Email this article Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia
Edited by Chris Berry, Fran Martin, and Audrey Yue.
Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 306 pp. ISBN 0822330873 (pbk.).
"Gay" and "lesbian" are terms that are irrevocably grounded in a Western cultural imaginary. Their deployment by groups of self-styled sexual non-conformists in non-Western contexts has, consequently, challenged conventional understandings of how homosexual identities and practices can and should be articulated. Some scholars, most famously Dennis Altman, have heralded "the emergence of 'the global gay,' the apparent internationalization of a certain form of social and cultural identity based upon homosexuality" (1996, p. 77). This "expansion of an existing Western category" (p. 78) is seen to be the result of what Altman calls "sexual imperialism," the reshaping of local understandings of homosexuality, largely influenced by the development of global media systems and increasing popular access to so-called new media (from cellphones to the Internet), in order to align them with Western conceptions of what it means to be gay or lesbian. Acknowledging that the rise of a politicized queer identity in Asia does coincide, to varying degrees, with the widespread introduction of various digital technologies in these regions, the various essays in Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia rail against Altman's homogenizing view at every opportunity, suggesting instead that the emergence and diverse manifestations of contemporary queer identities outside of the West contests any notion of a global cultural hegemony.
Importantly, the essays in Mobile Cultures are not intended to present an exhaustive account of queer formations in "New Asia." Instead, they are snapshots of the region, providing a starting point from which to reconcile two important streams of scholarly investigation: "the globalization of sexual cultures [and] … the study of 'new media' " (p. 2). By exploiting the novel avenues for transmitting information and communicating ideas opened up via the Internet and computer mediated communication (CMC) not to mention pagers and cellphones, it is argued that Queer Asia challenges traditional and orientalist categories of Asian sexuality while simultaneously "indigenizing the global and producing mobile and contingent practices of self-inscription and self-identification" (p. 2). The featured authors are not interested in the specifics of machine-to-machine communication. Rather, they want to explore the ways in which these new technologies are used in the struggle toward self-actualization, the formation of communities, and the development of political action and policy, all within the context of shifting and travelling discourses of queerness.
To this end, all of the work featured in this collection is based in, or at least overlaps with, traditions of self-reflexive and materially grounded research (from statistical data, the result of local surveys and interviews, to long-term ethnographic accounts). This allows Mobile Cultures to make a significant contribution to the study of new media and sexuality, an area dominated by work that has been largely "theoretical and/or speculative, sometimes flirting with more sensational possibilities such as virtual transvestism and cyber-rape" (p. 10). It also facilitates the demonstration that the use of new media by Queer Asia is invariably local in its orientation, even as it borrows and negotiates the global flows of information.
The book is divided into three sections. The first, "Interfaces: Global/Local Interfaces," purports to group together essays that stress "the local appropriation, or glocalization, of globally mobile technologies and discourses" (p. 13). Belying the affinity of this statement with popular currents of work in media globalization, Tom Boellstorff's chapter "I Knew It Was Me: Mass Media, 'Globalization,' and Lesbian and Gay Indonesians" presents us with the fascinating concept of "dubbing culture," in which fragmented cultural elements from Western media are appropriated and transformed in their encounter with and mobilization in a non-Western locale. For queer Indonesians, he argues, the adoption of "lesbian" and "gay" as identity signifiers is akin to the dubbing of American media texts into other languages: it can only ever be an imperfect process of juxtaposition of global discourses with local understandings, rather than a seamless fusion. This reconceptualization of Arjun Appadurai's notion of disjuncture forces us to consider issues of translation and authenticity when discussing the apparent imposition of sexual categories through media transmission: "It questions the relationship between translation and belonging, asserting that the binarisms of import-export and authentic-inauthentic are insufficient to explain how globalizing mass media play a role in constituting subject-positions in Asia but do not determine them outright" (p. 43).
Boellstorff's theorization provides a powerful anchor to this first section, intersecting neatly with Chris Berry and Fran Martin's argument against the idea that the Internet is simply a vehicle that allows for the importation and imposition of a global "McGay." Pointing out that factors such as language and access mitigate the deployment of Internet technology, they suggest that these barriers have enabled "syncretic," tactically articulated and heterogeneous, manifestations of queer community in Taiwan and Korea, ones that foreground "the historical specificities and limits of the Anglo-American sexual cultures rather than simply … 'spreading' or reproducing those cultures" (p. 106). A more concrete example of this is provided by David Mullaly's discussion of the way in which the Internet has allowed Western discussions of the gay gene to be taken up by queer Thais and "read as a 'scientific' signifier of the Buddhist common sense that assists in accepting the (dissatisfying) way things are, namely, that one's birth (incarnation) cannot be chosen (luak kerd mai dai)" (p. 125).
