CFP: (Un)Making Queer Worlds

(Un)Making Queer Worlds: Transformations in Asia-Pacific Queer Cultures
Roundtable Workshop for Postgraduate* and Early Career Researchers

June 22-23, 2007
Graduate Centre, University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, Australia

Call for Papers

Proposal deadline: April 27 2007

Since 2000, intellectual interest in Asia-Pacific queer cultures has surged. This surge responds partly to the new visibility of non-normative sexual and gendered subjectivities in the Asia-Pacific and its multiple diasporas. Along with the new thinking around Asian/Pacific sexualities and genders come various contestations: in particular, the fine distinction between understanding A/P sexual cultures as part of an emerging ‘queer globality’, and the tendency to subsume them under a developmental model that places the ‘West’ as the vanguard of, or bad example for, the ‘rest’. Collaborations between queer studies, post-colonial studies, and post-structuralist critiques have shed light on the contemporaneity and historicity of each local queer culture in the Asia-Pacific. But although such effort to carefully describe geographical or local queer particularities is invaluable, locality does not subsist in an insular manner, but is always relational. ‘Glocal’ queer theory marries the specificity of locality with the context of globality. Additionally, the economic processes of globalisation have been accompanied by--indeed, in some cases actively promoted--mass migration, warm body exports and brain drains, particularly from the Asia-Pacific regions, that have temporarily and permanently dislocated individuals and families from their homelands. In such instances the ability to locate ‘local sexualities’ is brought to the fore just as it proposes new difficulties for the analysis of sexuality along national, regional lines, particularly in Australia. And if sexualities and genders are ‘glocal’, then so is capital. Understanding the nexus between glocal capital and sexual subjectivities through their localised and diasporic trajectories is, at bottom, about the political stakes of queer survival in a neoliberal world.

(Un)Making Queer Worlds tackles these important questions directly by bringing together scholars for a two-day roundtable workshop at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The workshop is particularly interested in proposals from postgraduates and Early Career Researchers (ECRs).

Confirmed speakers: Associate Professor Peter A. Jackson will deliver a keynote address on Friday June 22. Dr Jackson is the Deputy Convenor and Senior Fellow, Division of Pacific and Asian History at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is the author and editor of numerous publications on genders and sexualities in Thailand and elsewhere, including Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thailand (Haworth Press, New York, 1999) and Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives (Haworth Press, New York, 1999).
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Submission of abstracts

What we’re looking for:

We seek participants investigating how various Asia-Pacific constituents are (un)making trajectories of queer world and globality. We encourage papers that employ interdisciplinary approaches. We hope that (Un)making Queer Worlds will contribute to the ongoing elucidation of constantly evolving Asia-Pacific queer cultures and their global articulations.

Workshop format:

Featured participants will be asked to circulate their papers a week in advance of the workshop. Participants will be allocated a one-hour session to present a paper (20-30 minutes) and engage in discussion. As this is a postgraduate and ECR event, registration is free of charge.

Please submit abstracts of 450-500 words to unmaking-worlds@unimelb.edu.au by April 27 2007. Keep in mind that papers presented will be circulated before the workshop. Circulated papers should be no more than 6000 words in length.

Important dates:

Proposals due: 27 April 2007
Speakers confirmed: Monday May 7
Deadline for papers to be submitted: Monday June 4
Papers circulated: Monday June 11
Workshop: Fri/Sat June 22-23

For more info, to register or to submit a paper proposal, email

unmaking-worlds@unimelb.edu.au

(Un)Making Queer Worlds is a project jointly initiated by the Cultural Studies Program, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, and the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. We acknowledge the support of the Cultural Research Network of the ARC and the School of Graduate Studies, University of Melbourne.


* Just in case you didn't know, "postgraduate" translates into American English as graduate student.

Breakthrough

...I hope.

I'm happy to report that the prospectus is chugging along now. After whining last week I actually cracked open several books in the TBR pile and started reading. It helped that I went back to the space where I've become programmed to do intense amounts of reading -- no, not the intuitive choice of my office desk, which always seems to need cleaning off, but the kitchen table. I read whole books in one sitting at this table with its uncomfortable uncushioned chairs while studying for oral exams last year. We lived in a much smaller place then, our apartment, and when we moved to the house I decided that the kitchen table would be used strictly as a kitchen table since I would have space in the office. But, yeah, apparently that resolution is out the window. And I'm not going to question the feng shui of this arrangement.

So, at this kitchen table last night, I had a breakthrough that pretty dramatically expanded the project, but in a way that felt inevitable once the figurative lightbulb went on over my head. I am grateful for that feeling. It's like I'm going with gut instinct, and I like trusting my gut instinct when it decides to show up. Sort of like a muse, or unerring "female intuition." I was reading Claudia Castañeda's Figurations, and it reminded me of what I'd found useful in the wonderful texts that I read for my third-field exam last year and that I had forgotten about when it came time to square myself towards the prospectus; they were unfortunate casualties of my post-orals mind-numbing euphoria. Then I went back through all of my school-related notebooks for my notes on the dissertation and on meetings with professors and colleagues during which we'd talked about my project; and what did I find? Well, the notes were scattered all over the place and only partial, but apparently I have been seriously working on the dissertation ideas much longer than I remembered, and I shouldn't go over the same ground twice. Also, now, in this expanded version of the project, I will be able to do the historical/archival work that I was itching to do but that I couldn't figure out how to incorporate. So: yay!

