Audrey Yue

Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia

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

Cultural governance and creative industries in Singapore

Singapore, a leading country in the Asia‐Pacific region, is currently attempting to transform its cultural industry into creative economy. Creative economies capitalise on how knowledge can be marketed by merging arts, technology and business. They ensure a nations competitiveness within an integrated global economy. This paper critically examines Singapores recent cultural policy developments in tourism, broadcasting and new media. It argues that new creative industries have produced new consumption patterns and identities that harness the place‐branding of “New Asia” as a form of cultural capital and a strategy of regional dominance. Cybernetics is proposed as an approach to frame creative cultural governance and consumption in Singapore.

SAME-SEX MIGRATION IN AUSTRALIA From Interdependency to Intimacy

In 1985 Australia became one of the first countries in the world to accept samesex relationships as the basis of migration. Other countries with similar policies at that time included Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In the Australian context, same-sex applications were assessed through ministerial discretion under the compassionate and humanitarian visa category. In 1991 the interdependency category was introduced to recognize nonfamilial migration. Same-sex migration has been hailed as reflecting Australia’s progressive sexual law reform and modernizing Australia’s immigration history. Since 1991, more than 7,500 permits have been issued.1 Between 1991 and 2005, gay Asian migrants made up the largest group of same-sex settlers. This period saw the gradual decriminalization of homosexuality, the introduction of HIV/AIDS public health that validated and affirmed gay sex, amendments to marriage and property laws that recognized the interdependency of same-sex couples, and the mainstream embrace of the queer social movement in Mardi Gras cultural tourism.2 As a set of institutional and symbolic economies that have led to the modernization of sexuality and the self-presencing of queer in the country, these progressive sexual law and cultural policy reforms contribute to the emergence of Australian queer modernity. Alongside the implementation of multiculturalism as a social policy, these developments deploy the language of intimacy to imagine national cultural and sexual diversity. From the interdependency of same-sex relationships to the erotic practices of gay sex to the celebration of everyday diversity, the intimate language of togetherness marked the emergence of a new sentimental order.3 This article problematizes how same-sex migration policy organizes sexu-

Hawking In The Creative City

The development of creative industries in Asia in recent years has seen the rise of Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore as post-modern centres of innovation. From the new co-produced pan-Asian horror and action film genres, to brands like Samsung and Creative Technology, to the branding of cities through new nationalisms, creative industries are transforming cultural industries by merging the arts with technology and business. Characterised by cluster, convergence, content creation and value-adding, creative industries not only enhance a countrys economic wealth and promote international trade through intellectual property and tourism, they also produce new cultures that are more regional and less national and global. This paper critically examines how a regional queer Asian culture has emerged in Singapore as a result of its creative industry developments. Unlike the sex tourism of gay Bangkok or the social movement of queer Taiwan, queer Singapore is created by cultural and media policies, and gay and lesbian entrepreneurship. In a country that prosecutes homosexuality, queer commerce has flourished. The city-state is now recognised in the mainstream and the subculture as the new regional Mardi Gras centre of Asia. Queer Singapore shows how sexual recognition is constituted, not through the post-Stonewall politics of sexual rights, but through what I will argue as the Foucauldian ethics of identity. This paper will frame this approach against current studies in creative industries and map the changing field of cultural policy studies. Rather than accounting for the new sexual culture through the appeal to social diversity by benchmarking it as a gay index essential to the soft infrastructure of a creative city, this paper attempts to formulate a critical creative industry framework to understand how an expedient culture has been transformed into a pragmatic resource for determining action. Singapores pragmatic approach to culture offers such a model to rethink how sexuality can function as a technology of cultural policy.

Multicultural Broadcasting and Diasporic Video as Public Sphericules

Broadcasting constitutes a major platform on which contemporary public cultures may be built and managed. However, mainstream broadcasting, even when its charter responsibilities focus on service to and representation of a culturally pluralistic social field, has limits as it seeks to meet these responsibilities. Diasporic video, although marginal to most national media ecologies, is important at a global level in addressing cultural maintenance and renewal. This factor is neglected in existing accounts of the emergence of a genuinely multicultural and international public culture.

