Over approximately the past fifteen years, English-language scholarship on same-sex sexuality and transgenderism in Asia has expanded dramatically.Footnote ¹ One of the most significant themes in this literature is the exploration of sexuality and gender as a form of identity (or “subjectivity”), practice, and cultural discourse (or “cultural logic”) that has emerged in the context of the transnational movement of concepts, bodies, and imagery. The turn to issues of transnationalism, diaspora, and border crossings works toward interrogating and deconstructing assumptions of steamrolling Westernization or stable identity categories that fall along binaries such as traditional/modern or local/global. Within this growing literature, authors struggle with representing forms of same-sex sexuality and transgenderism not as simple products of Westernization or, alternatively, as “authentic” indigenous sexualities, but rather as complex responses to, and extensions of, culturally determined systems of gender, nationalisms, capitalist labor and consumer practices, urbanization, and transnational movements.

A second significant and related theme is the exploration of connections and commonalities across Asia and within Asian subregions, particularly Southeast Asia. The politics and logistics of research have compelled researchers to frame their studies in terms of national cultures. For example, the need to learn national languages (Central Thai, Mandarin Chinese, etc.), the organization of area studies in terms of national cultures (Japanese studies, Vietnamese studies, etc.), and the requirement to apply to national research boards for visas reinforce the nationalist project of defining “culture” in terms of the nation-state. The critical analysis of how the nation-state works to define sexuality and gender as part of nationalist projects is a popular and well-developed direction of Asian sexuality and gender studies. But exactly how sexuality and gender categories work across and through boundaries is an important new direction. For example, the emergence of identity categories that either directly adopt some variation of the English terms “gay” and “lesbian” (such as gay in Thailand and lesbi in Indonesia), the centrality of gender rather than sexuality or sexual orientation in the establishment of these categories, and the prevalence of “butch-femme,” or masculine and feminine pairings between women in sexual relationships, have all led to long-standing calls for a systematic and concerted exploration of cross-regional influences and patterns. To take a widely recognized example, in numerous East Asian and Southeast Asian contexts, terms for masculine women rely on an adaptation of the English word “tomboy.” Tom in Thailand, tomboi in Indonesia, and TB in Hong Kong are all types of female masculinities in which sexual attraction to gender-normative feminine women is a taken-for-granted cultural assumption and practice in these areas. These commonalities have urged researchers to question the traditional focus on nationally bound cultures, or to assume that the “West” is the original and authentic model of all transformations in the sexual and gender order of Asia.

This essay will examine several of these recent texts and explore the ways in which they engage with the themes of boundaries, borders, and diaspora and then move to review recent efforts at cross-regional analysis. This review cannot be comprehensive; constraints of space make it impossible to review all of the important texts produced in this field. I have chosen a few texts that represent the general trends I have outlined, and I urge interested readers to turn to other texts listed here. In addition, discussion is weighted toward the discipline of anthropology and studies on Southeast Asia (and, to a degree, South Asia), as these fields define my own research, as well as make up a particularly dynamic, although not the only, area of Asian studies of sexuality and gender.

Before turning to these texts specifically, it is important to identify the general debates and cleavages within the field of Asian “queer” studies in order to better contextualize the contribution of the texts discussed here and to grapple with the at times contentious debate over the terms, analytical categories, and theoretical frameworks deployed within these studies. I identify two main axes of debate circulating within the field at present. The first point of debate concerns the terms of analysis—the term “queer” in particular—and the second issue concerns the generally masculinist orientation of the literature.

In Bangkok on July 7–9, 2005, the conference “Sexualities, Genders, and Rights in Asia: The First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies” was held, sponsored by the AsiaPacifiQueer project, in collaboration with the Office of Human Rights Studies and Social Development at Mahidol University.Footnote ² This conference was explicitly geared toward providing a forum for the development of a regional queer studies and fostering a network of people working on queer issues within the region. Two important edited works have been produced that reflect on the conference presentations and theme: AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities, edited by Fran Martin, Peter Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue (2008), and a special issue of the journal Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context (vol. 14) in 2006.

