Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 8, Number 4, 2007

Editorial introduction: global queer, local theories

Wei-cheng R. CHU and Fran MARTIN

The phenomenal rise of queer Asia has probably been the most exciting development in
recent global queer studies. Various efforts were made to bring together Asian queer scholars
as early as the mid-1990s, when queer studies on and in the area was just beginning to emerge
in a palpable form. However, it was not until a decade later, in 2005, when Sexualities,
Genders and Rights in Asia: First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies (organized by the AsiaPacifQueer Network along with Mahidol University, Thailand) took place
in Bangkok that the emergent Asian queer studies demonstrated the full force of its energies,
bringing hundreds of scholars, activists and students across the region and from all over the
world together under the same roof. It was a fantastic and exciting event, leaving people
hoping for its continuation as a regular event to accommodate the burgeoning activist strategization and scholarly discourse that have flourished in queer Asia and are eager to be
heard.
Thanks to this watershed event, where people were astounded by the full scale of
current queer activism and discourse in Asia, we nevertheless came to the realization that
something significant seems to be missing from this international arena of Asian queer
studies. Specifically, we became aware of a relative de-emphasis on the abundant heteroglossia of local theorizations that inevitably come along with the queer struggles carried out
at specific locations. (So what we mean by local pivots on its target of audience, not its
identity or origin.) For local queer people, the presence of these localized, customized
theoretical discourses has been paramount and hard to neglect because in most cases they
not only act as a driving force behind the development of Asian queer cultures and activisms, but also help produce critical perspectives on these formations that can influence their
future directions. Yet more often than not, they are nowhere to be seen in the international
literature (published mainly in English) on Asian queer studies, which tends to focus on the
phenomena of local queer existence as data to be processed through Euro-American theoretical paradigms, rather than on the ways in which local activists have striven to shape
those phenomena, and even less on the accompanying theorizations or local critical efforts
that attempt to make sense of it.
Moreover, most of the time people do not even notice the absence of these local theories, for activisms and theories that emerge outside the metropolitan queer have long been
regarded as no more than a compromised (or, in a better term, hybridized) application or
worse, a copy or imitation of their metropolitan origins that are posited as the ideal norms,
even by local queer people themselves. Hence, the metropolitan arrogance that is manifested most symptomatically in the last great event of international queer studies, at the
Queer Matters conference held in London, 2004, where reportedly one plenary speaker,
when defending the US-based journal GLQs apparent lack of interest in publishing translations of non-English-language queer studies work, flatly asserted that the default
language of queer studies today is, in any case, English (Jackson et al. 2005: 300).
Naoki Sakai has aptly described this local/metropolitan (theoretical) absence/arrogance
as based on certain imaginary cartographic visions, which flow in two distinct directions.
While the raw and particularistic data flow, centripetally, from peripheral sites to various
wcrchu@ntu.edu.tw
Inter-Asia
10.1080/14649370701567948
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ISSN 14649373 Print/ISSN 14698447 Online/07/04048302 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14649370701567948

484 Wei-Cheng R. Chu and Fran Martin

metropolitan centers in the West, advanced information about how to deal with these
data and turn them into useful knowledge i.e. what is deemed as theory centrifugally
flow in the reverse direction, which is from the centers to the peripheries (Sakai 2005: 189).
Yet clearly there are always local endeavors to process these data which make them theoretical by the above definition no matter how inadequate they may be regarded by the
metropolitan standard. In fact, local theorizations may turn out to be rather ingenious, or at
least opportunely effective, if we take their enunciative contexts into serious consideration.
It is certainly undeniable that many local (queer) theories, as they are, remain no more
than simple applications of grand theories invented in the metropolitan centers, but the
reason for this evidently lies in the cultural hegemony enjoyed by the latter, which local
theorists either uncritically subscribe to or cleverly appropriate as they lend them legitimacy that is otherwise hard to obtain. Therefore, we can expect local theories to be less
dependant upon metropolitan ones only if the hegemonic status of the latter is relativized or
provincialized, and the best way to effect this, as Kuan-hsing Chen convincingly argues in
his book Towards De-Imperialization: Asia as Method, is to diversify the interlocutors by first
starting to talk with our local neighbors, which in this case are precisely inter-Asia (Chen
2006). This space of intra-regional dialogue is also important as it provides local theorists,
who are usually preoccupied with specific and urgent struggles in the local queer scene,
with the possibilities of translocal connections, which may turn out to be enlightening for
their respective engagements in specific local contexts.
It was to bring out the voices of local queer theorists and to further involve them in such
a translocal dialogue, so we came up with the idea of this special issue along with a one-day
workshop, to which potential contributors were invited. The Taipei Workshop on Inter-Asia
Queer Studies took place at National Taiwan University on the 7 January 2007, thanks to the
generosity of Taiwans Cultural Studies Association, which kindly agreed to accommodate
the workshop as part of its Eighth Annual Conference. Later, two very lively and dynamic
panels at the main 2007 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Shanghai Conference (1517 June) plus
one graduate student panel also grew out of the many responses to the call for papers of the
special issue. We truly hope this inter-Asia queer coming-together can continue as an
ongoing project, to the effect of making local theories more visible in the international arena
as well as to each other.
Our initial idea was that ideally, each contributor to this special issue would offer either
a meta-critical analysis of local queer discourses or a locally situated theoretical discourse
that is informed by a comparative framework, thus making trans-local dialogue easier to
carry out. We believe that the essays selected for inclusion here are important steps towards
such a goal. However, regretfully we find that most of the essays that were eventually
selected for inclusion in this special issue, as well as the original responses to its call for
papers, are still very much limited within the economically more well-off area of North-East
Asia in their subject matter (especially Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan although the emergence of in-depth queer research in China is a very welcome development). This geoeconomic bias is something worth pondering in itself, and highlights the fact that inter-Asia
queer could usefully focus on establishing further links beyond these areas in the future.

References
Chen, Kuan-hsing (2006) Towards De-Imperialization: Asia as Method
:
, Taipei: Xingren.
Jackson, Peter A., Martin, Fran and McLelland, Mark (2005) Introduction to Re-placing queer studies:
reflections on the Queer Matters conference (Kings College, London, May 2004), Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies 6(2): 299311.
Naoki Sakai (2005) Civilizational difference and criticism: on the complicity of globalization and cultural
nationalism, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17(1): 188205.