Is the experience of being a woman loving another woman the same in Brooklyn as it is in Surabaya? The contributors to Women's Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia would say no, and further that appreciation of the plurality of being a woman, being queer, and loving another woman is the beginning, rather the end, of liberation. Saskia Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya have assembled a collection of twelve essays that critique and deconstruct unitary ideas of gender, sexuality, and the queering of East, South, and Southeast Asia. The book is framed by an introduction that is explicitly transnational and feminist; Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya are attentive not only to how power and exclusion operate in the lives of lesbians and transgender people, but also to how their own analyses are implicated in processes of domination. Deploying ethnographic and historiographic analysis, literary and film criticism, philosophical critique, and personal reflection, the contributors reimagine a diversity of sexual subjectivities in Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. The book is divided into four categories: “Historical Legacies,” “Conditional Subjectivities,” “Female Masculinities,” and “Silencing and Modes of Invisibility.” An additional layer of themes creates connections across this collection of essays: the impulse toward categorization of identities, the potential for unusual sites of resistance, and the tensions between academic and activist work on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LBT) women's lives.

In one of two contributions to the volume, Abha Bhaiya asks, “Why do all of us have to be ‘lesbians’ in the way the dominant discourse can understand, label, and demarcate it?” (p. 75). Her fellow contributors offer a response by tracing a multiplicity of subjectivities, as well as the variety of ways in which they are formed and named. Megan Sinnott explores the masculine–feminine pairings of tom–dee relationships in Thailand, while noting the inherent instability and relationality of the pairings. Dees disrupt gender relations by occupying “gender normative yet sexually ambiguous” positions because “they do not neatly fit the transgender-normative gender pair model” (p. 123). Similarly, Franco Lai explores the masculine–feminine categories of TB (tomboy) and TBG (tomboy's girl), as well as “pure” (pure lesbian, one who is neither TB nor TBG) in Hong Kong. Grounded in ethnography in Bugis South Sulawesi, Sharyn Graham Davies explores how lesbi, calalai (masculine), lina (feminine), and other dissident sexualities are formed not in relation to a global or even national Indonesian queer subjectivity, but in relation to the heteronormative framework present. Evelyn Blackwood instead explores how lesbi and tomboi live in West Sumatra and how they perceive their lives in relation to national and transnational queer discourses in circulation. Shermal Wijewardene traces the lives of Shanthi and Manel, two biologically female “trans” rural lower-middle-class people in Sri Lanka. “Trans” is the category she uses “because it is the only term that is inclusive of their gender atypical behavior and at the same time expressive of how the gender perception of each differs from the other” (p. 103). By retaining the names, spellings, and pronouns (s/he and hir in Davies's essay, for example) in use in various locations—even when they upset the flow of text across an English-language page—the contributors point to the difficulty and subversive possibility of categorization.

Consistent with the volume's emphasis on the multiple ways to experience liberation, Saskia Wieringa, Kanchana Natarajan, Peichen Wu, and Jennifer Robertson identify diverse genealogies of women's same-sex love. Wieringa historicizes women's pleasure and same-sex relations in Japan from the Edo period to the present; she does so not to “uncover ‘premodern lesbians,’ ” but to offer a historical context to “subvert the feelings of sin, shame, and guilt that many present-day Japanese lesbians suffer from” (p. 24). Kanchana Natarajan's reading of the Tamil folk legend of Alliyarasanimalai against ideas of masculinity and femininity in Samkhyan philosophy productively identifies the existence of female desire and makes transgression of orthodoxy seem possible. In her essay about the members of the Seito Society, a women's literary society in 1910s Japan, Peichen Wu also foregrounds transgression. While the women, who were sexual with men and women, might be seen as bisexual today, Wu argues for recognition of their ambivalence as creating a space of resistance to binaries of all forms. Finally, Jennifer's Robertson's critique of the Asahi Shimbun's spoof of the attempted lesbian double suicide of Saijo Eriko and Masuda Yasumare in 1935 shows how even homophobic and heterosexist representations reveal the beginning of their undoing.

While many of the contributors note their participation in activist as well as academic work, the two essays by Abha Bhaiya, one of the founders of Jagori, a feminist organization in Delhi, are the most significant in this regard. In one of her essays, about the responses of Indian feminists, lesbians, and fundamentalists to Deepa Mehta's film Fire, she critiques the film as trivializing and depoliticizing woman-centered relationships. In her other essay, Bhaiya writes of women's love in the voice of “we,” and refuses to split off the personal from either the political or the intellectual by writing, “The truth about my identities is constantly shifting and reconfigurating… . We are not the alternative but integral to what is everyday mainstream, even if we are pushed to the margins” (p. 75). Bhaiya reminds us that refusing to separate the intellectual from the personal and the political will be necessary until and beyond the moment when LBT people can live without harassment, violence, and other sanctions experienced on the basis of identity.

The contributors to Women's Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia offer careful analyses of historical and present-day sexual subjectivities and how they are formed in relation to bodies, communities, and nations. The book is important for scholars and activists who are concerned with understanding the constellation of masculinities and femininities in East, South, and Southeast Asia, and for those concerned with how to understand and resist globalizing processes. What is now needed is a further extension of the spirit and practice of their analysis to site additional, perhaps endlessly multiple, experiences of gender, sexuality, desire, pleasure, and liberation in and beyond Asia.