This interarea panel presents four inquiries that situates erotics in an "Asia" increasingly enmeshed in globalization processes through movements of people, capital, and media. Through innovative formats, we will develop interdisciplinary conversations on the translocal production, travel, and reception of media so as to theorize: (1) contemporary reconfigurations of Asia; and (2) recastings of erotic desires. Panelists pose such questions as: What has been the role of transnational mass media in circulating erotic representations about and within Asia? How have desires for an imagined Asia affected the erotic lives, identities, and practices of Asians in disparate locations? How have Asians reworked their sexual lives and fantasies in light of these processes? We conceive of erotics as extending beyond sex acts or desires for sex acts, as embedded also in fantasy, everyday practices, social relationships, and political institutions.

We position ourselves methodologically between ethnographic audience studies and literary-critical interpretation, demonstrating this syncretic approach both in the substance of the work and in the presentation format. Ten-minute remarks on each topic—the role of mass media in gay subjectivity in Indonesia, popular consumption of literature on failed sexual intimacy in China, the production of erotic nostalgia among queer Filipino diasporics, and proliferating representations of sex in Indian television serials—are complemented by screenings/readings from original media to invite the audience into the interpretive process. With time allocated for discussion, scholars who have agreed to participate from the floor include: Sandra Buckley, Judith Farquhar, Laurel Kendall, Karen Kelsky, Dorothy Ko, Michael Moffatt, and Ann Walton.

Tom Boellstorff, Stanford University

In this paper, I examine how three forms of mass media—general print media, gay print media, and the Internet—articulate an erotics of gay subjectivity in Indonesia. A growing number of Indonesians employ the ostensibly Western term "gay," drawing from state discourse to imagine their community as a "gay archipelago" simultaneously national and transnational. However, these Indonesians rarely meet gay Westerners: most learn of the term "gay" through general print media. Once identifying as gay, some Indonesians then produce their own magazines, circulated primarily in small print runs. An increasing number also communicate through the Internet. Sexuality, that most embodied of domains, is highly mediated in gay Indonesia. How is this erotics structured archipelagically, through frameworks derived from afar? How do these translocal mediations impact sexual practice, as well as notions of desire and romance?

I employ an interdisciplinary methodology (textual analysis and ethnography) to explore how these mass media are transformed in erotic practices and imaginings. To show how these mass media link sexuality to other cultural domains, I turn to the recent "dubbing" controversy. The Indonesian government recently banned the dubbing of foreign television programs into Indonesian in favor of subtitles, explaining that Indonesians will no longer be able to differentiate themselves from non-Indonesians if foreigners "speak" Indonesian. How might the erotics of gay subjectivity parallel this controversy in terms of "dubbing culture," an embodiment of sexual practices and romantic imaginings that, from a modernist perspective, appear disjunctural and inauthentic?

Ralph Litzinger, Duke University

In the mid-1990s, the Beijing Youth Daily journalist An Dun began to interview young men and women about their views on love and marriage. These narratives became the material for her 1998 bestseller, "Absolute Privacy" (Juedui yinsi). According to one editorial, An Dun’s account gave voice "to the common person’s anxieties and pain in a highly commercialized era characterized by unrestrained desire and degenerate morality." In the wake of An Dun’s commercial success, others began to publish similar books. Street stalls were soon littered with titles such as "Extreme Privacy," "The Privacy of Single Life," and "The Privacy of Sexual Passion." While An Dun’s work was seen as a new form of social realism, the official press denounced these books for turning personal suffering into the newest hot commodity.

Why have questions of failed sexual intimacy gripped the popular imagination at this particular historical juncture? What does the popular interest in the realm of the private tell us about new practices of the erotic? How does the state regulate this new "voyeur’s market," in which the taboo, the hidden, and the secret suddenly gain value (Dutton, Streetlife China, p. 284)? My presentation explores how the focus on privacy invests the body with erotic potential and inspects it as a site of social struggle. Reflecting on my own desire to consume, know, and record similar narratives, I argue that the privacy rage in China poses important methodological challenges for scholars interested in the relationship between media representation, subjectivity, and governmentality.

Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

How do rhetorics around modernity, erotic nostalgia and queer personhood circulate in Filipino cinema production and consumption? Utilizing interdisciplinary methods (e.g., survey interviews, life history, and ethnographic observation) and concepts from anthropology, cultural and cinema studies, this paper compares Filipino queer audiences of two queer films in New York City and Manila. The two films present transgender politics, gay political and cultural organizing, and sexual traditions coming together in a seeming traffic snarl of translation and cultural dissonance. Such an intersection is predicated on the spatiality of desire and postcolonial cultural production within transnational economic, political, and cultural circuits. I suggest that the films serve as temporal-spatial markers of travel, settlement and non-movement for queer audiences as the films alternately provide sources for nostalgic musing about embodied desires and yearnings that cross multiple borders, and serve as didactic texts in which to posit variegated views of the queer diaspora. Manila and New York form crossings of racialized bodies and erotics practices through experiences of immigration, consumption of queer transnational media, and political activism. For Filipino queer audiences, the films provide narrative structure to their lives in both cities as they locate themselves within life trajectories and carnal memories.

Purnima Mankekar, Stanford University

Following the introduction of transnational satellite television, the 1990s have witnessed the eroticization of many areas of the Indian public sphere. Simultaneously drawing on and diverging from previous representations of the erotic in popular culture, dramatic serials, advertisements, and talk shows on transnational television networks highlight how the Indian public sphere has been (re)charged with historically-specific constructions of sexuality and erotics.

This presentation uses video clips, policy analysis, and ethnography to examine representations of sexuality (in particular, those of premarital and extra-marital relationships) in the dramatic serials shown on transnational television networks, and their interpretations by viewers in India. My objective is to raise three questions. For the viewers of these serials, the discourses incited by these serials appear to open up new domains for discipline and also of gendered forms of agency, especially with regard to intimate relations. How does the explicit focus on erotics, sexuality, and intimacy implicate the refashioning of modern subjectivity? Second, how do these serials, themselves part of larger circuits of transnational media, participate in the redrawing of national and cultural boundaries of "Asia" occurring in the late-twentieth century? Third, how does the production and reception of satellite television, targeting viewers across transnational space, compel a reexamination of how we may study cultural texts, their audiences, and their social and cultural implications?