Final reminder for the upcoming half-day APQ (AsiaPacifiQueer). Please circulate widely. Apologies for x-posting!

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Perverse Transits: Transnational Flows and Local Sites—an AsiaPacifiQueer half-day seminar
University of Melbourne, July 22 2004
Large Seminar Room, John Medley Building, 1:00-4:45

Papers:

The Sacred, The Profane and the Domestic: Locating the Cinema of Cui Zi’en
Chris Berry
Associate Professor in Film Studies,
University of California, Berkeley.
In the last few years, Cui Zi’en has emerged as the People’s Republic of China’s first gay filmmaker. Working independently, he has produced a string of video and film works, including the feature film Man, Man, Woman, Woman (Nannan Nünü, scripted by Cui, directed by Liu Binjian, 1999), Mass (no CHinese title, 7 minutes approximately, 2001), The Pros and Cons of the WC (Gongce Zhengfan Fanfang, 20 minutes approximately, 2001), and Enter the Clowns (Choujia Dengtai, 2001). The paper introduces his work, considering it through Fran Martin’s theorization of “situated sexuality” as a decentering and recentering of queer culture and identity.
Taken as an oevre, and unholy trinity of themes animates Cui’s work: the sacred, the profane, and the domestic. Although I imagine the pious slogan for good German housewives is unknown to Cui, in my mind this operates like a perverse reworking of Kinder, Kirche, Küche (Children, Church and Kitchen). Cui’s interests are also with the domestic sphere and the church––but not the kitchen. Instead, Cui is most drawn to the toilet, and partciularly the public toilet, which he usually translates “WC” (water closet). I assume this is a deliberate pun––if gay men in the United States produce themselves by coming out of the closet, Cui’s Chinese gay men find each other by going into the (water) closet. On a formal level, his films appropriate the tropes of popular culture, ranging from television talk shows to family melodramas, and rework them into Chinese queer culture.

Thoroughly Modern Kathoey: Modernity and the Incitement to Transgenderism in Thailand
Peter A. Jackson
Fellow in Thai History
Division of Pacific and Asian History
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
ANU
A number of studies of Thai same-sex and transgender cultures (including my own earlier work, e.g. "Dear Uncle Go: Male Homosexuality in Thailand") have described m-t-f transgenders (Thai: kathoey) as the "traditional" face of homosexuality in Thailand and "gay" and "lesbian" identities as historically recent phenomena.  In these accounts, "modern" gay and lesbian identities are described as emerging from a transformation of "traditional" forms of transgenderism.  I now critique this view, and argue instead that the contemporary transgender identities that are now so prominent in Thailand are not the cultural precursors of gay and lesbian, but emerged together with gay and lesbian identities as part of a much broader shift in the local culture of gender and eroticism.  Rather than being a premodern form of homoeroticism that is being "transcended" in the transition to (post)modernity, Thai modernity is linked with an incitement to transgenderism that is making the kathoey an!
  even more prominent cultural phenomenon. I will illustrate this work-in-progress presentation with excepts from several Thai music video clips that reflect the prominence of the kathoey in contemporary Thai popular culture.  I will conclude with some reflections on Foucault's account of "the perverse implantation" to suggest a possible historical process for the contemporary incitement to transgenderism in Thailand.

Japan's Postwar 'Perverse' Culture 
Mark McLelland
ARC postdoctoral fellow, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies,
University of Queensland 
During the war years, state censorship in Japan placed severe restrictions on the representation of sexuality in print, film and other media, downplaying romance and reducing sex to hygienic and procreative functions. But in the first postwar decade, Japanese publishing saw a boom in interest in the topic of sexuality, particularly in those 'perverse desires' deemed 'individualistic' which had been repressed by the wartime state. Of the many hundreds of magazines printed during this period, several were dedicated to the exposition of 'perverse desire'. Unlike contemporary discourse about 'sex variants' in English which was almost entirely framed by medical and criminal discourse, Japan's 'perverse press' gave voice to a wide range of 'experts' as well as to the perverse themselves. The magazines did not segregate issues along a hetero or homosexual divide but included discussions of sadomasochism and a variety of fetishisms as well as 'sodomia' and 'Lesbos' love. Based on a !
 reading of over five hundred articles from the early 1950s press, this paper considers the relationship between sexual representation and practice. Borrowing Frow and Morris' definition of culture as process, that is 'a contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes of formation and reformation of social groups,' I inquire how and to what extent this literary genre impacted upon sexual minority identity and community formation in Japan's postwar period. 

Border Traffic: Queer and Asian Diaspora Studies in Australia
Audrey Yue
Lecturer in Cultural Studies
University of Melbourne
This paper formulates the critical pedagogy of border traffic by decentering the disciplinarity of ‘place’ (in area and ethnic studies) and situating the diaspora as alternative epistemological project. It argues that border traffic enables a cross-disciplinarity that problematises the movement afforded by ‘mobility’ as a materalilty and a discourse. For the Asian diaspora in Australia, border traffic inscribes the translocalities of how ‘Asia’ has been historically materialised through Australian institutional and symbolic economies. From immigration, forced prostitution to human rights, sex and sexuality, like the regions of Asian and Australia, are constructed through their reliance on borders. This paper will examine how border traffic, as the governance of mobility, has produced the diasporic Asian sexual subject in Australia. Case studies include the regulation of (female Asian) sex work, ethno-specific (gay Asian) public health HIV-AIDS management programs, inte!
 rdependency immigration policy and the postcolonial female masculinity of Asian drag kings.
 
Post-socialist Melancholia: Lesbianism as Repression in Liu Suola
Fran Martin
Lecturer in Cultural Studies
University of Melbourne
Commentary to date on lesbian representation in post-Mao Chinese fiction has generally assumed that, mirroring the absence of lesbian self-representation from the social sphere until about a decade ago, the lesbian topic was also absent from contemporary literature until the emergence of certain works by women writers including Chen Ran, Lin Bai, and Zhang Mei in the late 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, I argue in this paper for the ambiguous yet discernable fictional pre-emergence of the lesbian topic in a novella by Liu Suola, “Blue Sky Green Sea” (Lan tian lü hai) published in early 1985. Liu’s novella represents the lesbian subject by manifesting it as the repressed content both of the narrator’s unconscious and of the text itself. I link this representation of lesbianism as repression with the renewed popularity of Freudian theory in the intellectual context of 1980s China, the era of “culture fever.” Like other instances of the “schoolgirl romance”––a narrativ!
 e also notable in contemporary Hong Kong and Taiwanese fiction––“Blue Sky”’s representation of love between young women has both a memorial and a strongly utopian cast. But the distinctive forms that lesbian utopianism takes in this novella are unmistakably marked by the particular intellectual context of the reforms-era People’s Republic of the mid-1980s.



About The AsiaPacifiQueer Network
AsiaPacifiQueer (APQ) was founded in 2000 as an on-going collaboration between Australian, New Zealand and other scholars who are researching queer cultures and peoples in post-colonial societies of the Asia-Pacific.  APQ has organized three conferences in Australia, edited a special issue of the Internet journal Intersections, and convened dedicated APQ streams at several international conferences.  Full details of APQ’s past and upcoming activities are listed at the network’s website: (http://apq.anu.edu.au/)

-- 
Alvin Koh
PhD candidate 
Dept of English with Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne VIC 3010
k.koh3@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