In the introduction to Martin et al., the editors describe the goals of the conference: “Prior to this conference, there had been no mechanism, no other large-scale international gathering, journal, or academic context in which local Asian GLBTQ histories could be discussed alongside each other without first referencing Western approaches and paradigms” (2008, 2). The aim of the conference to provide a space outside the hegemonic realm of Western-based academic discourse highlights one of the key points of contention—the rubric of “queer” and “queer studies” itself as a framing device and analytic construct for the discussion of sexualities and genders in Asia.

Martin et al. promote the model of “queer hybridization” in order to transcend the presentation of “sexual cultures” as either traditional, “authentic” local phenomena or, alternatively, as products of a global process of Westernization and homogenization (2008, 6). Both the terms “queer” and “hybridity” are used in this sense to indicate the “transformative potential of new subject positions and subversion” that are of theoretical concern within postmodern and poststructural approaches (Martin et al. Reference Martin, Jackson, McLelland and Yue2008, 7). This framing of “queer” as an analytical perspective is troubled by the term's simultaneous use throughout academic literature as a shorthand reference to nonnormative sexuality and gender, or to same-sex sexuality and transgenderism (which may be, arguably, in some contexts “normative”). Ara Wilson, in her essay in the Intersections special issue, lays out these problematic usages of the term “queer”:

Wilson succinctly summarizes the practices of using of the term “queer” as a theoretical perspective, while simultaneously acknowledging its problematic use as a referent to local practices and categories in which “queer,” and its implications of subversion, minority positions, and contestation, may not resonate with local meaning systems regarding sexuality and gender—a point reiterated in Martin et al.'s introduction, in which the editors note that in the case of Thailand, in particular, queer theory or queer identity is not a popular or resonant concept (2008, 10–12).

Likewise, James Welker and Lucetta Kam (2006), in the introduction to the Intersections issue, identify a series of problems with the use of the term “queer.” Queer, as a reference to queer theory, is embedded in Western/Anglo hegemonic academic settings, and thus it is a problematic category for framing the project of supporting the development of Asian theories of sexuality and gender independent of hegemonic Western/Anglo/American academic institutions and theoretical traditions. One of the primary theoretical gestures of queer theory is to identify the moments in which gender, the sexed body, and desire do not line up in expected and heteronormative ways, thereby destabilizing and underminining the assumed naturalness of the heteronormative order. The ways in which these categories, themselves Western historical productions, are expected to cohere has been explored in much of the anthropological literature on sexuality and gender in Asia; therefore, the moments of “queerness” cannot be defined or identified outside any particular historical and cultural context, which problematizes the use of “queer” as a point of cross-cultural comparison and analysis.

“Queer,” as a category of identity, term of self-reference, or category of analysis, is even less salient in many Asian contexts; for example, the term may represent a kind of oppositional, confrontational, and nonnormative status that is unappealing or not consistent with concepts of self and community (a point that is also relevant for the study of same-sex sexuality and transgenderism within the United States).

The critique of the use of the term “queer” resonates with a longer-standing discussion over the use of Foucauldian-inspired sexuality theory in regions where gender identities subsume sexual behavior and identities (for a few examples of the debate, see Blackwood, forthcoming; Jackson Reference Jackson2006; Morris Reference Morris1994; Sinnott Reference Sinnott2004; Stoler Reference Stoler1995). In fact, much of the literature cited in this essay dispels any easy application of “sexuality” as an analytical or descriptive unit. For example, terms translatable as “gay,” “lesbian,” and “homosexual” (or direct borrowings of these terms) are often references to the transgendering of an individual versus his or her sexual identity or behavior per se. The distinction between sexual and gender identity has led to a bifurcated sexual/gender order in places, such as Thailand, where a stratum of individuals, often involved in activist or nongovernmental organization work, identify with Anglo/American/Western categories of sexuality identity (such as “gay” or “lesbian”) but coexist within larger cultural contexts in which these categories are understood by most others as dimensions of gender (such as being a manly woman or a womanly man). The distinction between sexuality and gender as the primary basis of identity is an important point of discussion and analysis, but because of the long-standing and extensive coverage of this issue, this essay focuses on the related and currently salient issue of the term “queer.” The term “queer” has an undeniable postmodern appeal, with its umbrella-like inclusion of an unbounded range of individuals and its potential within activist projects to reach across borders—national, sexual, and gendered (Welker and Kam Reference Welker and Kam2006, 6).