What's so queer about Happy Together? a.k.a. Queer (N) Asian: interface, community, belonging

This is an electronic version of an article published in the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

Queer Asian mobility and homonational modernity: Marriage equality, Indian students in Australia and Malaysian transgender refugees in the media

In recent years, the regulation of mobility has seen marriage equality emerge as a homonational discourse of progressive gay and lesbian politics championed on the erasure of homophobia to end systemic discrimination. While homonational modernity promotes the superiority of a nation through sexual openness, it also mobilizes the fear of homophobia to marginalize racialized and sexualized minorities through sexual quarantine. Using media case studies on Indian student migrants and Malaysian transgender refugees from the Asian Australian diaspora, this article examines how homonational modernity regulates the queer mobility of diasporic Asian subjects. The article uses these case studies to interrogate homonational modernity and, in doing so, hopes to create a critical platform for a politics of queer Asian mobility. Critically illustrating how ‘Asia’ (e.g. Malaysia and India) and the Asian diaspora (e.g. Asian refugees and queer migrants in Australia) have been made present in Australian’s homonational modern imagination as sites of inclusion and exclusion, this article provides a critical approach to the regulation of mobility that allows for the intervention of and accounting for the uneven distribution of race, sex and gender that conditions personal mobility, revealing the institutional constraints and privileges that shape queer liberalism and homonormativity.

The Chinese-language Press in Australia: A Preliminary Scoping Study

Despite clear evidence pointing to the centrality of the Chinese press in the historical formation of the Chinese community, and despite the continued importance of the Chinese-language press in the current political, cultural, social and economic life of the Chinese community, there is little understanding of its history and recent growth in mainstream English-language media scholarship. Worse still, the shift in recent scholarship to the power of cyberspace and other forms of new media in assisting the formations of diasporic subjectivities runs the risk of giving the impression that the print media are no longer relevant. Our article aims to address this blind spot by mapping out the contours of change and continuity within the Chinese-language press in Australia. In the first part, we provide a brief historical account of the Chinese migrant communities in Australia, and the role of the press in their formation. We argue that this symbiotic relationship is crucial to understanding the development of the early Chinese-language print media in Australia, which was a less than hospitable society for the Chinese migrants. We then trace the development and evolution of the Chinese-language print media in a range of areas, including the Chinese-language medias current modus operandi, business strategies, cultural practices and ideological positioning, within the context of Chinas rise and the widening impact of Chinas promotion of soft power. We conclude by identifying some future directions in the research on the Chinese-language media in Australia, thus contributing to our understanding of some of the opportunities and challenges present in the (re)shaping of Australias multicultural policies and politics.

Mega Screens for Mega Cities

This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon, 1 through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital technologies, and networked public space with empirical analyses of audience response research data collected during the screen event. The central argument is that large public screens can offer a strategic site for examining transformations in the constitution of public agency in a digitized, globalized environment. The idea of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ is finally proposed as a conceptual framework for understanding how new forms of transnational public agency in mediated public spaces might operate.

Diasporic Chinese media in Australia: A post-2008 overview

Despite the exponential growth of Chinese migrants in Australia, and despite the sizable body of work in various locations, the picture of how the Chinese-language media have developed in Australia over the past decade is still somewhat unclear. Even less clear is a sense of how the field has changed since the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games, a significant event that signalled Chinas ascent on to the global stage. This paper seeks to update the picture of the Chinese-language media landscape in Australia. We explore a number of angles, which work in articulation to produce a picture of growing complexity and fluidity. In doing so, we put forward a number of arguments. First, the diasporic Chinese-language media are subject to, as well as respond to, the vagaries of the wax and wane of the multicultural polity of the host nation. In addition, the diasporic Chinese-language media, for a wide range of reasons – technological, cultural, and economic – need to reassess their cultural role and strategies in the wake of the PRCs new status as a global power and its push for expansion of its media content and cultural impact outside China. Furthermore, to a varying extent and in a variety of ways, the diasporic Chinese-language media have become part and parcel of the global transnational cultural economies of Chinese-language media productions.