Queering the transnational turn: regionalism and queer Asias

Transnational queer sociological analysis of sexual identity and civic‐political activism in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China

“…Eng and Hom ; Han ; Leong ; Lim ; Manalansan ; Nguyen ). The second approach – ‘critical regional queer Asian studies’ (Johnson, Jackson and Herdt ; see also Chiang and Wong ) – conceptualizes queer life in the complex modernities of the Global South as centres of transnational queer critique and analysis (e.g. Berry, Martin and Yue ; Chu and Martin ; McLelland and Mackie ; Wieringa, Blackwood and Bhaiya ).…”

“…Finally, the proposed transnational queer sociology constitutes a response to both Chiang and Wong’s () recent call for ‘queering the transnational turn’ to consider the critical edge that ‘regionalism’ might afford investigations of queer modernities in Asia and Yue and Leung’s () ‘queer Asia as method’, whose aim is to provincialize Western queer knowledge production and initiate critical conversations. The proposed sociology is to be used not only for a broader range of cases within Asia, but across the globe.…”

The queer Global South: Transnational video activism between China and Africa

“…Howard Chiang, Ari Larissa Heinrich, and Alvin K. Wong (Chiang & Heinrich, 2013; Chiang & Wong, 2020) come up with the critical term “queer Sinophone cultures” to decenter the PRC (People’s Republic of China)-centrism in transnational queer studies. Audrey Yue (2017) and Helen Hok Sze Leung (Yue & Leung, 2017) use “queer Asia as method,” whereas Howard Chiang and Alvin K. Wong (2016, 2017) study “queer Asia as critique”: in both cases, “queer Asia” is treated with a great theoretical vigor, rather than simply reproducing the West/Asia and theory/method dichotomies in academic knowledge production. Drawing on Yue and Leung, Jia Tan (2019) examines the use of inter-Asia referencing in queer film festivals in the Asia Pacific; Ting-Fai Yu (2019) examines the role of class in comparative queer cultures in Asia.…”

Queer vernacularism: Minor transnationalism across Hong Kong and Singapore

“…One useful framework to approach this multiplicity of the novel’s spatial mapping of gender is queer regionalism. In parsing the complex regional configurations of sexuality in the novel, Howard Chiang and Alvin K. Wong argue that “queer regionalism can potentially counter the ‘area unconscious’ of queer studies in order to allow for gender and sexual modernities in ‘other Asias’ to actualize both objects of studies and conceptual paradigms for queer theory” (Chiang and Wong, 2016: 1646). Lee’s novel precisely references such “other Asias” as Singapore through its triangular mapping of erotic confusion and school boy romance across the Chinese-Singaporean protagonist Chris and the minor characters Sylvia and Ken (Spivak, 2008).…”

“…What makes Peculiar Chris a truly peculiar text of queer vernacularism is thus the way in which the narrative mobilizes the homonormative tendency of the Western gay emergence of the self through disavowing sexual perversity and urban vernacular knowledge of sexual diversity. As Chiang and Wong (2016) suggest, [With] the subsequent multicultural inclusion of Indians and Malays alongside the Chinese as national subjects, Ken as a queer Indonesian can equally be read as internal to the very transcolonial fabric of Singaporean queerness. In his fluctuating positionality of being an external regional other and an internal national other, Ken’s queer subjecthood marks the very boundary through which a Sinocentric Singaporean queer subject like Chris can emerge.…”