An example of both the potential and the limitations of the term “queer” as an overarching category for these studies is found in Gayatri Reddy's With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (2005). Reddy argues that the trope of gender “thirdness,” of which the hijra has long served as the most iconic example, reifies sexuality and “thirdness” as the privileged point of hijra identity. Reddy argues that the project to destabilize the presumed naturalness of the Western dual gender system has rendered hijras (and other subject categories often glossed as “third sexes,” such as the Thai kathoey) as static and one-dimensional representatives of a third or intermediate sex defined largely by their sexuality. In contrast, Reddy demonstrates that religion, kinship, and moral discourses of respect, or izzat, are the central yet flexible vectors of identity.

Placing this nuanced ethnography of hijra identity within the category of “Asian queer studies” may link Reddy's analysis of the multiple plains of identity with the concern in queer studies regarding the complex and contradictory processes of the construction of normativity. The hijras of Reddy's analysis are utterly embedded within the localized cultures of religion, kinship, gender, and so forth. However, “queer” is not used within her study as a category of analysis or as a term with local significance to the individuals whose life stories are captured within her text. The popularity of the term “queer” as a central analytical linchpin, or simply as a categorical placeholder for a certain kind of study, seems to add little to the type of detailed ethnographic description that Reddy provides. In fact, it may even elide the important argument that Reddy makes concerning the importance of multiple plains of identity other than sexuality that are of primary significance to the hijras themselves.

Debate over, or at least unease with, the term “queer,” both for the theoretical impositions it makes as well as its rootedness within hegemonic Western/Anglo academics, is an extension of a much longer-standing debate within anthropology and history over the use of a range of analytical categories that are deployed in cross-cultural analysis, including the terms “gay,” “lesbian,” and even “sexuality and gender” (see, e.g., Elliston Reference Elliston1995; Valentine Reference Valentine2007). To do any cross-cultural analysis, general analytical terms must be used that are already embedded in linguistic systems, which are, by necessity, extensions of hegemonies, hierarchies, and relations of power. Whether “queer” is a more precise or more useful term for this type of cross-cultural analysis and discussion than the categories and terms “LGBT,” “transgenderism,” “same-sex sexuality,” and the like, is part of the ongoing debate, and the differing terms of analysis used in the field of “Asian queer studies” reflects this debate. The works discussed here have all focused on explicating local meaning systems, influenced by transnationalisms of all sorts, with nuanced attention to the categories of their particular cultural context.

In addition to the debate over language use, terminology, and categories of analysis, the other significant point of contention within the field surrounds feminist critiques of male-centric perspectives, the lack of gendered analysis (in terms of hierarchical relations between men and women), and the “false gender neutrality” of words such as “queer.” Discussed in the last section of this essay, Women's Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, edited by Saskia Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya (2007), speaks directly to this debate. Each of the books discussed here was selected because of their positive contributions to the field in the way the authors grapple with these contentious issues through substantial research and thoughtful analysis; rather than focusing this essay on a critique of particular approaches or flawed analyses, I have chosen to identify works that reflect the central position that scholarship on Asia has taken within queer/sexuality studies.