The books I'm talking about? Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (2002); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (1995); and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995) and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002). (I know I've mentioned before at least the last three texts in relation to the prospectus/dissertation, but I meant that I forgot to go back to what I'd written in my notes and in the marginalia of the books.)

(Smelly Books, if you're reading this, thanks for the Castañeda citation!)

Standstill, Or, Loser

Encouraged to share by the Foreign Student's recent post on feeling like a loser, I'll disclose here that I myself have been wallowing in a bit of self-pity lately.

I am suffering a serious bout of writer's block (scholar's block?) regarding my prospectus, which makes me utterly undesirous of reading anything to do with the dissertation. I believe the mental block is due, in part and so ironically, to the fact that this project is incredibly important to me; I am afraid that I will produce a proposal that makes the project seem only a dim shadow of this large, potentially very significant thing that is in my head; I am loath to sit down and make that dim shadow real by writing it.

I borrowed a shelf of books from the library a couple of weeks ago, and, add that to what's already on the TBR list, I now have a rather intimidating pile of books in the office that need to be opened and at least skimmed. If I were in a different mood I would actually be excited by the prospect of going through them. But I don't even want to skim. A part of me thinks that if I leave the books there and maybe watch it grow as I compulsively borrow from the library or buy the books I believe I need, the project will seem important forever.

Right?

*sigh* I know, I know, I need to snap out of it. If this were a paper for a class, I doubt I would be dragging my feet like this. Perhaps I need a solid deadline and the threat of a grade?? Ugh. How can I be thinking of having a career in academia? I'm such a loser! (And not in a coolly cynical and ironic way like that Beck song.) Have sympathy for me!

A Comfort Woman's Story

{cross-posted at The Last Vehicle and Getaway}

In the news, Japanese Prime Minister Abe's recent denial of the Japanese military's role in sexually enslaving young women (some as young as 10) during World War II has infuriated the survivors and their supporters. Such a statement, despite the findings of historians and the witness statements of survivors from different parts of East and Southeast Asia who came out with their stories independently of one another, is callous and delusional.

Here's the problem: While Abe doesn't deny that women were "recruited" to serve the military sexually, he claims that there was no "'coercion, like the authorities breaking into houses and kidnapping' women. He said that private dealers had coerced the women, adding that the House resolution [for Japan to admit its role in coercing these women] was 'not based on objective facts' and he would not apologize even if it were passed." But just yesterday I read a Filipina's narration of her experiences as a "comfort woman" for Japanese soldiers in the Philippines, and I can say that Abe must be doing some logical contortions of his own in how he defines "objective facts," or ignoring some significant eyewitness testimonies on the subject. In other words, he's simply full of shit.

According to Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military, published in 1999, Maria Rosa Henson was not coerced into sexual slavery by "private dealers" or any such thing during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines in World War II; she was directly kidnapped by Japanese checkpoint sentries who noticed her because she was young and pretty. She was only 15 at the time. But that wasn't the first time she'd been raped. The year before she was forced into sexual slavery, at 14 years old, she had been raped by Japanese soldiers when they came upon her in the road, not once but at two different times. She notes this repeated violation and the loss of her virginity with some agony, especially since the loss of her virginity -- which no one knew about but her mother and her two uncles, who witnessed but could do nothing about the rape on pain of death -- made her believe that she couldn't accept any of her various suitors. Being herself a product of rape, she seems to have believed for a while that being raped was her fate. She also notes that she hadn't even started menstruating by the time she was kidnapped and taken into captivity by Japanese soldiers, and she was confused when she had a miscarriage during her captivity because she had never had a period.

She was abused so badly before her rescue by Filipino rebels that she was in a coma for months, and when she woke up she could barely walk or talk, some probable damage to her brain having occurred when a Japanese officer slammed her head against a wall. For the rest of her life she had speech problems, would drool uncontrollably at times, and could no longer write because of a palsy in her hand. Such lasting physical problems are not uncommon in the stories told by other comfort women. And the shame of it made Henson keep the story of her captivity a secret for 50 years, until 1992 when there was a radio announcement in the Philippines calling for former comfort women to tell their stories. Only her mother knew what she had been through; she wouldn't even tell her husband or children, and her children only found out when she decided to respond to the radio announcement. After working for acknowledgement and reparations from the Japanese government for five years, she died on August 18, 1997, a few months shy of her 70th birthday. Many more of these comfort women have since died.

It is so, so sad. And for someone like Abe to refuse the Japanese military and government's accountability in the hell that Henson and 100,000 other women like her were put through, to continue to play a devious waiting game for the claimants to die, just pours more salt on the wound. I was horrified when reading Henson's narrative, and I can't imagine the pain that the remaining survivors are going through at this denial of their claims and this latest setback in their campaign for reparations. It is enraging.