Queer Asian Subjects: Transgressive Sexualities and Heteronormative Meanings

Abstract

This special issue of Asian Studies Review explores comparatively the production and transformation of gender and sexual subjectivities across and beyond South and Southeast Asia. More specifically, papers in this special issue disclose the complex intersections of ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion and nationality through which sexual subjectivities are formed and subject positions inhabited within and across these regions. By tracing the transnational movement of people and the circulation of images and ideas, their appropriations and effects, the papers in this volume reveal mutable and multiple sexual subjectivities that are no longer fixed in place, even as state discourses, hegemonic meanings and individual actors work to attach specific meanings to particular bodies. In this special issue we ask, what are the effects of migration, forced and chosen, on forms and formulations of gender and sexuality for people's embodied and discursive entanglements? How do spatial and temporal, as well as religious, economic and political changes alter and foreclose some kinds of intimacies and subjectivities even as they open and enable others? What are the social and cultural processes through which heteronormativity is articulated, enforced, transgressed and challenged?

Keywords:

• queer
• Asia
• sexuality
• heteronormativity
• lesbian
• gay

Acknowledgments

All but one of the papers in this special issue of Asian Studies Review were originally presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Philadelphia in March 2010. We are grateful to Peter Jackson for inviting us to submit a selection of papers to Asian Studies Review and to all the other participants on our panels, Tom Boellstorff, Jane Ferguson, Rachel Harrison and Ward Keeler. Niko Besnier provided insightful comments on this introductory essay from a comparative “Pacific” vantage point.

Notes

A complete review of the recent literature on queer subjectivities and more broadly on gender and sexual diversity within, across and beyond South and Southeast Asia, respectively, is outside the remit of this introductory piece; some of that literature is the subject of more systematic analysis in the review pieces cited in the text (see also Loos, 2009). In this essay we only directly refer to those works that have a particular bearing on the points under discussion. However, we are indebted to that wider body of scholarship on which we seek to build here. Readers unfamiliar with that scholarship may wish to consult some of the following major articles, monographs and edited collections published in the last fifteen years, e.g. Babayan and Najmabadi (2008), Blackwood (2005; 2010), Boellstorff (2005; 2007), Bose and Bhattacharyya (2007), Bhaskaran (2004), Davies (2010), Gopinath (2005), Gupta (2001), Jackson (2011), Jackson and Cook (1999), Johnson (1997), Johnson, Jackson and Herdt (2000), John and Nair (1998), Manalansan (2003), Manderson and Jolly (1997), Martin, Jackson, McLelland and Yue (2008), Nanda (1999), Osella and Osella (2006), Peletz (2007; 2009), Reddy (2005), Sinnott (2004), Srivastava (2007), Vanita (2002), Vanita and Kidwai (2000), Welker and Kam (2006), Wieringa (2002; 2010), Wieringa, Blackwood and Bhaiya (2007) and Wilson (2004; 2006).

There is a substantial body of work on MSM (men who have sex with men) although much of it focuses on health-related issues. For a critical reading of the emergence of this putative “non-identity” category, see Boellstorff (2011).