seriously than HK."
Open Access
ICCGL: cultural communication via the internet and GLBT community building in China
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Jiang, Hui; AsiaPacificQueer Network
This paper introduces the states of existence and characteristics of gay websites in mainland China. Based on the work and experience of the Information Clearinghouse for Chinese Gays and Lesbians (ICCGL) and its website GayChinese.net in the past six years, it also discusses the operation and significance of this NGO whose major attempts to reveal aspects of gay life in contemporary China by analysing the various cultural conflicts emerging within or in relation to the gay websites.
Open Access
Indonesian intersections of bisexuality and transgender
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Graham, Sharyn; AsiaPacificQueer Network
This article analyses the intersections of bisexuality and transgender in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. While there are no equivalent indigenous terms, there are cognate identities and experiences that make such an examination valid and fruitful. The article is divided into three main sections. After a brief introduction, I introduce two gendered identities which fall outside normative models: calabai’ (transgendered males) and calalai’ (transgendered females). In the second section I recount specific examples of bisexuality and transgender intersection. A critical analysis of these intersections reveals much about representations and understandings of desire, sexuality, and gender. The theoretical contributions which arise from this analysis are proposed in the third section where I argue that the conceptual categories imposed by rigid Western terminology are rendered problematic when considering the intersection between bisexuality and transgender in South Sulawesi. As such, in South Sulawesi experiences of bisexuality and transgender must be explored from a perspective which allows appreciation of their coalescence.
Open Access
Intra-Asian circuits and the problem of global queer
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Wilson, Ara; AsiaPacificQueer Network
This paper advances a regional approach to understanding gay, lesbian, GLTB, or queer sexualities in Asia. Debates about queer globalisations have largely rotated on the relation of non-Western to Western formulations of erotic identities: to what extent are queer subjectivities a Western export? As conversations about queer sexualities grapple with the global level, they have had difficulty avoiding the centrifugal powers of Western formulations, particularly those attached to the hegemonic force of United States. The dominant model for global queer subjectivities is an import-export framework: the assumption that legible queer sexualities derive from U.S. – infected Western modes of sexuality or from Western-based systems of modernity, such as capitalism. One version of the import-export model underpins homophobic nationalist discourses, which assert that Western imperialism produced Third World queers. An import-export logic also surfaces in well-meaning work in sexual rights, which, when it stresses the homophobia of third-world traditions, implies – or even asserts – that modernisation will make the non-Western world more liberated for queers. In this way, sexual rights reproduce a geopolitical progress narrative. Discussions about non-normative sexuality in the global south conflate Western, modern, and globalisation. Even when they are critical of Western dominance in the world, as is the case with nationalists and many sexual rights advocates, their interpretation recapitulates Western hegemony, by locating the origin and agency of modern queer life squarely in the West.
Open Access
Lesbian identity and community projects in Beijing: notes from the field on studying and theorising same-sex cultures in the age of globalisation
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Engebretsen, Elisabeth; AsiaPacificQueer Network
"This paper is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork for my PhD in Anthropology, and is a research project that investigates same-sex desire and cultures among women in Mainland urban China, mainly in Beijing and on the Internet. The ambitions with this project are for one to contribute knowledge about the variations and similarities in human sexuality and culture, by way of studying a rarely prioritised category of people (lesbian-identified women) in a relatively seldom studied locale (urban China). And second, I hope to connect ideologies about sexual identity to wider social and cultural economies of change and inter-exchange in this particular moment in history often referred to as an age of ‘globalisation’."
Open Access
The making of a local queen in an international transsexual beauty contest
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Wong, Ying Wuen; AsiaPacificQueer Network
This paper will examine the intricacies in beauty contests and the tensions brought about by the negotiation of a local, authentic culture in the face of Western-derived notions of beauty and femininity. Thailand’s many beauty contests feature as an inept part of Thai society, with an emphasis on the ‘public face’ and beauty. Thailand has been romanticised as a land of beautiful women and more recently, of beautiful kathoey. One of the aims of my paper is to determine the importance of beauty contests, not just as ‘anti-pageants’, but as a means to consolidate a transsexual identity. However, it can also be shown that beauty contests are both sites of empowerment and subjugation simultaneously.
