Megan Sinnott

Bio: Megan Sinnott is an academic researcher from Yale University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Westernization & Identity (social science). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 22 citations.

Borders, Diaspora, and Regional Connections: Trends in Asian Queer Studies

Abstract: Over approximately the past fifteen years, English-language scholarship on same-sex sexuality and transgenderism in Asia has expanded dramatically.1 One of the most significant themes in this literature is the exploration of sexuality and gender as a form of identity (or "subjectivity"), practice, and cultural dis course (or "cultural logic") that has emerged in the context of the transnational movement of concepts, bodies, and imagery. The turn to issues of transnational ism, diaspora, and border crossings works toward interrogating and deconstruct ing assumptions of steamrolling Westernization or stable identity categories that fall along binaries such as traditional/modern or local/global. Within this growing literature, authors struggle with representing forms of same-sex sexuality and transgenderism not as simple products of Westernization or, alternatively, as "authentic" indigenous sexualities, but rather as complex responses to, and exten sions of, culturally determined systems of gender, nationalisms, capitalist labor and consumer practices, urbanization, and transnational movements. A second significant and related theme is the exploration of connections and commonalities across Asia and within Asian subregions, particularly Southeast Asia. The politics and logistics of research have compelled researchers to frame their studies in terms of national cultures. For example, the need to learn national languages (Central Thai, Mandarin Chinese, etc.), the organiz ation of area studies in terms of national cultures (Japanese studies, Vietnamese

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History

Abstract: Gender and sexuality have been neglected topics in the history of Chinese civilization, despite the fact that there is a massive amount of historical evidence on the subject. China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? Susan Mann answers this by focusing on state policy, ideas about the physical body and notions of sexuality and difference in China's recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bars; from law to art and sports. More broadly, the book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast a new light on the process of becoming modern, while simultaneously challenging the universalizing assumptions of Western modernity.

Asia is burning: Queer Asia as critique

Abstract: For the last ten years, both queer studies and Asian studies have undergone major shifts in terms of their objects of study and disciplinary orientation. If the separation of sexuality from feminism as a new domain of inquiry in the mid-1980s introduced an early set of precursors for the poststructuralist critique of gender, sex, sexuality and the body, queer studies in its current form has increasingly turned to intersectional categories of analysis. This intersectional model of queer studies shows how queerness is felt, structured and transformed by the sociohistorical formations of race, class, gender, ablebodism and the dominance of the neoliberal state. Such an analytical shift is evident in the 2005 special issue of the journal Social Text, in which David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and Jose Esteban Munoz asked provocatively: ‘What’s queer about queer studies now?’ They answered in the affirmative by laying out the emergent entanglement of queerness with ‘the geopolitics of war and terror... the denaturalizing potentials of queer diasporas, and the emergent assumptions of what could be called queer liberalism’ (2005: 1). Looking back now, that special issue marked a watershed moment in which queer theory shifted from questions of psychoanalysis and gender performativity to the geopolitical critique of the US empire, imperialism and neoliberal homonormativity. However, it also revealed a certain intellectual anxiety about the geopolitics of the new queer studies that the editors advanced. Eng, Halberstam and Munoz critiqued the Eurocentric situatedness of queer theory within academia by pointing out the obvious and unfortunate fact that queer theory ‘produced’ from the US is read by non-Western scholars, while work by non-Western scholars outside of Euro-America is hardly read at all. As a practice of selfcritique, they ‘propose epistemological humility as one form of knowledge production that recognizes these dangers’ (2005: 15). More recently, critics of queer indigeneity and settler colonialism have borrowed this proposal to problematise the circulation of queer discourses that divides the Native and non-Native under the hegemony of homonational modernity (Driskill et al. 2011; Morgensen 2011). It has been more than a decade since epistemological humility was foregrounded as a mode to counter the self-referential logics of US-centrism and queer Eurocentrism; yet, despite the productive interventions made by scholars who advance the models of queer of colour critique and queer diasporas, queer theory has yet to fully engage with questions of empire, racialisation, economic regionalisation and late capitalism in other ‘areas’ of the world not dictated by the domineering optics of the Euro-American imperial past and the neoliberal present (Chiang andWong 2016). In this special issue titled ‘Queer Asia as Critique’, we theorise the missed chance encounter and productive possibility between queer theory and Asian studies; furthermore, we shall demonstrate how the

