NEW SPECIAL ISSUE - ACRAWSA E-Journal "Queer Race"

NOTE: For access to full text, ACRAWSA membership is required. Visit the ACRAWSA site for more information.

Special Issue: "Queer Race" 2.2 (2006)
Edited by Damien W. Riggs

You can view issue abstracts HERE.

Of particular interest to Asian Australian Studies are the following:

"THE (GAY) SCENE OF RACISM: FACE, SHAME AND GAY ASIAN MALES"
GILBERT CALUYA
As adept as we have become in tracing the discursive and institutional contours of contemporary Australian racisms, such a focus sometimes shifts attention away from the ‘lived experience’ of racism, in Fanon’s sense. What does it mean to face racism? What does it mean for gay Asian men to face racism on the gay scene? How is it possible to face racism? Indeed, do we face racism or does racism ‘face’ us? Drawing on autoethnographic research, this essay focuses on the lived experience of anti-Asian racism on the gay scene. It analyses cultural examples of racial wounding on the gay scene to tease out the constitutive role of shame for gay Asian men’s racial-sexual subjectivities.

"WHAT A DRAG! FILIPINA/WHITE AUSTRALIAN RELATIONS IN THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT"
ELAINE LAFORTEZA
This paper tracks the ways in which the deployment of Orientalist logic (in)forms the Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994) and responses to the film. I argue that Orientalism within Priscilla privileges a white hegemony that denies the potentialities of queer as destabilising normative coherence. I focus on the white protagonists’ relationship with Cynthia, the Filipina character, in order to interrogate how whiteness and Orientalism (in)forms their contact with one another, and I process queer (to a heterosexist social order) characters as normative protagonists because of their whiteness. Here, I insinuate my own readings of the film to show that while Orientalist whiteness shapes the film, it also produces and is produced by perceptual practices that deploy investments in and/or resignify the scope of white Orientalism. I track this simultaneous affirmation and reconceptualisation of normative structures through the characters’ use of drag. Such impermanence maintains whiteness as the speaking/subject position. Consequently, queer potentialities for extending the scope of white Orientalism cannot eventuate. This paper pushes towards recognising whiteness and Orientalism as integral facets of queerness within Priscilla and through responses to the film. With this, the multiple ways in which queer identities are experienced can be addressed.

"I THINK YOU’RE THE SMARTEST RACE I’VE EVER MET: RACIALISED ECONOMIES OF QUEER MALE DESIRE"
ALAN HAN
This paper explores how queer white men become both the desiring subjects and desirable objects of the queer male gaze. By analysing the personal experiences of queer Asian men, this paper argues that queer white men claim possession of desire as capital through racialised economies of queer male desire. These economies privilege queer white men by racialising queer Asian men and other non-white queer men, and ascribes them desirability according to the queer white male gaze. By racialising nonwhite queer men, queer white men’s whiteness is unracialised, and so, conceals their possession of desire as a white possession. I argue that it is only by exploring how queer white men claim possession of desire as capital within these racialised economies of queer male desire, that we can consider how they dominate the queer male gaze.