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
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
Queer(ing) Taiwan and its future: from an agenda of mainstream self-enlightenment to one of sexual citizenship
(AsiaPacifiQueer Network) Chu, Wei-Cheng Raymond
As parts of an ongoing reflection on the tongzhi (roughly equivalent to lesbian/gay/queer, hereafter abbreviated as l/g/q) developments in Taiwan, three critical theses are put forward in this essay. The first is a historical understanding of the excitingly prosperous l/g/q emergence in the 1990s. I offer here a contextual analysis which views this phenomenal rise as the amplified effects of what I call a ‘self-enlightening’ process pursued by the mainstream society since the democratization process started in the late 1980s. Yet as fortunate as it seems, this coincidence also dictated the specific form the l/g/q movement has taken as well as caused its apparent ‘cool-off’ near the year 2000. The second is the follow-up critical observation, along the line already mapped out, on the latest change of direction – i.e. what I call the ‘civic turn’ of the l/g/q movement since 2000. This in effect further proves my thesis put forth in the first section and also points at a general perspective on the relative strength (or lack of it) of the Taiwan society versus political power. At the end, O distinguish the l/g/q civil movement in Taiwan from its US counterpart by showing the local transformations of this largely imported discourse with the purpose of providing a glocal comparative framework. To further demonstrate the glocal difference, I also anticipate the historical significance of this new phase of development itself as well as for Taiwan in general.
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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.
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Uniquely positioned? Lived experiences of lesbian, gay and bisexual Asian muslims in Britain
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Yip, Andrew Kam-Tuck; AsiaPacificQueer Network
This paper highlights some of my reflections on the data drawn from an empirical research project entitled A Minority within a Minority: British Non- heterosexual Muslims, conducted in 2001 and 2002. Specifically, the project explored three dimensions of the lived experiences of non-heterosexual (specifically lesbian, gay, and bisexual; Hereinafter ‘LGB’ ) Muslims who are primarily of South Asian origin. These dimensions are (a) individual/cognitive (e.g. how they reconciled their sexuality with religious faith, given the pervasive censure of homosexuality); (b) interpersonal (e.g. how they managed social relationships with potentially stigmatising social audiences such as family members, kin, and their ethnic/religious community); and (c) intergroup (e.g. how they managed social relationships with potentially supportive social audiences such as the broader LGB community which is predominantly ‘white’ and secular). The 42 participants (20 women and 22 men) – recruited primarily through support groups, LGB Press and personal networks – were interviewed individually for about two hours. In addition, two focus group interviews were conducted. Most of the sample lived in Greater London, and the vast majority were under the age of 30, and highly educated (for more details about the research methodology and the sample, see Yip 2003). Owing to space I shall only highlight some prominent empirical and theoretical issues here, with references to more detailed discussions I have offered elsewhere.
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
When the politics of desire meets the economics of skin: the history of and phenomenon of a Filipino gay magazine
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Lim, Michael Kho; AsiaPacificQueer Network
Before Valentino became visible in the market, the only magazine that somehow attracted gay readers was Chika-Chika, showbiz-orientated magazine with a gay slant. Hence this became popular among Filipino gay men, specifically what we call the “parlor gays” or gays who worked in beauty parlors, act very effeminately and sometimes even cross-dress.
Open Access
Transgender culture and Thai boxing
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Rennesson, Stephane; AsiaPacificQueer Network
Through exposing a few keys of understanding of the national success of transvestites as Muay Thai boxers in Thailand, I shall lay down a few perspectives that stand as many tracks to be followed during a future fieldwork that the ethnologic methodology requires. I draw my data from a daily life experience in Thailand between 1999 and 2001 when I was carrying out fieldwork about Thai Boxing, and the reading of Thai newspaper (general interest ones as well as specialised in boxing). As a matter of fact, the Muay Thai’s image elaborated daily through its media coverage makes it a truly gendered activity. Definitely, it draws on masculine behaviour. Peter Vail (1998) sees Thai Boxing as the womb if hyper-masculinity. Considering this, I wish to question the confusing success of two cross-dressing boxers, Nong Tum and his recent emulator Nong Tim who is yet to be as famous as the former. I shall make use of the recent developments of gender analysis in Thailand embedded within the contemporary critical theory.
