Yiou Yang (University of Southern California)
yiou@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This session examines queer temporality, memory, and resistance within Asian media, highlighting tensions between visibility, erasure, and cultural expression. It addresses how dominant Asian discourses often marginalize or erase queer histories, creating spaces of precarity and invisibility. By employing alternative archival strategies, artistic practices, and non-linear temporal frameworks, queer communities disrupt traditional narratives of nationalism and heteronormativity. Papers may explore transnational dialogues, ephemeral practices of resistance, strategic visibility under censorship, and comparative analyses of queer cultural production across Asia, fostering nuanced understandings of queer persistence and divergent community-building practices shaped by distinct cultural, historical, and political contexts. Some papers may also engage with the conference theme, “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion”.

This session offers an intervention by exploring queer temporalities and collective memory within the context of Asian cultures, foregrounding narratives that remain underrepresented in existing scholarship. While queer theory has traditionally focused on Western contexts, this session redirects attention to Asian experiences, interrogating how queer subjects in Asia navigate historical erasure, political censorship, and socio-cultural marginalization. It addresses the urgent need to understand the region-specific mechanisms through which queer communities actively disrupt dominant nationalist, heteronormative, and capitalist frameworks that shape their visibility and memory.

Examining diverse media forms—including cinema, digital media, and performance—participants will analyze strategies employed by queer Asian communities to resist the erasure and silencing inherent within official historical and cultural narratives. By considering alternative archival practices and non-linear temporal frameworks, the session highlights how these communities actively reconstruct cultural memory and negotiate precarious futurities amid persistent marginalization.

Moreover, the session emphasizes transnational dialogues by inviting comparative analyses across multiple Asian contexts, illuminating shared experiences of resistance and distinct local articulations of queer identity. In doing so, it highlights how Asian queer practices significantly contribute to global understandings of queer theory and cultural memory, challenging universalizing assumptions within queer studies. This session therefore represents an opportunity to deepen interdisciplinary conversations.