Queer Asias

Catalog description

While commonly understood as universal, gender and sexuality are deeply shaped by transnational and geopolitical dynamics of culture, place, and power. This seminar investigates the politics of non-normative gender and sexuality transnationally across contexts like Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, and Pakistan. The course challenges the idea of North America as the center of authority on trans/queer knowledge and community. Readings will be organized topically and cover interdisciplinary ethnographic and theory-based scholarship on non-normative gender and sexuality in Asia, broadly conceived. We’ll approach the terms “queer,” “trans,” and “Asia” as heterogenous, mobile, and changing concepts. We’ll examine how they are constructed and contested, as well as how they intersect with dynamics of race, kinship, activism, migration, class, religion, and neoliberalism (among others). The course aims to complicate Euro-American epistemologies in disciplines like queer studies, anthropology, and the social sciences more generally.