Queer Asia as Method, published in Media, Culture & Society, includes an editorial and five essays spanning China, India, Indonesia, and transnational media culture. Each piece approaches gender and sexuality in Asia through the lens of media technologies and digital cultures, challenging the assumptions long embedded in Western-dominated queer scholarship.
Contributors explore a range of topics: cyberpunk and science fiction representations of Chinese queer futures; queer female entrepreneurship in China's digital economy; a hybrid medieval language repurposed for queer desire in Bengali cinema; the emotional toll of teaching queer studies under institutional hostility in Indonesia; and a critical interrogation of what queering knowledge production demands of scholars today.
Queer Asia is a collaborative project bringing together more than twenty researchers across disciplines to interrogate a fundamental problem in queer studies: the persistent dominance of Euro-American frameworks in the production and legitimation of knowledge about gender and sexuality.
Song Hwee Lim opens the collection by asking what it really means to "queer" something, arguing that genuine critical inquiry must remain restless and unresolved rather than settling into comfortable conclusions.
Ian Liujia Tian turns to cyberpunk and science fiction television to examine how Chinese queer bodies are imagined in global media, exploring the possibilities of a distinctly Sinophone vision of queer futures.
Ling Tang's contribution draws on ethnographic research with queer female entrepreneurs in urban China, tracing how these women navigate the pressures of digital labour, start-up culture, and sexuality in ways that both resist and accommodate state power.
Kaustav Bakshi explores how acclaimed Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh used Brajabuli, a centuries-old hybrid language, to give voice to queer desire in contemporary Indian cinema, suggesting that linguistic mixing itself can be a form of queerness.
Hendri Yulius Wijaya closes the collection with a candid autoethnographic account of precariously teaching queer studies in Indonesia, where rising institutional hostility makes the emotional toll of the work inseparable from the scholarship itself.
The edition launched at an event supported by Queer@King’s and the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries.
