Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia

Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power

by Chris Berry (Editor), Fran Martin (Editor), Audrey Yue (Editor)

Mobile Cultures provides much-needed, empirically grounded studies of the connections between new media technologies, the globalization of sexual cultures, and the rise of queer Asia. The availability and use of new media—fax machines, mobile phones, the Internet, electronic message boards, pagers, and global television—have grown exponentially in Asia over the past decade. This explosion of information technology has sparked a revolution, transforming lives and lifestyles, enabling the creation of communities and the expression of sexual identities in a region notorious for the regulation of both information and sexual conduct. Whether looking at the hanging of toy cartoon characters like “Hello Kitty” from mobile phones to signify queer identity in Japan or at the development of queer identities in Indonesia or Singapore, the essays collected here emphasize the enormous variance in the appeal and uses of new media from one locale to another. Scholars, artists, and activists from a range of countries, the contributors chronicle the different ways new media galvanize Asian queer communities in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and around the world. They consider phenomena such as the uses of the Internet among gay, lesbian, or queer individuals in Taiwan and South Korea; the international popularization of Japanese queer pop culture products such as Yaoi manga; and a Thai website’s reading of a scientific tract on gay genetics in light of Buddhist beliefs. Essays also explore the politically subversive possibilities opened up by the proliferation of media technologies, examining, for instance, the use of Cyberjaya—Malaysia’s government-backed online portal—to form online communities in the face of strict antigay laws. Contributors. Chris Berry, Tom Boellstorff, Larissa Hjorth, Katrien Jacobs, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Mark McLelland, David Mullaly, Baden Offord, Sandip Roy, Veruska Sabucco, Audrey Yue

Genres: Race, Asia, Queer

312 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2003

About the author

Chris Berry is the Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. In the 1980s, he worked for China Film Import and Export Corporation in Beijing, and his academic research is grounded in work on Chinese cinema and other Chinese screen-based media, as well as neighboring countries. He is especially interested in queer screen cultures in East Asia; mediatized public space in East Asian cities; and national and transnational screen cultures in East Asia.

Reviews

[Laura Tams · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book brings up some interesting examples of outsider negotiations with gender and sexual norms that I wouldn't have heard of otherwise, but unfortunately does so in an exotifying and sometimes delegitimating way. It was both exciting and uncomfortable to read about new ways of negotiating classic tranfeminine challenges in places and cultures far away from my own, but time has not been kind to this book which if written today would surely be criticized harshly for it's transmisogynist assumptions and voyeuristic tendenties towards the subject matter.

If you are transgender or from a "non-western" country, this book has a trigger warning for potentially triggering social dysphoria or making you resentful of academics.

[Lilly Irani · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a great essay in here by Tom Boellstorff where he proposes a framework of dubbing as a way of understanding the ways in which mass media provides a set of roles and narratives that are mainstream in their ethic, but can be reintrepreted and repurposed to less mainstream ends by the individuals who are audience to it. Though meant for media studies, I find the concept super useful for thinking about technological values and repappropriation.

There's also a bunch of stuff about online activism in asian queer culture that I'm interested in.