The next section, "Mobile Sites: New Screens, New Scenes," in "highlighting the role of new media mobility in reconstituting what counts as 'locality' " (p. 14), fails to hold together as well as the first, but still presents us with interesting work by authors who, like Boellstorff, allow their theorization to emerge from the culture that they are studying. Larissa Hjorth, for example, takes Japanese linguistics as the inspiration for her discussion of kawaii culture in "Pop and ma: The Landscape of Japanese Commodity Characters and Subjectivity." Exploring the appropriation of apparently gender-normative characters such as Hello Kitty by Japanese lesbians, Hjorth opts to disregard a Western feminist reading and makes a radical assertion: "[D]ifference in a Japanese cultural context may not be structured in binary oppositions but may appear in the indeterminate spaces and gaps, which may be understood through a rethinking of ma" (pp. 158-159). Although this certainly builds upon the work of queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, her adoption of ma, a concept that references the meaningful space around and between written characters in kanji, allows Hjorth to contemplate a queer Asian formation on its own terms, opening up ambivalences that might not have been readily apparent had a Western paradigm been merely imposed upon a non-Western phenomenon.
Another standout essay here is Sandip Roy's "From Khush List to Gay Bombay: Virtual Webs of Real People." Although it is the least "scholarly" piece in the book (Roy is an activist and a journalist), nowhere are the materially grounded concerns of the anthology more at play. Attempting to answer questions such as "Does it now just take a modem to start a movement?" and "Will countries with fledgling GLBT movements risk losing the process of building a movement that is about them and their needs and end up assimilating into Western models because they are more accessible?" (p. 181), Roy follows the development of a queer South Asian political consciousness from on-line groups of diasporic Indians in North America to the adoption of Internet technology by activists in India, and back again. By tracing this route, he argues, we are made privy to the divergent interests of Queer Asia and its diaspora: "Groups in South Asia are much less interested in the ramifications of being 'Indian and gay' than being 'gay in India' " (p. 183).
The final grouping of essays, entitled "Circuits: Regional Zones," "intimates some of the queer possibilities inherent in new discourses and practices of transnational Asian and Internet regionalism, which are themselves responses to globalization" (p. 14). Olivia Khoo's essay "Sexing the City: Malaysia's New 'Cyberlaws' and Cyberjaya's Queer Success" stands as a strong example of this. She situates the sodomy conviction of former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in the context of Malaysia's push to become a "New Asian" leader in information technology and the constitutive irony of local groups using the Internet to access accurate information about the trial and foster discussion in the face of laws that censor "immoral" content on the Web.
The strength of this volume lies in the diversity of perspectives that are expressed, the innovative and grounded theorizing involved, and the attempt to integrate two divergent yet inevitably intertwined discourses. This last point, however, is also where Mobile Cultures sometimes misses the mark. New media tends to take a secondary position to discussions of queer sexuality in Asia in some of the essays and is practically non-existent in others. While the editors do state that they hope to challenge conventional understandings of new media, pointing out that "what counts as new media in one place may not in another, and … the significance of what are conventionally understood as new media also varies widely" (p. 9), this reads as somewhat of an apology for pieces such as Boellstorff's, whose objects of study can only be understood as mass media (magazines, television, and film), even in the Indonesian context.
Further, some of the essays - such as Baden Offord's discussion of "the queer Singaporean" (p. 152, my emphasis) - speak of queer Asian formations in homogenous and essentialist ways that inevitably belie the complexity of the global/local binary.
As a contribution to debates surrounding "the global gay," however, the importance of this volume cannot be understated. Working, as it does, to reconcile and complexify the uneven but steady emergence of Queer Asia and the concomitant rise of new-media technologies in these regions, Mobile Cultures is a significant contribution to a number of fields. As such, it opens the door to further research and a continued questioning of the interconnections between media and identity, in all their kaleidoscopic forms.
Reference
Altman, Dennis. (1996). Rupture or continuity? The internationalization of gay identities. Social Text, 14(3), 77-94.
