Re-examining Communication and Media Practices in/across Queer Asia

Queer Asia, once an exigent idea, is now an established academic term in the field of queer studies in Asia. Since AsiaPacificQueer Network (2000–2008), an Australia-based consortium, triggered scholarly conversations about Queer Asia “to inscribe queer studies within Asian studies and to locate Asia, and the non-West, within cultural and media studies,”2 we have seen prolific academic concerns about Queer Asia emerge in various academic disciplines. By referring to Kuan-Hsing Chen's provocative call for “Asia as Method”3 and reframing it as “Queer Asia as Method,”4 scholars have made an individual and collective attempt to invigorate the conversations about Queer Asia in diverse forms from numerous journal articles to special issues of academic journals5 to anthologies and edited volumes.6 Hong Kong University Press launched a series named “Queer Asia,” in 2008, and the University of Michigan Press announced its new series, “Global Queer Asias,” in 2020. Not many would object to a proclamation of Mark McLellend, a seminal scholar in the discipline: “In conclusion, in just 20 years, we have moved beyond a paradigm that saw the study of ‘local’ minority sexuality and gender cultures in Asia as interesting. . . . ‘Asian Queer Studies’ has established itself as a major academic endeavour.”7Nonetheless, we wrestle with overdue unresolved conflicts in examining and conceptualizing Queer Asia. As many preceding scholars have repeatedly identified, both Queer and Asia exhibit mixed modalities in various sectors.8 Asia is an imagined region that reinforces the white, Western cartography of the globe, encompassing cultures and nation-states. These are vastly dissimilar and competitive in terms of political systems, religions, economic structures, societal norms, and cultural traditions. Scholarly efforts pursuing Queer Asia may find it challenging to envision “Queer Asia” and apply “Queer Asia as Method” to their research.Furthermore, despite the impressive amount of existing literature on Queer Asia in the past couple of decades, academic discussions of Queer Asia remain underdeveloped, especially in the United States. Compared to Asia and Europe, the U.S. based scholars are blithe about the matter. We are witnessing Queer Asia's wide heterogeneity, vibrancy, impact, and power in Asian locales, benefiting from changing political situations, the rapid distribution of new communication technology, and the increasing transnational exchanges in and across the region.9The recent changes in Asia can be explained by neither a theory-oriented in another culture nor one theory and methodology. For instance, the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan or recognition of civil partnership in Tokyo, Japan, and Thailand needs a new framework based on understanding historical, cultural, and geopolitical contexts among neighboring countries beyond the Western approach to same-sex marriage. Another example that attests to the necessity of such a framework is the rise of Boys’ Love and crossplay cultures in (and outside) Asia, something which receives criticism from a Western scholarship for depoliticizing, commodifying, and appropriating queerness.We acknowledge that queerness and Asia constitute each other and that this mutuality bears a possibility to redirect and refigure Western-centric queer theory. At the same time, we need many more venues through which queer Asian narratives can be articulated by queer Asians than currently exist. Such platforms will help numerous postcolonial and/or local queer identities in Asia, such as kothis, tomboi, bakla, waria, tongzhi, iban, new half, tom/dee, TB, hijra, kathoey, izzat, and bantut, emerge as themselves and constitute the body of queer theory, not queer Asian theory. This, in turn, will reveal the multilayered yet hidden forms of oppression that oppress local Asian queerness, and make “queer futurity” queer futurities.10The intellectual landscape of Queer Asia described above drives and motivates our desire to put this special issue together. We recognize that Queer Asia is such a vast and enormous scale of inquiry, examining various modes of differences (e.g., identity, space/place, culture, history, society, political economy, and more) included under the label. Queer Asia is defined by interdisciplinary research on historical and contemporary constructions of queerness manifested, represented, and performed in/across the region of Asia. There are different ways to approach issues and concerns of Queer Asia, of which the multiple, unstable, and dynamic approaches we appreciate. Yet, coming from the academic context of communication and media, we also wish for more explicit studies on communication and media practices of queerness, and how these alter, shape, and reinforce the production and distribution of Queer Asia in an ever increasingly diverse fashion.In this respect, we view communication as a discursive process of articulation about happenings in and across social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts. By media, we refer to the mediums and platforms that distribute, circulate, and archive information and data. Therefore, by communication and media practices, we mean the ongoing and interanimating processes and activities in which individuals, media technology, social institutions, and/or relational settings alter, shape, and reinforce situated meanings and cultures. We argue that communication and media practices play a major role in creating, circulating, and ingraining the historical and contemporary realities of Queer Asia's modernities in the geopolitical (or imagined) boundary of Asia and beyond. Therefore, we have come together to produce this special issue for an interdisciplinary venue QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking that draws an audience from communication and media studies who are also interested in GLBTQ studies.To actualize our precise interrogation in this special issue, we propose the following question: What's happening in Queer Asia, as a space beyond and across geographical boundaries? To answer this question, we assemble academic articles, forum articles, film reviews, and book reviews that pay attention to underrepresented issues and concerns of cultures, groups, and traditions overlooked within the rubric of Queer Asia. With these collections of writing that disrupt and reshape existing cisgender/nontrans-centric queer Asia(s), By revisiting and traveling around the multiple localities of Queer Asianness working with communication and media practices, we hope to create an expanded visionary space within which scholars can discuss Queer Asia and contribute to building up Queer Asian studies further.Based on a collaborative autoethnographic approach, Terrie Wong and Shuzhen Huang's article reveals the complexities within Chinese queerness and, through interpersonal communicative practices, discloses the (im)possibilities of transnational queer Chinese womanhood relative to the interrogative challenge of queer of color critique. This article attests to how self-reflexive revising of intersectional positionalities can actualize the Queer Asia as Method approach on a personal level. Ming Wei Ang and Gabrielle Ibasco's article explores the liberatory potential and power of transgender crossdressing in a country battling with its liminality between Asia and the West, through spaces in which queerness manifests in dissimilar ways. Their Singaporean interviewees, who are fans of anime and manga, revel in exploring genderqueer possibilities via aesthetic experimentation, thereby disassociating themselves from social oppression. Lamiyah Bahrainwala and Jaishikha Nautiyal envision Queer Asia by reimagining a queer desi relationship influenced by colonial history. Their autoethnographic stories surrounding their nonqueer and queer desi diasporic identities demonstrate the ingrained working of heteronormative white supremacy and help them explore queer desi ways to seek queerness, not Asian queerness. The reader's attention to queer relationships in India or South Asia, in Bahrainwala and Nautiyal's writing, is redirected toward queer individuals in the article by Aratrika Bose, Tanupriya, and Anuja Singh. According to these authors, female gender nonconforming artists engrave and promote female queerness in digital spaces by posting anti-hegemonic images of female bodies on Instagram. The article by Mohammed Rashid indicates the possibilities (and limitations) of digital tools. It sheds light on Mondro, a digital archival blog that functions as a counter-public sphere to decolonize the Western-centric understanding of queerness and discusses how digital activism strategically navigates visibility and invisibility to avoid online hate and harassment. Ali Na delves into the artwork featuring “Diwata” from the Philippine precolonial period that, the contributor believes, embodies the performative potential to disturb Western queer and trans studies. Na's article critically reads how Philippine artists navigate historical yet transtemporal and local yet transnational aesthetic practices of queerness and unmask the Western-centricism of queer theory.The four forum articles in this special issue suggest more radical approaches to discussing cultural and communicative practices to disrupt imagined Queer Asianness. Yidong Wang's article delves into how homo(phobic)nationalism regulates queerness similarly and dissimilarly within Chinese-speaking cultures and countries, a geopolitically contested region. The article written by Norman I., an anonymous author, unfolds the recent political scandals involving online and offline media practices. It debunks the ethnically, religiously, and historically complex discrimination against queerness that exists in Malaysia. Jiya Pandya, Avni Sejpal, and Sharvari Sastry employ correspondence among themselves in which each scholar shares nostalgic stories about how films, telephone, and e-communication, respectively, helped them (and their queer peers) explore queerness at different times. Vince Ha introduces the experimental artworks of Canadian Asian artists whose queer of color diasporic identities are constantly challenged and frustrated in local and/or artistic communities.The six reviews about three books and three films are intended to present recent academic discussions about media and communication practices and media products that revisit the Queer Asia paradigm; in doing so, they update the regional imagery in a way that corresponds to the changing terrain surrounding Queer Asia around the 2020s. The reviews contribute to diversifying the thematic scope and geographical range of this special issue, thereby complicating how anglophile academia defines Queer Asia.By showcasing this aforementioned range of work, we desire that this special issue contributes to facilitating an additional space to consider how communication and media practices of queerness re/fashion the productions and distributions of Queer Asia as a theory/method. It is our hope that this special issue illuminates how Queer Asia not only recognizes the multiple convergences and divergences of queerness that exist in and across Asia. It is also about rewriting, remaking, and revisiting queer practices of Asia(nness) as multiple, unfinalized, and dynamic conceptions. As a consequence, the intellectual and political genealogies of Queer Asia exhibit possible paths toward decolonizing the whiteness/Westernness of queer modernities as global normativity. Our objective is not an exhaustive investigation of all these possible paths, but an exploration of the potential regarding how far the paths can reach. In this regard, Queer Asia not only references a huge regional area but also includes various modes of differences, some of which we showcase in this issue. Hence, we suggest that the reader considers this special issue as another anchor of entry to invite future studies, as Queer Asia is surely only at the beginning of its flourishing.

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