Queer Asian Subjects: Transgressive Sexualities and Heteronormative Meanings

Abstract: This special issue of Asian Studies Review explores comparatively the production and transformation of gender and sexual subjectivities across and beyond South and Southeast Asia. More specifically, papers in this special issue disclose the complex intersections of ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion and nationality through which sexual subjectivities are formed and subject positions inhabited within and across these regions. By tracing the transnational movement of people and the circulation of images and ideas, their appropriations and effects, the papers in this volume reveal mutable and multiple sexual subjectivities that are no longer fixed in place, even as state discourses, hegemonic meanings and individual actors work to attach specific meanings to particular bodies. In this special issue we ask, what are the effects of migration, forced and chosen, on forms and formulations of gender and sexuality for people's embodied and discursive entanglements? How do spatial and temporal, as we...

Prejudice Before Pride: Rise of an Anticipatory Countermovement

Abstract: While homophobia is generally a response to overt expression of non-heteronormative identities, transnational discursive flows in particular have helped to shift the sequence toward a form of anticipatory countermobilization Singapore offers a recent example In March 2009, a group of evangelical Christians staged a takeover of Singapore’s most established feminist organization, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) Details emerged gradually: the ringleaders deemed AWARE too accommodating of lesbians and non-normative sexuality The event caused a firestorm in Singapore Over two thousand incensed women and men thronged an extraordinary general meeting, in which the “old guard” successfully ousted the new, amid an incredible show of overt feminism and queer-friendliness (Ironically, concerned for its image, AWARE had rarely advocated openly for lesbians or other sexual minorities) The contest was front page news in Singapore, finding its way even into the prime minister’s annual National Day address While the storm has since died down, the AWARE case raises key questions about the subtleties of “queer” mobilization in proudly “conservative societies” (to use the Singapore government’s usual phrase); the intermeshing of feminist and “queer” identities; and especially the nature and origins of homophobia in Singapore and the region more broadly Both “feminism” and what I will label “homonormativity” (acceptance of “queer” people and practices, not necessarily per western binaries) are most commonly framed outside the US and Western Europe as at least partly imported, if not inappropriately foreign In some cases, feminism informs homonormativity; in others, feminists only reluctantly encounter or embrace challenges to heteronormativity Even tentative expressions of queer identity raise boundary challenges for feminists and their organizations A recent surge in generally religiously-justified homophobia forces those boundaries to the foreground, requiring immediate and precise specification of gender-bounded identities amid a widening range of indigenous and extralocal discursive possibilities This paper starts from Singapore and extends through Southeast Asia - a region both religiously diverse and in which understanding and performance of non-heteronormativity tends to privilege gender over sex dimensions - to explore the emergence and anxious expression of homophobia even as homonormativity remains marginal and largely suppressed

Korean-Pop, Tom Gay Kings, Les Queens and the Capitalist Transformation of Sex/Gender Categories in Thailand

Abstract: Since the early 2000s, masculine style for queer women in Thailand has been heavily influenced by Korean popular culture, or “K-pop”. K-pop is marked by deliberate gender androgyny and overall gender play. This new aesthetics of masculinity used by masculine-identifying women has been accompanied by linguistic shifts in which explicitly sexualised terms, such as queen and king , themselves products of complex transnational borrowings, have been borrowed from Thai gay male culture. This paper seeks to explore the possibilities of queer cultural transformation through forms of commodified images and capitalist intrusions. It also explores the process of creative borrowings made through transnational, national and local circuits of knowledge. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010 focused on young queer women in Bangkok who have adopted the K-pop style and the new sexualised terms of identity, such as tom gay king and les queen , for example. It is also based on re...