In Focus Introduction: Queering Asian Media

It has been nearly a decade since the publication of Cinema Journal's 2014 In Focus dossier on "Queer Approaches to Film, Television, and Digital Media."¹ The dossier powerfully demonstrated an essential scholarly refocus from "a US-based politics of 'coming out'" to more diverse queer deconstructions, non-confrontational queer practices, negotiative queer productions in media and cultural studies.² This shift was largely inspired by the late queer media scholar Alexander Doty's "contra-straight" theorization of the seemingly hetero-normative mainstream media text and context.³ Following this model, in combination with Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology, recent scholarship has understood queer as not only minority identities but also disruptive positions, sentiments, styles, and practices that productively reorient normative imaginations, regulations, and sociopolitical identities in global media studies.⁴ In particular, a growing body of scholarship has queried and reoriented commercial media that often target straight audiences and have benefited from globalization, migration, urbanization, social stratification, and the rapidly developing digital technologies. Findings from such research have shown that not only binarism-disruptive gender and sexual knowledge but also new forms of identity- and desire-based binarism, essentialism, and homonormative assimilation are produced in queer media production, circulation, and consumption.⁵

The early 2000s have also witnessed "a queering of Asian studies" amid crisscrossing processes of localization, transnationalization, and globalization. Here queering works as a critical perspective, highlighting "the new worlds of queer Asian media cultures created through the globalization" of gender and sexual politics while also problematizing "the binary between the 'West' and the 'rest'" in conceptualizing queer Asian media.⁶ In particular, the two frameworks of queer Asian studies mapped out by Audrey Yue—"queer hybridity" and "critical regionalism"—have been widely adopted in a range of academic disciplines to challenge imperialism, (neo-)colonialism, ethno-nationalism, heteronormativity, homonormativity, and Orientalism and Occidentalism in scholarly discourses as well as cultural productions.⁷ Nevertheless, most of the existing scholarship in queer Asian media studies has focused on the queer promises and struggles in media representation, performance, and reception, such as queer Asian star and fan studies. What has remained understudied is the potential of queering Asian media's production technologies, distribution venues, political-ideological institutions, and narrative strategies, with an eye to tease out nonconforming feelings, subjectivities, and relationalities.

Contemporaneously with the expanding queer turn in media studies and area studies, queer Asian media has broken through into the mainstream and globalized media industries. This breakthrough encompasses the boom of androgynous K-pop idols; the inter-Asian and global popularity of Japanese Boys' Love (BL) and Girls' Love (GL) cultures; the surge of Thai and mainland Chinese homoerotic TV dramas and their popularity in the Anglophone world; queer and transgender film and TV stardom in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand; and Asian-based lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) live-streaming channels and online celebrities.⁸ The proliferation of both LGBTQ content, characters, and celebrities and norm-defying media and pop cultural forms, formats, platforms, and spaces in contemporary Asia offers us an exciting opportunity to bring queer Asian media and the method of queering to bear upon each other and to examine how this might reshape queer approaches to Asian media studies.

Our In Focus dossier, "Queering Asian Media," showcases six essays that examine a variety of Asian media forms and genres through a queering critical lens, with special attention to East Asian and Southeast Asian media cultures spanning the past five decades. The authors in this dossier mobilize queering as both an analytical tool and an often neglected characteristic of Asian media culture to unpack the contested and morphing modes of knowledge production surrounding gender and sexuality, geopolitics, and histories that have been made possible by Asian media production, circulation, and consumption in an increasingly inter-Asian, globalizing world. Collectively, these essays articulate a spectrum of queer affective politics across spaces, time, ideologies, media forms, and media technologies.

Our dossier raises the following questions. Acknowledging queering as an established and powerful practice in media production, distribution, and reception, how might...