Queer Asian Australian migration: creative film co-production and diasporic intimacy in The Home Song Stories

Abstract

This paper examines Tony Ayres' recent film, The Home Song Stories (2007) using the framework of queer Asian Australian migration. First, queer migration is critically considered through the minor transnationalism of its co-production. Evaluating the marketing of the film in Singapore and Australia, this article shows how Chinese ethnicity is deployed as exclusive and inclusive to enable different tactics of queer mobility and how these tactics are incorporated by different film policies to fulfil competing national aims. Second, this article considers the queer mobility of diasporic intimacy. Diasporic intimacy disrupts the regulation of queer migration and shows how the private domains of memory, family and sexuality are reconstituted in the transnational Chinese diaspora. The framework of queer Asian Australian migration describes the non-normative migration of Asians to Australia, the disjunctive flows of mobility that constitute the Asian diaspora in Australia, as well as the regulation of non-normative Asian Australian migration in national symbolic and institutional economies. The framework of queer Asian Australian migration, this article argues, provides a theoretical platform to critically consider the transnationality of Asian Australian cinema.

Keywords:

• queer migration
• Asian Australian cinema
• film co-production
• Tony Ayres
• The Home Song Stories
• intimacy