Open Access
Male sexual health: Kathoeys in the Lao PDR, South East Asia - exploring a gender minority
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Doussantousse, Serge; Keovongchith, Bea; AsiaPacificQueer Network
"This paper explores transgender (TG) males, who are a sexual minority in the Lao PDR. In both the Lao PDR and Thailand transgender males are commonly known as Kathoeys or Ladyboys, and although research has been done on Kathoeys in Thailand (Totman, 2003), none has so far been conducted in the Lao PDR. Social sciences research in the Lao PDR is still developing, and so far the focus has been on ‘normal’ male and female studies and therefore this paper intends to begin to fill the gap in the literature."
Open Access
Notes on sexual relationships and their political recognition in an intercultural context
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Blasius, Mark; AsiaPacificQueer Network
"Thus, for this roundtable, I have come to think of three types of political recognition of same-sex sexuality. One is recognition of the political economy that makes same-sex erotic relations possible in different locations in Asia. Another is recognition of the constraints of nationalism and statism on such same-sex relations and the political opportunities opened by intercultural same-sex relations between people from different Asian (and other) national cultures. A third type of political recognition involves how Asian queer diasporas within western societies are shaping LGBTSI political agendas in those societies, and how these diasporic communities may also influence agendas for the political recognition of same-sex relationships in Asia."
Open Access
Of transgender and sin in Asia
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Winter, Sam; AsiaPacificQueer Network
There are vibrant transgender communities in both Thailand and the Philippines (e.g. see Winter, 2006; Winter, Sasot and King, in prep). Yet the languages of Thailand and the Philippines lack single words that correspond to our words ‘transgender’/ ‘transsexual’. In Thailand the commonest word for transwomen is kathoey. Originally used to describe hermaphrodites, the word later broadened to embrace any male contravening gender role expectations (gays, effeminate males etc), only recently (with the word ‘gay’ entrenched in Thai) used more specifically to describe transwomen. The word kathoey can carry negative connotations; transwomen are not always comfortable with it. One reason may be that the word implies that one is a variant of male rather than female. Whether it is taken offensively depends a lot on how it is used. In this paper I use the word respectfully, seeking to reclaim it in the way that Western gays have done with the word ‘queer’
Open Access
Opening up: articulating a same sex identity in Beijing
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Ho, Loretta; AsiaPacificQueer Network
This paper aims to give a glimpse of the findings that I obtained from my field research into the articulation of a same-sex identity in Beijing, between March and June 2004. It is important to stress that these findings are not identified to represent the social reality of the gay men and lesbians living in Beijing. Thus, these findings are necessarily selective and merely illustrate dominant trends and themes that are suggested by this fieldwork and other research. They focus on •How cosmopolitan gay/lesbian individuals in Beijing reconcile with their sense of identity • how they engage with others of different backgrounds, and • their voices, silences, and spaces.
Open Access
Queer Japanese identities: an antidisciplinary approach to constructions of identity in Japan
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Matthews, Joel; AsiaPacificQueer Network
"I call upon here, not only the antidisciplinary paradigm of ‘Cultural Studies’ but also its approaches to re-evaluate, re-analyse, re-theorise, re-interpret and re-negotiate cultural theory concerning ‘Japanese Identity’. To simply ask ‘What is Japanese Masculine Identity?’ is to miss the point entirely. What remains important, is that outreach to not only theorise and inform, but appreciate the cultural sensitivities involved in the process. My paper activates this provisional project through an examination of hybrid youth queer subcultures, and their renegotiation of a specifically Japanese hegemonic heteronormativity. Identity and community play an important role in the Japanese context. Both have been a ubiquitous discursive force in the construction and maintenance of queer sites within Japan."