Abstract
My history of engagement with Asian Queer Studies is almost contemporaneous with the history of the journal Sexualities whose contribution to the field of sexuality studies we are currently celebrating. This short piece looks at the emergence of the field of Asian Queer Studies across the past 20 years and reflects my own research interests and biases to some extent (hence mostly addressing East Asia). I hope it will at least give a sense of how much the field has been transformed in this comparatively short time frame and point to some of the major developments that have brought about this transformation.
In 1997 I commenced a PhD at the University of Hong Kong that aimed to analyse the various ways in which male homosexuality was positioned in the contemporary Japanese media. This was in some ways a fraught enterprise. Male homosexual sex had only been legal in HK since 1991 and there remained strongly expressed public sentiment against recognising minority sexuality rights. I was even warned about not discussing my research too openly in front of undergraduate students who ‘might not understand’ the aims of the project! Reviewing past doctoral and masters’ theses on the topic of homosexuality that had been submitted to HKU since the 1980s, it was apparent that the majority of these projects were still framed in terms of ‘deviance’ and ‘social problems’ by researchers positioning themselves as outside the communities under investigation. This was despite the fact that Samshasha (also known as Xiaomingxiong – both pseudonyms), a US-educated Hong Kong local, had been an advocate for gay rights in the colony since 1980 and in 1984 had published his comprehensive History of Homosexuality in China in Chinese (see McLelland, 2000). Samshasha, however, published and circulated his work without any academic support or recognition at a time when male homosexual acts were still illegal.
Of the non-social science literature looking at homosexuality in China (Hinsch, 1992; Van Gulik, 1974), as well as Japan (Leupp, 1997) and Korea (Kim, 1992), much was historical and concerned ancient texts and cultural practices. There was little available that looked at contemporary issues of sexual minority identity and community based on accounts deriving from the communities themselves. One pioneering account that to some extent anticipated works that became more prominent in the early 2000s, was Peter Jackson’s 1995 book Dear Uncle Go: Male Homosexuality in Thailand based upon letters from gay men sent to a prominent Thai advice columnist as well as sources derived from gay and mainstream Thai publications.
Despite the lack of a tradition of Queer Studies at universities in HK, I had joined HKU at an interesting time as things were beginning to change. Chou Wah Shan, then a lecturer in Sociology at the university, had recently (in 1995) brought out his ground-breaking study (in Chinese) of gay men’s coming-out narratives, later adapted and published in an English version as Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies (Chou, 2000). Chou went on to argue in a subsequent article for the Journal of Homosexuality that ‘same-sex eroticism is no longer a minority issue but a basic human issue that concerns everyone and permeates every aspect of social life’ (2001: 46).
The turn of the millennium saw the breakthrough into mainstream publishing of new kinds of narratives about sexual minorities, ones that stressed the primacy of the perspectives and voices of those persons directly concerned. These were often written by authors who were open about their own non-heterosexual interests and identities. In Chinese, a common term that emerged at this time is tongzhi, originally used in revolutionary circles in the early 20th century to designate ‘comrade’, and later adopted by some among the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community to refer to fellow non-heterosexuals. Japanese also has a useful term for this sense of close community involvement, tōjisha, originally a legal term designating a plaintiff in a trial but later picked up by women’s and minority sexuality movements to designate the viewpoints of those persons directly involved with and impacted by an issue. Many of the people who began writing about sexual minority issues in Asia in the late 1990s and early 2000s were themselves members of sexual minorities and were keen to represent the viewpoints of people that they knew as friends and community members and not simply as ‘research subjects’.
This work introduced a new reflexivity into discussions of non-heterosexual identities and behaviours in an East-Asian context, challenging the applicability of the sexual identity labels and coming-out trajectories that had been established in Anglophone academia since the 1970s. An emphasis on lived experience (as opposed to historical or cultural texts) began to reveal the complex and nuanced ways in which members of sexual minorities thought about themselves both individually and as part of wider communities. This work was careful to highlight the significance of local terms and resisted situating developments taking place across the societies in East Asia in terms of western developmental narratives (see for example the chapters collected in Martin et al., 2008).
Much of the research published prior to 2000 had stressed male, particularly male homosexual experience. However since the turn of the millennium there has been increased emphasis on lesbian and transgender lives and culture by a new generation of female authors presenting important work about queer women and trans men. These works include Sang’s 2003 The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, Tang’s 2011 Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life, and Kam’s 2013 Shanghai LaLas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China. Sinnott’s 2004 Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand is another significant work, discussing as it does female-to-male transgender experience.
