The category “queer” is vexing: both more inclusive than any of the host of other terms for non-normative genders and sexualities, and more exclusive as the still-young progeny of Western academic imagination. That tension pervades the present volume, as well as the AsiaPacifiQueer network from which it stems and the inaugural International Conference on Asian Queer Studies in Bangkok in 2005, at which many of its chapters were presented. The editors challenge the hegemony of imported analytical frames even as they situate their network (and this compendium) squarely within them. They do so by dint of its name—if there is one central theme to the volume, it is the deep significance of labels, adopted or ascribed—and by its centering in Australia, however earnestly framed as more “south” than “west.”
The volume engages deeply with queer theory, defined, per Megan Sinnott in her chapter, as “an analytical approach that renders visible the cultural processes in which sexual and gender norms are constructed, reproduced, and made to appear natural” (p. 132). Its assembling of discrete empirical contributions gives the volume real value. Even scholars who are familiar with the field will find something new and intriguing among the stories and readings presented. As a whole, however, the book falls short on two fronts. First, despite the editors' aim of fomenting intraregional conversation, the authors here make no effort to speak among themselves, apart from the occasional citation of a fellow contributor's prior work, even when offering different perspectives on the same community (e.g., on early same-sex personal ads or the correlation of speech with gender in Japan, or on the relative conflation of sexual and gender identities in Hong Kong). The volume remains stalled where Asian queer studies, per the editors, began: “as a series of nation-level projects,” largely unaware of each other (p. 19), despite the editors' noting the rise of a unifying discourse of tongzhi (literally, comrade) among sinophone queers and the salience of forms of transgenderism regionwide.
Second, while the editors argue for a theoretical framework anchored in Asian rather than Euro-American experience, only a handful of authors seem aware of or interested in that project. The theorists most commonly invoked are queer theory's usual suspects: Butler, Halberstam, Foucault, and (for a postcolonial edge) Bhabha. Fortunately, most of the authors who resist that framework do so with élan: Song Hwee Lim's critical interrogation of the rise of “queer” (or ku'er) in Taiwan, for instance, or Heather Worth's demonstration of the fluidity of gender and sex identities among Samoan and Maori fa'afafine in New Zealand (even if Derrida remains her foil). Other authors incline toward a more knee-jerk dismissal—for instance, Jin-Hyung Park, who mysteriously traces Western queer scholarship to “positivist sociology” (p. 202). Certain of the authors, too, show a discomfort using the terms employed by the communities they are studying (e.g., the label “lesbian” by James Welker), given (Western) academic critiques of those terms, and thus make caveat-laden recourse to the extralocal “queer” for convenience.
The distribution of chapters in the volume is unusual, in good and bad ways. The interdisciplinarity of queer studies as a field of study is well represented here. The field's roots in literature and poststructuralist criticism are evident in the preponderance of chapters offering deep readings of films, novels, and other texts. Merely the richness of the languages presented here in terms of the self-representations they allow (exemplified by Claire Maree's chapter on Japanese camp speech) confirms the inevitable inadequacy of categories defined by English speakers. And, importantly, whereas most work in the field, not least in Asia, foregrounds male or male-to-female transgendered experience, this volume privileges women, both masculine and feminine identified. Still, the volume might cover more ground if, for instance, both chapters on Hong Kong were not on masculine women and if more chapters thought across local genders and sexualities.
Moreover, how the specific chapters were selected is a mystery. “Pacific Asia” is undefined, but East Asia figures far more prominently than Southeast Asia: three chapters are on Japan alone. Both Indonesia and Singapore are absent, despite the ready availability of queer-themed research in both, and one chapter on Thailand is mainland Southeast Asia's sole representation. (Oddly, too, the introduction synopsizes queer studies only in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and Singapore, rather than in all—and only—the countries invoked in the case studies to come.) Fortunately, what Southeast Asia chapters there are tend to reference material on neighboring states far more than the other chapters. Several chapters, too, are based on research that is at least a decade old (and published already in other forms), which is hardly ideal, especially given how large the ever-increasing availability and recognition of a “gay” and/or “lesbian” culture and identity looms in the background for many of these researchers and the communities they study, not to mention the editors' stress on the post-9/11 context. A few chapters are far too enamored of jargon: editor Yue's own, for instance, which revels in the language of gender bending and finds worlds of meaning in the humble fridge magnet, but offers too little in the way of comparative perspective for the claims she makes, or J. Neil C. Garcia's inadequately specified postcolonialist fixation. Others are just empirically and/or theoretically weak, especially Yik Koon Teh's on Malaysia, which gives the impression of relying on an exceedingly narrow sample.
All told, the volume represents a worthwhile effort, yet it fails to meet its potential. What might have propelled it beyond being a compendium of interesting case studies, some of them theoretically provocative, would be the editors' having balanced the contributions more meaningfully; required that the contributors read and reflect on each others' pieces (as otherwise, the volume cannot hope to cohere); and obliged authors both to step outside the familiar Butler-Halberstam matrix and to take the “Pacific Asia” ambit seriously (Teri Silvio might find real resonance for Taiwan in Boellstorff's work on nationalism and gay identities in Indonesia, for instance). Moreover, they might have delved deeper into the benefits of sharing regional perspectives and experiences, as by disentangling the relative priority of gender versus sex, ideally without starting from Butler et al. And if “mainstream” queer theories simply prove irresistible, stressing the rearticulation or recentering of known, even if oppressive, architectures of meaning would frame the book well. Regardless, one hopes that even if this volume fails to deliver the cross-boundary dialogue to which it aspires, it will inspire readers to take that extra step: to reflect on what they can learn not from “Western” theory and experience, but from the complex, polyvalent experiences of a far broader range of communities.