Boundaries, Borders, and Diasporas

The themes of boundaries, borders, and diaspora have been particularly productive in Asian queer scholarship. Mark Johnson's (1997) ethnography of male transgendered gay or bantut beauty contestants in the southern Philippine town of Jolo illustrates how cultural categories are transformed within specific historical contexts, such as the Spanish and American colonialisms, militarism of the Christian Philippine state in southern Muslim regions, and transnational discourses of progress and modernity. Johnson argues that the beauty pageants for transgendered males identifying as gay have emerged as a site in which an outside cultural other is mediated and negotiated in the process of producing an ethnic nationalism. These contests require participants to use English and perform their knowledge of transnational beauty. Johnson argues that the beauty performed in the contest is “rooted in and articulate a particular conceptual order of the world” (1997, 54); it is an indicator of education, professionalism, and good citizenship, and has a particular association with “America,” which is evoked as an imagined cultural other. In this sense, the gays and their beauty are associated with desirable qualities of transnational cosmopolitanism and cultural capital. However, beauty, and its association with gays, is a multivalent symbol that evokes ethnonationalist imagery in which nationalism is associated with masculinity and femininity with the traditional order, a theme that is repeated in many of the other cultural contexts studied by the authors reviewed here. In the context of the oppression of the Muslim south by the Christian Philippine state, the feminized gay, representing beauty, otherness, and America, resonates with meanings of failed masculinity and defiled women. The image of gay is marked by ambivalence in which contradictory, complex meaning systems are evoked within a specific historical and political context. Gay is a category of identity that is inextricable from the specific political and historical context, as well as the gendered social order of the southern Philippines.

According to Johnson, transgendered males may have functioned historically as mediating figures in island Southeast Asian cosmologies (Peacock Reference Peacock1968; Peletz Reference Peletz2007), and may be still functioning in a similar way, yet the cosmologies that are being mediated are thoroughly part of the current historical moment: “What emerges is an entangled skein in which local sensibilities and idioms of masculinity and femininity, kinship and marriage, are variously asserted, reworked and/or placed alongside ethnonationalist rhetoric, religious and Western psychologisms, and imaginings of other worlds and peoples” (1997, 13). These cultural forms and identities are only properly understood if placed within the larger transnational flow of meanings and influences, as well as local national and ethnic conflict and political order.

Tom Boellstorff (Reference Boellstorff2005, Reference Boellstorff2007) also takes up the concept of boundaries and borders in nationalist contexts by exploring the production of contemporary sexual and gender subjectivities in Indonesia. Boellstorff uses the concept of “dubbing” to grapple with the complex way in which obviously foreign terms and concepts, such as “gay” and “lesbian,” are refashioned into locally salient concepts and subjectivities. Boellstorff rejects the use of terms such as “mimicking” or “borrowing” to describe these appropriations of English terms because they imply that something that is authentic and original has been used to produce a category that is debased, inauthentic, and derivative:

According to Boellstorff, simple dichotomies of Western/Indonesian, modern/traditional, and global/local fail to capture the complex process of cultural transformation and production of new categories of selfhood. In dubbing, a fusion is created in which the seams are visible, and there is no original to which the dubbed version can refer. In an intriguing insight, Boellstorff compares dubbing to the creation of the Indonesian state, which is justified in terms of a tradition that has never been experienced by most citizens and a political entity newly formed from the parameters of the old colonial state. Boellstorff argues for a rejection of the binary of “puppets of globalization” and “veneer over tradition” (2005, 82) to explain the emergence and development of these subjectivities. According to Boellstorff, something new has come into being—namely, gay and lesbi subjectivities—but they are not a translation into an authentically original cultural form or a simple “borrowing” of a foreign concept.

The theme of borders is extended in Martin Manalansan's Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2004),Footnote ³ in which the movement across borders is more literally rendered in the migration of Filipino men to New York City. Manalansan explores how identity categories, such as gay and bakla, gain their salience through the process of migration and negotiation with the racial, ethnic, and class hierarchies in the United States. Within the racialized and class politics of New York City's gay and mainstream culture, in which Asian men and particularly Filipino men are sexualized and feminized, the concept of bakla, a seemingly “traditional” category based on feminine transgenderism, gains significance as an alternative space in which a type of nostalgia for home and nation is expressed: “[B]akla is not a premodern antecedent to gay but rather, in diasporic spaces, bakla is recuperated and becomes an alternative form of modernity” (2004, 21). Manalansan challenges the dominant mainstream narrative of a liberated, modernized Western gay identity that displaces archaic bakla or “closeted” Filipino queers.

Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005) explores queer diasporic female subjectivity within South Asian popular culture, including music, film, and literature. This work is rooted in the discipline of cultural studies, in contrast to the social sciences and ethnographic work discussed earlier, yet Gopinath is an important participant in the conversation on queer diaspora that has concerned many of these authors. Gopinath addresses the tensions and contradictions in the way in which home, nation, sexuality, and gender are represented within queer and feminist South Asian popular culture. Gopinath argues that queer diasporic films often displace the implicit and embedded female queerness in South Asian films by rendering the queer explicit and male. For example, in comparing two films, Gopinath says, “The line between female homosociality and female homoeroticism, which remains so porous in representations of homosocial space in neoconservative Bollywood romance such as HAHK [Hum Aapke Hain Koun, or “Who am I to You?”] … is strictly policed in the ostensibly feminist Monsoon Wedding” (2005, 122). Gopinath argues that queer diasporic experience and expression must be understood in terms of the nationalist, racial, and class politics operating in both the South Asian and diasporic contexts that impose gender hierarchies, valorize masculine community, and erase female homoeroticism in representations of an “authentic” homeland or liberating diasporic space:

Gopinath, along with the other authors reviewed earlier, refuses to accept binaries that place Asian tradition or home in opposition to queer subjectivity. Gopinath stresses the need to understand how representations of female heterosexuality and erasures of female queer sexuality are embedded in both assertions of an imputed traditional national culture and queer rearticulations of such a cultural order.

Connections

Saskia Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya (2007) and Michael Peletz (Reference Peletz2007) have produced two recent texts that explicitly address the issue of cross-regional patterns of gender and sexuality in Asia. The obvious similarities in gender and sexual categories throughout Southeast Asia in particular have evoked widespread calls for more systematic comparison; the general parameters of such a comparison are succinctly laid out by Boellstorff (Reference Boellstorff2007, 180–218). Like Gopinath (Reference Gopinath2005), Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya (Reference Wieringa, Blackwood and Bhaiya2007) are noteworthy in their explicit focus on women's sexualities and genders. One of their theoretical contributions to the field lay in their feminist concern with identifying gender hierarchy and differences between male and female bodied individuals in the way that the sexual and gender categories are produced. Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya address the tension that exists within this literature between scholarship under the framework of “queer studies” and feminist studies. Blackwood and Wieringa, in the introductory chapter (“Globalization, Sexuality, and Silences: Women's Sexualities and Masculinities in an Asian Context”), explain that femaleness rather than “queer” was chosen as the defining analytical category to structure the volume, “keeping the theoretical lens on women and those with female bodies as a more productive angle to reveal the way meanings are attached to particular bodies” (2007, 12). The authors argue that the term “queer” implies a gender neutrality that is belied by the gender-specific cultural and sexual practices evident in these studies. Blackwood and Wieringa sum up the need for a feminist engagement with queer studies:

As is the case with the texts reviewed earlier, Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya engage the theme of cross-regional patterns in nuanced and locally attentive ways that do not rely on a steamrolling approach to globalization or absolute binaries such as “local” and “global” or “traditional” and “modern.” Several of the articles pick up the theme that is identified in Gopinath (Reference Gopinath2005) regarding the problematic and contradictory implications of rendering explicit and visible female same-sex sexuality. For example, Abha Bhaiya (“Flames of Fire: Expressions and Denial of Female Sexuality”) reviews the response to Fire, a film about explicitly identified female same-sex sexuality and love in India. Hindu fundamentalists clashed with democracy activists and local feminist organizations over the right to show the film. Bhaiya argues that the film itself produces lesbianism in a stereotypical and trivializing manner, and the narrative that emerged from the protests worked to produce claims of being “Indian and lesbian,” leading the protestors to participate in type of “competitive citizenship.” The articulations of “Indian lesbianism” of the film and the protests through their perhaps unintended complicity with nationalist agendas did not lead to an unambiguous moment of progress or liberation.

