In-Person Panel PS4.5

Queer Narratives Across Asian Borders: Rights and Representation

Sexuality and Gender Diversity Rights Claiming Practices in Southeast Asia 

Anthony Langlois 

ASEAN has established its own human rights regime, declared itself in favour of democracy and freedom, and focused its attention on citizens’ and residents’ well-being through the deployment of its “people-oriented” and “people-centred” rhetoric. ASEAN’s endorsement of human rights however does not extend to LGBT rights, which in some parts of the region are in crisis. ASEAN is here faced with a complexity: the international human rights regime has taken its own LGBT turn. Violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity expression and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) are recognised by the UN Human Rights Council as critical human rights violations. Further, sexuality and gender diversity advocacy organisations in different states in the region, operating at different scales and in different sectors, increasingly connect their work to human rights, both as a way of getting traction, but also in an attempt to push the ASEAN discussion of rights in the direction of recognising LGBT or SOGIESC rights. This has contributed to the evolution of what I analyse as a SOGIESC rights claiming mode of political participation across the Southeast Asia region.

Erotic Failures: The Intersections of Gay Fiction and Japanese Empire 

Samuel Perry 

In the Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam writes of the need for a more "disloyal historiography," one that does not simplify the function of homosexuality, but also acknowledges the unsettling and politically problematic aspects of the queer past. Surprisingly little work of this kind has been done when it comes to questions of male homosexuality in Japan. In this paper I therefore turn back turn the 1970s, to a period when male homosexuality found an altogether new kind of affirmation in a wide range of magazines, just as scholars argue it also began to increasingly embrace normative forms of masculinity and coupledom, and to sever itself from sexological discourses on the perverse. I look in particular at several erotic stories that create a space where a potentially transgressive sexual jouissance overlaps with troubling narratives of empire that explicitly invoke Japan’s former Korean colony. How and why do the horizons of erotic fiction in Japan expand in the 1970s to foreground the experiences of Japanese gay men in Korea?

Queer Absences in Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh (2016): Bollywood, Section 377, and Queer Indian Politics 

Shabnam  Rathee 

I unravel complicated questions of sexual otherness and its messier intersections with religion, class, capital, and caste in and through the discourse of the legal challenge to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) that bookends Hansal Mehta’s adaptation of Professor Siras’s story in Aligarh (2016). My reading of the film’s treatment of the primary event of violation, invasion of Siras’s privacy, becomes the focal point for analyzing how the filmic diegesis overlooks the experiences of Irfan, Siras’s lower-class, Muslim lover. By framing Siras’s legal fight around the broader queer movement in India that has oscillated around reading down Section 377 to exclude consensual same-sex activities in private, I contend that Irfan’s absence heightens the abjectness of queer bodies without access to social capital to demand legal justice. In this context, I argue that Aligarh’s politics of bracketing off the transgressive figure of Irfan can potentially expose the underlying logic of racial othering and profiling that continues to marginalize abject queer bodies that cannot be assimilated within the broader demand for political citizenry based on assertions of “collective homosexual identity” (Tan 2019, 142).

Taiwanese LGBTQ Comics in 2018-2023: A Case Study of Cross-Asian Cultural Exchanges 

Tien-yi Chao 

Despite the strong influence of imported Japanese works over the past few decades, Taiwanese comics are now thriving in development, with increasing impact and visibility in the Asian market, in particular works focusing on LGBTQ issues. This paper aims to analyse the development of Taiwanese commercial comics of such kind by discussing a selection of works published between 2018 and 2023, as well as the government’s cultural policies relating to CCC (Creative Comic Collection) and Taiwan Comic Base. By doing this I hope to explore the ways in which Taiwanese comics manage to develop a ‘national identity’ (or branding) featuring ‘Fabulous Taiwan’ in recent years. I contend that this is achieved by highlighting the local society’s tolerance and even respect towards LGBTQ communities (as in comparison with a majority of Asian countries), while at the same time establishing culturally hybrid links to Japanese manga and Korean manhua, especially Boys Love (BL) and Girls Love (GL/Yuri) subcultures.