Open Access
Turning the lion city pink: interrogating Singapore's new gay civil servant statement
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Tan, Chris K.K.; AsiaPacificQueer Network
On 4 July 2003, Singapore’s former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong dropped a small bombshell of an announcement in the main local newspaper The Straits Times. He declared, “In the past, if we know you’re gay, we would not employ you. But we have changed this quietly.” Now, the government will employ gay Singaporeans in ‘certain positions’, even sensitive ones, provided that these civil servants openly declared their sexual orientation. Expecting considerable indignant resistance form the conservative quarters, Goh attempted to placate them: “We are born this way and they [i.e. gay people] are born that way, but they are like you and me. The furore that came in the wake of this announcement saw one very heterosexual man publicly decrying that the government had lost its moral authority to rule. To those of us more experienced in queer politics elsewhere, this man’s outrage seemed misplaced. Goh was merely offering employment to openly gay men and women, not legalising same-sex marriages as had happened in Toronto earlier in the summer. So why the public uproar?
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
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
"Together we teach them safe sex" HIV education program for men who have sex with men (MSM)
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Lee, Barry M W; AsiaPacificQueer Network
Gay men were the first to be blamed for AIDS. The first reported case, of what later came to be known as AIDS, was identified in 1981 in the USA among gay men. The disease was quickly termed as the “gay plague” by the media, with massive blame unjustifiably heaped on to gay men. The linking of gay men to AIDS led to the development of a homophobia among the general public and an AIDS phobia within the gay community. This initial strong stigmatisation and discrimination against gay men and / or MSM (Men Who Have Sex with Men) has been enduring. Based upon my experience of directing educational programs for MSM in Hong Kong, I now share with you an alternative approach to safe sex prevention intervention.
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
Spaces to be manoeuvred: Lesbian identities and temporality
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Tang, Denise; AsiaPacificQueer Network
Discussions on queer spaces are not only limited to physical landscapes such as patterns of residential neighbourhoods, work locations, leisure sites or commercial establishments frequented by lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender. “Queer spaces” increasingly take into account various sites such as cyberspace, cultural forums and cognitive mappings. This paper briefly discussed social and leisure spaces and the issues in utilising these spaces as identified by women interviewed for this research. 14 women were interviewed on notions of sexual identity, family and peer relations, social and leisure spaces, social movements and love relationships. I chose to use feminist ethnography as the primary qualitative research method. I conducted life history interviews with lesbian women who engage in intimate sexual and emotional relations with other women. Life history interviews were selected because they illustrate the principle that ‘a self story is literally a story of and about the self in relation to an experience, in this case the development of a lesbian identity, that positions the self of the teller centrally in the narrative that is given’ (Stein, 1997)
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
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
Queering the culture: how does the gay discourse change if we take cross cultural communication seriously?
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Jacques, Luke; AsiaPacificQueer Network
Body theory has been an area of growth, ambivalence, and politics in the last twenty years, yet the graft with ‘Asianness' remains unstable. Beyond generalised tropes of Orientalism, close textual analysis is required to understand the sexualised context of the non-Western gay male body. This essay works through the multiple readings of gay foreign bodies represented within both Thai and Australian popular culture and academic texts. Through relevant textual analysis, an examination into cultural meanings, readership practices, and appropriation by and from Western media culture probes the relationship between images of ‘gayness’ and Thai ‘gay’ identity. This essay investigates the semiotic construction of ‘gay’ discourses in both Thai and Western popular images for both the Thai and Western reader. A critique of how ‘gay’ is translated, embodied, and defined within representations and images in Thai popular culture demonstrates that Thai ‘queer’ communities resist neo-colonialist discourses by selectively appropriating particular Western gay terminology and identities in order to create distinctly Thai discourses of ‘gayness’.
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
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
What is necessary for us, for our queer movement in Japan
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Hibino, Makoto; AsiaPacificQueer Network
I am a bisexual or polysexual activist in Japan. So at first, I would point out the discrimination against bisexuals within our queer communities. Do you know about Bisexuals? Let’s confirm some basic facts. (1) Some people think that bisexual is the way or process to get the identity of lesbian or gay. (2) Many people are especially interested in one’s gender. (3)The bisexual opinion is, I think, different from the lesbian and gay viewpoints.
Open Access
A semantic look at feminine sex and gender terms in Philippine gay lingo
(Canberra, ACT: The Australian National University) Suguitan, Cynthia Grace B.; AsiaPacificQueer Network
Gayspeak, like other languages, is constantly changing. But unlike other languages, words and terms in this colourful tongue undergo change so quickly that it would be impossible to come up with a dictionary of the language that wouldn’t become obsolete within a matter of months, weeks, or even days. In spite of this, there is a thread that holds this language together, and that is freedom, freedom from the rules and dictates of society. Part one of this paper gives the definitions and etymological backgrounds of certain feminine sex and gender terms in gay lingo. Part two compares the reactions of the gay community to these words with the reactions of the mainstream society to the English or Filipino counterparts of these words. Part three examines how the use of feminine sex and gender terms in gay lingo reflects and reinforces the Philippine gay community’s attitude towards women.