The modernizations and historical trends that are described by the authors in Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya are met with ambivalence; activist discourses such as that evidenced in the response to Fire were problematic in their appropriation and naming of sexual and gender practices that have been interwoven into normative orders and described within a wide range of local meaning systems. Bhaiya and the other authors demonstrate that there are no simple or easy solutions for navigating the problematic boundaries of resisting gender and sexual oppression and mobilizing new forms of visibility and articulation that often bring with them new hegemonic orders of oppression.

Michael Peletz's Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics in Modern Asia (2007) is an analysis of historical trends and regional variations of gender and sexual practices, categories, and concepts within Asia. Peletz rejects simplistic assumptions of gender binaries or the sexual binary of homosexual and heterosexual as an analytical framework, and instead explores the multiple local and regional ways of categorizing and conceptualizing gender and sexuality. The text is organized around thematic issues, including ritual, households, state and national security discourses, family and descent, same-sex sexuality and transgenderism, militarism, prostitution, and social activism. For each theme, Peletz discusses one or more case studies, pulling from an impressive range of secondary sources as well as his own work on Malaysia.

Peletz employs the concept of “pluralism,” looking at the degree of multiple legitimate gender and sexual models in each society:

Gender pluralism is the acknowledgment and legitimacy granted to a range of gendered expression, typically in which the physical body does not absolutely determine the gender of the individual. Peletz compares gender pluralism to the well-known concept of “benign sexual variation” that Gayle Rubin (Reference Rubin and Vance1984) described in “Thinking Sex” (Peletz Reference Peletz2007, 45).

Peletz's focus on gender pluralism resonates with the focus of Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya (Reference Wieringa, Blackwood and Bhaiya2007). Blackwood and Wieringa (same volume) explain that the emergence of lesbian and gay visibility in Asian regions, celebrated within queer activism and some strains of queer studies, had rendered into explicit sexual discourses practices and intimacies that had not previously been the target of suppression, “Activist and globalized definitions of sexuality may reduce the diversity of intimacies to a binary sexuality, effectively erasing the multiple expressions of women's desire and pleasures” (Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya Reference Wieringa, Blackwood and Bhaiya2007, 14). Peletz also describes a general pattern in which gender pluralism and fluidity is being replaced with more rigid gender binaries, “even in the more patriarchal and gender-inegalitarian societies of East Asia, nineteenth century sexualities were more fluid than they are at present” (2007, 86).

Peletz places his analysis of same-sex sexuality and transgenderism within the broader framework of gender hierarchies and sexual politics. Peletz demonstrates that same-sex and transgender practices and concepts are extensions of the patriarchal hierarchies that characterize much of Asia. For example, Peletz explores the greater legitimacy and prevalence of same-sex relations and transgenderism in Southeast Asia. Based on evidence from early modern Southeast Asia, Peletz argues that the region is particularly characterized by gender pluralism, evident in the gender constructions of ritual specialists:

The many possible explanations for the predominance of gender pluralism in Southeast Asia that Peletz lists include the less patriarchal kinship structures (matrilocal/neolocal postmarital residence patterns, bilateral systems of descent, and matrifocality in place of the rigid patrilineal systems of East Asia) and relatively egalitarian relations between men and women. Peletz concludes with a complex picture of trends and trajectories for sexual and gender orders in Asia, including nationalisms, militarism, feminism, the spread of global capitalism, the growth of sex-tourism, and AIDS.

Both Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya (Reference Wieringa, Blackwood and Bhaiya2007) and Peletz (Reference Peletz2007) provide a response to the often-heard call for regional analysis of sexuality and gender within Asia (see Wilson Reference Wilson2006). Through ethnographic and historical study, Peletz and Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya provide a feminist and queer-sensitive analysis with attention to the intersections of gender (as a form of hierarchical relations between men and women) and sexuality. As is well known by anyone who is familiar with sexuality studies, studies on female masculinity and same-sex sexuality are often marginalized, and volumes solely on these topics are difficult to publish, making Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya's work an important contribution to the field.