Networking Asia Pacific: queer film festivals and the spatiotemporal politics of inter-referencing

ABSTRACT

Expanding on the critique of Euro-America-centrism in knowledge production, this article examines three spatiotemporal hierarchies through the inter-referencing practices of Asia Pacific Queer Film Festival Alliance. First, through the analysis of the documentary short Lady Eva and its circulation, I look at how the network opens up the issue of Pacific indigeneity in the transpacific context, which has the potential to unsettle the existing epistemic structures that rest upon the binary of West/non-West or white/Indigenous. Second, I investigate how the queer film festival alliance serves as sites for the articulation of queer rights, which sometimes cast a progressivist temporal narrative based on a hierarchical arrangement of geographical places. Third, through the case of ShanghaiPRIDE Film Festival, I examine how anti-institutionalism in film festival organizing offers a critique of gay-male dominated queer film festivals and the capitalist developmental logic that emphasizes profit and financial viability. By doing so, I scrutinize how the spatiotemporal hierarchies embedded in the film festival network complicate the understanding of inter-referencing as citation, collaboration, and competition. At the same time, I use inter-referencing to further the discussion of spatial politics in film festival studies by highlighting the spatiotemporal hierarchies.

KEYWORDS:

• Film festival
• queer
• Asia
• Pacific
• inter-referencing
• network
• rights

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Helen Leung, Christine Kim, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also want to thank Helen and Christine for inviting me to present the draft of this article in the Inter-Asia Beyond Asia workshop at Simon Fraser University. I am also grateful to Fan Popo, Dean Hamer, and all others who shared with me their thoughts and offered kind help during the writing of this article.

Notes on contributor

Jia Tan is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her doctoral degree in critical studies of cinema and television from the University of Southern California. Her articles on digital media, feminism, queer culture, and documentary have appeared in Crime, Media, Culture; Critical Studies in Media Communication; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; and Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

ORCID

Jia TAN http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0986-3497

Notes

1 As suggested by the Mardi Gras Film Festival in Sydney, there have been lesbian and gay film festivals in Sydney since 1978. For more, see https://queerscreen.org.au/about-us/history/.

2 Among them are the establishments of Beijing Queer Film Festival in 2001, Q!Film Festival in Jakarta in 2002, Abhimani Queer Film Festival in Colombo in 2005, Kansai Queer Film Festival in Kansai in 2005, ShanghaiPRIDE Film Festival in 2009, KASHISH Mumbai International Queer Film Festival in 2010. This website on queer film festival studies provides an interactive global map of queer film festivals: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/gqc/resources/queer-film-festival-studies/.

3 For more information, please also see the website of Taiwan Women's Film Association, the organizer of Women Make Waves Film Festival: http://www.wmw.org.tw/en/category/86.

4 By Native/Indigenous studies, I am referring to a diverse body of work that engage with issues of indigeneity and settler colonialism such as Jodi Byrds’s (2011) book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism or journals such as Settler Colonial Studies.

Additional information

Funding

This article receives funding from General Research Fund, Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee, Hong Kong (number 14612818) and Direct Grant for Research, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (number 4051095).