International academic conferences have played an important role in highlighting this new work on queer approaches to sex and gender in Asian societies. From the early 2000s there has been a steady increase in the number of panels presented at prestigious conferences in the USA such as the general meetings of the Association for Asian Studies as well as in Europe and throughout Asia. The International Convention of Asia Scholars conference held in Singapore in 2003 was a significant landmark given that it featured five themed panels covering queer Asian issues, from activism through to literary criticism and film theory. This conference marked something of a generational change regarding the acceptability of queer theories and issues in ‘Asian Studies’ as a discipline, making it clear that queer culture was as valid a topic of academic inquiry as any other aspect of a nation’s culture and heritage.
In 2005 the Sexualities, Genders and Rights in Asia: 1st International conference of Asian Queer Studies, an international collaboration between academics based in Thailand and Australia, was held in Bangkok, the first time that an international conference had been convened specifically around Asian Queer Studies on such a large scale (there were over 500 attendees; see Welker and Kam 2006 for a discussion of the conference). It is now common to find a range of Queer Studies panels at conferences dedicated to Asian Studies and for Asian Queer Studies panels to feature in conferences dedicated to diverse fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, History and Literature. Since 2014, the Association for Asian Studies, for instance, has had a designated queer caucus that sponsors a queer panel at each meeting as well as serving as a point of contact for Queer Studies scholars working on and across Asia.
The International Association for the Study of Sexuality Society and Culture, founded in 1997, organises conferences in different world regions in order to facilitate inter-regional dialogue around sexual health, rights and culture – the 2017 conference was held in Bangkok. Such conferences that are open to activists and NGOs as well as academics are significant in that they often feature presentations that challenge academic knowledge and the privileged position from which some (but not all) academics speak. After all, many academics are paid to produce the research they do in institutions that are, on paper at least, committed to values such as free speech. Activists on the ground in situations such as Bangladesh, India, China and Indonesia (to point to just a few of the presentations at the 2017 IASSCS conference) are clearly in a very different speaking position and the knowledge that they make available has different stakes.
It is important also to recognise the contribution of journals such as Inter-Asia Cultural Studies that have been working toward the ‘re-centring of cultural studies outside the Anglo-American axis’, serving as a space that is supportive of queer work and queer researchers based in Asia who do not feel it necessary to frame their work in terms of contemporary western theory (which is often a tiresome revision request when scholars submit work that is seen as of purely ‘local’ import by ‘international’ journals). The journal Sexualities, too, has proven a hospitable venue for numerous articles and special issues looking at regions including South America, Africa and of course East Asia – and one of its current editors, Travis Kong, is himself an expert in male homosexual subcultures in China. Kong’s 2011 book Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy is an excellent example of the new style of ethnographic inquiry that demonstrates how the study of non-normative sexualities is essential for an understanding of social mobility and globalisation across Asia. The manner in which the rise of internet publishing since the late 1990s has facilitated inter-regional conversations is also extremely significant. The website Fridae.com, now the longest running site offering pan-Asian queer-related news and current events, is a case in point, providing information in both English and Chinese.
Changes in publishing practices have gone hand-in-hand with a transformation in the way Queer Studies research is regarded in the academy in terms of the appointment to positions, tenure and promotion. Hong Kong University, for instance, is now home to several significant scholars of queer sexuality. Other universities in the region with strong concentrations of Queer Studies scholars include National Taiwan Central University, National Taiwan University, and Hong Kong Baptist University.
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, if marginal issues for mainstream academic disciplines such as History, Sociology, Literature and Cultural Studies. ‘Asian Queer Studies’ has established itself as a major academic endeavour – as acknowledged by its now official place on the agenda of influential organisations such as the Association for Asian Studies. Queer Asia panels appear across numerous academic conferences and academic journals and major presses, including Palgrave and Hong Kong University’s own press, now feature Queer Asia books and series. There is a greater understanding among researchers of the political stakes involved in researching minority sexualities and genders in Asia, greater outreach that includes the voices of activists and local community members, and a growing awareness of the limitations of western paradigms for the study of gender and sexuality. Sexualities journal itself has always proven hospitable to this kind of research and we look forward to seeing more of it in its pages in the future.