Queer Asian Cinema and Media Studies: From Hybridity to Critical Regionality

Abstract

B etween 2000 and 2008, I, together with Peter Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Fran Martin, co-convened the AsiaPacifiQueer (APQ) Network, an Australasian-wide collective of scholars writing in the field of queer and Asian studies. The APQ Net-work was aimed at facilitating intraregional linkages that arose with the marginalization of Asia-focused queer studies in the academy. It was also related to persistent anxieties about the place of queer stud-ies, geopolitically and academically. In particular, it was aimed at ad-dressing the real academic consequences of the US-centric nature of North American queer studies. As our now-defunct website noted: When the world's most richly funded research institutions, the most influential university presses, and the biggest mar-ket for English-language publications in the humanities and social sciences are all located within a single nation, a certain skewing of perspectives is probably inevitable. . . . It is possible for North American queer studies scholars to build successful careers while remaining almost completely ignorant of the global diversity of non-Western (and also non-American Western) queer cultures and histories. North American sexual cultures––from subcultural scenes to media products; from gay and lesbian activism to everyday sexual and gendered practices––are presumed to be primary and general while non-American sexual cultures, both Western and non-Western, are framed as particular and secondary.