Abstract
Queering the Asian diaspora: East and Southeast Asian sexuality, identity and cultural politics, by Hongwei Bao, provides an in-depth and nuanced investigation of queer Asian diasporic cultural production such as film, fashion photography, and performance to shed light on how queer diasporic Asian artists, filmmakers and activists use cultural production as a vehicle for identity formation, community empowerment and social activism. Authored by a member of the global queer Asian community who lives in the UK, this book focuses on Asian British experiences and offers a variety of case studies to examine queer East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) diasporic identity, community formation and cultural politics in the European context to open up alternative imaginations about Asianness and queerness, and reveal the richness of queer Asian diasporic culture and experience. It engages in transnational, interdisciplinary and cross-generational dialogues about queer Asian diasporic identities and demonstrates the radical political potential of queer Asian diaspora by challenging the cultural essentialism of mainstream Asian politics and the stereotypes of mainstream queer politics.
In addition to an introduction and an afterword, the book is divided into six chapters. Each chapter, devoted to a case study, is self-contained and can be read in isolation. By examining Andrew Thomas Huang's 2019 film Kiss of the Rabbit God, Alger Liang's 2021 fashion photography series Return of the Rabbit God and Scotty So's 2022 fashion photography Rabbit God, Chapter 1 demonstrates how the three diasporic queer Asian artists imagine the Rabbit God, a queer Asian heritage, in innovative ways to articulate their queer Asian identity and address racism, migration experience and queer desire. Focusing on the drag performances of Scotty So, Whiskery Chow and Sin Wai kin, who are queer Asian artists living in the West, Chapter 2 attempts to explore these artists’ strategies to interrogate gender, sexual, racial and ethnic identity and subvert the Western orientalist gaze. By creatively utilizing Asian cultural traditions, their drag performances have challenged cultural essentialism and consumer culture dominant in the West and illuminated a complex queer Asian diasporic cultural politics.
Chapter 3 engages with queer artist duo Cheng Yumo and Huang Ziwei's Grand Gay Wedding performance to offer a new understanding of family, kinship and intimacy. It contends that their wedding not only endows the traditional wedding with new meanings, but also celebrates queer identity and community and subverts the Western bias and orientalist fantasies concerning Asians and Asianness in a global and diasporic context. Chapter 4 turns to examine queer curatorial practices and strategies by taking Secret Love, the biggest queer Asian art exhibition outside Asia to date, first held in Stockholm and curated by Si Han in 2012, as an illustrative case study. It argues that the curator of Secret Love employs strategies such as an orientalist mode of framing, contextualization and recontextualization, highlighting its queer undertone, decolonizing queer art and breaking the boundaries between art and queer activism.
Based on a systematic study of queer Asian filmmaker Popo Fan's films and curated film events outside China, Chapter 5 suggests that his films and curatorial practices explore queer intimacy and cross-cultural encounters and serve as a conduit for political and activist purposes. This chapter provides a more inclusive understanding of Chineseness and queerness, fostering solidarity with other gender, sexual and ethnic minority groups in a transnational context. Chapter 6 probes the Imagining Queer Bandung project that was organized by and for queer and trans people of colour in Berlin from June to August in 2021. With a reference to the Bandung Conference in 1955, it argues that Imagining Queer Bandung provides a venue for diasporic queer people of colour to pursue queer activism, forge transnational queer solidarity, and enact grassroots decolonization and transnationalism.
Against the backdrop of increasing anti-Asian racism in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this book captures in a timely way the contemporary trends and emerging cultures of queer Asian people living in the diaspora and thrusts their otherwise invisible voices and activism into the limelight, challenging Anglocentrism and Eurocentrism in queer studies and the nation-state-centric theorization of globlisation. By virtue of rich case studies, it vividly illustrates diasporic queer Asian people's strategies to articulate the diversity and complexity of their identities and imagine anti-hegemonic forms of cultural politics. In this way, the book gives us fascinating insights into the complexity, diversity and heterogeneity of diasporic queer Asian societies and cultures.
However, as the author of the book is a diasporic queer Chinese, the book inevitably primarily focuses on the cultural productions by diasporic queer Chinese with little attention to activities by diasporic queer people from other countries in East and South East Asia (ESEA), such as Japan, Vietnam and Malysia, although it aspires to provide an ESEA-focused perspective into the discussions of queer Asian diaspora. Consequently, the book would be improved if it could explore the cultural specificities of heterogenous ESEA experiences.
As a whole, this is a thought-provoking, insightful and interdisciplinary book that makes significant contributions to research on queer Asian diasporic identities and cultural politics. With its reader-friendly and jargon-free writing style, the book will not only appeal to scholars in diaspora studies, queer studies and Asian Studies, but also attract general readers who are interested in queer culture, Asian diaspora and queer activism.
