What is “Queer Asia?”: a struggling pathway to globalizing Queer Studies in Communication

ABSTRACT

This essay exemplifies the author’s struggle with the concept of “queer Asia” as a case of the many pathways to globalize Queer Studies in Communication. During the demonstration, this essay pays attention to Audrey Yue’s proposal of three methodological conditions of queer Asia; denaturalizing Asia as an area; Asia as anchoring points; and centralizing LGBT (Lesbian–Gay–Bisexual–Transgender) research in/about Asia. The overall goal of this essay is to advocate to create a space of possibilities to welcome scholarship about queer Asia in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• queer
• queer of color
• Asia
• communication
• critical/cultural

Acknowledgements

I thank a special forum editor Dr. Ahmet Atay for including my voice in his politically important special forum on Queer Studies in Communication. Also, I sincerely appreciate Drs. Bernadette Marie Calafell, Nicole Files-Thompson, and Sean Upshaw for offering some constructive feedback on this essay. Moreover, I dedicate this essay to my late mentor and queer intergenerational friend Dr. James W. Chesebro.

Notes

1 Howard Chiang and Alvin K. Wong, “Asia is Burning: Queer Asia as Critique,” Culture, Theory and Critique 58, no. 2 (2017): 122.

2 Audrey Yue, “Trans-Singapore: Some Notes Towards Queer Asia as Method,” Inter-Asian Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2017): 21.

3 See discussion of the body as a site of knowledge in for example, Bryant Keith Alexander, The Performative Sustainability of Race: Reflections on Black Culture and the Politics of Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Robin M. Boylorn, “On Being at Home with Myself: Blackgirl Autoethnography as Research Praxis,” International Review of Qualitative Research 9, no. 1 (2016): 44–58; Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Monstrous Femininity: Constructions of Women of Color in the Academy,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2012): 111–30; Amber Johnson, “Confessions of A Video Vixen: My Autocritography of Sexuality, Desire, and Memory,” Text and Performance Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2014): 182–200.

4 See the details of my position in Dawn Marie D. Mcintosh and Shinsuke Eguchi, “The Troubled Past, Present Disjuncture, and Possible Futures: Intercultural Performance Communication,” Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 49, no. 5 (2020): 395–409.

5 See, for example, Janet R. Jakobsen, “Queer is? Queer does? Normativity and the Problem of Resistance,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4, no. 4 (1998): 511–36.

6 See, for example, Bernadette Marie Calafell and Tom Nakayama, “Queer theory,” in International encyclopedia of communication theory and philosophy, ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Robert T. Craig (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 1–6; Karma R. Chávez, “Border (In)securities: Normative and Differential Belonging in LGBTQ and Immigrant Rights Discourse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 136–55; Shinsuke Eguchi and Godfried Asante, “Disidentifications Revisited: Queer(y)ing Intercultural Communication Theory,” Communication Theory 26, no. 2 (2016): 171–89; Johnson, “Confessions of A Video Vixen”; E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies or (Almost) Everything I know about Queer Studies Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–25; Shane T. Moreman and Dawn Marie McIntosh, “Brown Scriptings and Rescriptings: A Critical Performance Ethnography of Latina Drag Queens,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 115–35.

7 Gloria Anzaldúa, “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana,” in Inversions: Writing by Dykes and Lesbians, ed. Betsy Warland (Vancouver, Canada: Press Gang, 1991), 250.

8 See, for example, Raka Shome, “Internationalizing Critical Race Communication Studies: Transnationality, Space, and Affect,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, eds. Tom Nakayama and Rona T. Halualani (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 149–70.

9 See the details of my critique in Shinsuke Eguchi, “Sticky Rice Politics: Impossible Possibilities of Queerness in and across Yellow Fever and Front Cover,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 1 (2020): 67–84.

10 See, for example, C. Winter Han, Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian America (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Nguyen Tan Hoang, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representaion (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2014).

11 See, for example, Eguchi, “Sticky Rice Politics”; Cynthia Wu, Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire (Philadelphia, PA; Temple University Press, 2018).

12 See, Eguchi, “Sticky Rice Politics,” 80–82.

13 See, Thomas Baudinette, “Ethnosexual Frontiers in Queer Tokyo: The Production of Racialised desire in Japan,” Japan Forum 28, no. 4 (2016): 482–3.

14 See, for example, Dredge Byung’chu Kang, “Eastern Orientations: Thai Middle-Class Gay Desire for ‘White Asians,’” Culture, Theory and Critique 58, no. 2 (2017): 182–208; Katsuhiko Suganuma, Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male-Queer Cultures (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012).

15 Yue, “Trans-Singapore,” 21.

16 See the detail discussion on queer conceptualizing of region in Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 19–58.

17 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 1–18.

18 Yue, “Trans-Singapore,” 21.

19 See, for example, Howard Chiang and Alvin K. Wong, “Queering the Transnational Turn: Regionalism and Queer Asias,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 23, no. 11 (2016): 1643–56; Chiang and Wong, “Asia is Burning.”

20 Yue, “Trans-Singapore,” 21.

21 Ibid.

22 See discussions on the genealogy of queer of color critique in, for example, Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Real Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–65; Richard A. Ferguson, Toward a Queer of Color Critique: Aberrations in Black (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Richard A. Ferguson, One-Dimensional Queer (Medford, MA: Polity, 2019).

23 See, for example, Chiang and Wong, “Asia is Burning”; Yue, “Trans-Singapore.”

24 Yue, “Trans-Singapore,” 21.

25 Chiang and Wong, “Asia is Burning,” 122.

26 Ibid.

27 See the argument in Wu, Sticky Rice, 1–23.

28 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 87.

29 See, for example, Suganuma, Contact Moments; Baudinette, “Ethnosexual Frontiers in Queer Tokyo.”

30 See, Eguchi, “Sticky Rice Politics,” 80–82.

31 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11.

32 See the discussions on the importance of disidentification to queer of color theorizing in, for example, Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies”; Bryant Keith Alexander, “Queer(y)ing the Postcolonial through the Western,” in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, eds. Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda T. Smith (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 101–33.

33 See, for example, José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 185–9.

34 See, for example, Joshua Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 37–80.

35 Gopinath, Unrule Visions, 77.