School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemGoing south( 2000)This article examines the relationship between transnational news and narrowcasting in the diasporic Chinese consumption of media in Australia. In our analysis, ‘going south’ was the paradigm we developed to disrupt the fixity of the Asia/Australia binary, to foreground relationality and flow, to examine the landscape of encounters that were produced at the intersections of these places. Going south, then, functions as a critical trajectory as well as a geographical distinction. For the transnational Chinese diaspora in Australia, the status of ‘going south’ is a metaphor inflected with shifting meanings. Inscribed in a migratory movement of literal displacement and reoriented in the racialised landscape of a postcolonial settler Australia, it aligns itself with south of Asia, south of China and south of the East and the West. This trajectory locates the emerging identity of a transnational Chinese-Australia in a spatial-temporal mobility. It also articulates itself as a place of cultural negotiation, a very distinctive borderland. In this article, going south means a recognition of the specific media landscapes in Australia and their various relations with diasporic audiences. It also means an analysis attentive to the ways in which the reception of Chinese audio visual products is mediated by different experiences of diaspora and the different institutional, economic and policy dynamics that structure news programming in Cantonese and Mandarin. We argue that narrowcasting is more than a site where other news becomes available; it is also a site where other temporal-spatial relations decentre the identity of nation as narration, making going south a space where Chinese identities foreground Australia’s multiple enunciatory presents.
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ItemMigration-as-transition: Hong Kong cinema and the ethics of love in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046(Asia Research Institute / Singapore University Press, 2005)Migration is always an on-going process of transition. It is a journey of physical displacement, as well as social and psychological dislocation. From the nostalgia of departure, the shock of arrival to the belonging of resettlement, migration-as-transition involves the continual transformation from one state to another. Central to this transformation is the encounter of the intersection as a border cultural practice consisting of convergence and divergence: the former through the bonds of similarities between home and host cultures; the latter through the transnationality of diasporic and global intimacies. At the heart of this intersection is a hope constituted in the anticipation that a better life elsewhere is also accompanied by the reciprocity of love. From the macro politics of the love for refugees, foreigners and strangers, to the micro regions of neighbourliness, to the daily vicissitudes of romantic and family love, the ethics of love has become synonymous with the making of the migratory subject and the forming of the coming community in our current times.This chapter examines migration-as-transition in Hong Kong cinema. Hong Kong cinema is an exemplary site to examine migration-as-transition because of its pre-post-1997 cultural condition that precipitated a period of transition beginning in the 1997 Handover of the British colony to the Chinese motherland, and ending its ‘one country, two systems’ Special Administrative Region rule in 2046. The pre-1997 and post-1997 transitional years have witnessed the migration of its people and its film industry to the region and the West. For the diasporic community and the global audience, Hong Kong cinema is a site of transition through cultural maintenance and negotiation. Within Hong Kong, the cinema is a site of transition through cultural survival. The political crisis of the pre-1997 Handover has transformed into the post-1997 economic crisis evidenced through the pre-millennial financial meltdown and the post-SARS market collapse. With the promises and lies of reform, the ethics of love now complicates Hong Kong’s triangulated grand narratives of Britain and China. This chapter will further illustrate how the ethics of love is evident in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, a love story with a science-fiction subtext set in 2046. It argues that love is an intermediary that can question Hong Kong’s political transition because its ethics enable the possibility and the potentiality of a post-transitional coming community.
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ItemWhat’s So Queer About Happy Together? a.k.a. Queer(N)Asian: Interface, Community, Belonging( 2000)This paper attends to the relationship between diasporic media and diasporic queer formation by exploring the cultural circuit of Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997)as an agent of diasporic Asian Australian queer visibility. In particular, it examines how Happy Together interpellates Hong Kong’s ®rst modern Cantopop star, actor and Asian gay icon Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing,4 as an interface for articulating an emerging diasporic Asian queer identity. This interface is a transnational imagination called `Queer (N)Asian’.5 `Queer (N)Asian’ expresses how diasporic media interpellates diasporic queer formations.Queer (N)Asian is constituted in the disjunctive new `scapes’ informed by Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) global cultural flow. Characterized by three features, it is anemergent horizon that critically deploys the instabilities of `queer’ and `Asian’. The first feature is that it contests the orthodoxy of East and West. Hong Kong cinemabetween the transitional years, 1984-1997, highlighted this contestation as a globally popular and postnational screen for diasporic interpellation. During this period, thepost-Declaration cinema expressed the identity-crisis experienced by the colony. In The East is Red (Ching Siu-tung 1993) for example, the transsexual martial artist, aptly named `Asia The Invincible’, exemplifies the deployment of `transsexuality’ and `Asia’ to highlight the cinema as a cultural model that experienced both British and Chinese modernities, combining and reconfiguring the contingencies and contiguities of West/East, capitalism/communism, and pluralism/autocracy. The consumption of Hong Kong cinema as a travelling technology in the queer Asian-Australian diaspora, for example, has produced a new self-conscious Asian and queer visibility constituted in such a tactical deployment.
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ItemPaging ‘New Asia’: sambal is a feedback loop, coconut is a code, rice is a system(Duke University Press, 2003)The issue of sexuality in Singapore is an ambivalent discourse that crosses the borders between prohibition and endorsement, official and unofficial and private and public. On one level, homosexuality is prohibited and consensual same-sex desires are punishable as criminal offences. On another level, transgenderism is endorsed by the discourses of biology and medicine, and sanctioned (albeit unofficially) through state support and policy. This ambiguity manifests itself in numerous aspects of Singapore’s cultural location within both Asia and the West, and is exemplified also in recent discourse about New Asia. This chapter will investigate the culture of such an ambiguity by examining the consumption practices of computer-mediated communication (CMC) technology by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in Singapore cyberspace.
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ItemAsian-Australian cinema, Asian-Australian modernity(University of Queensland Press, 2000)This chapter examines the emergence of Asian-Australian modernity through cinema as site of cultural production. Using three films to map three characteristics, this paper presents Asian-Australian modernity as constituted in a culture of mobility that reconfigures ethnicity and reconstitutes desire. Beginning with the narrative of Chinese heterogeneity in Won Ton Soup (Clara Law, 1993), this paper argues that such a narrative is delineated by a mobile trajectory called ‘going south’. This trajectory acknowledges the movement of Asian migration into Australia, and as a critical transnational direction, it characterises the emergence of Asian-Australian modernity. Implicit in this trajectory is the formation of a cultural diaspora. Using the performativity of ethnicity in Floating Life (Clara Law, 1996), this paper further argues that such a performativity articulates the diasporic affect of alienation, defamilarisation and dis-placement. As a form of differential repetition, it produces an incommensurability of difference that redefines the paradigm of ethnicity. Asian-Australian modernity is further characterised by a reconfiguration of ethnicity. Underpinning this reconfiguration is a reconstitution of desire. Examining the politics of intercultural queer desire in the experimental documentary China Doll (Tony Ayres, 1997), this paper argues that the shift of gay desire from a postcolonial ‘rice-and-potato’ hybrid sexuality to the ‘sticky rice’ model locates an agency framed by the ambiguity of Asian-Australian visibility and pride. Characterised by such a model of cultural desire, Asian-Australian modernity articulates an emergining identity that visibilises as well as questions the hegemonic forces surrounding its constitution, expression and production.
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ItemUsing blogging for higher order learning in large-cohort university teaching: A case study(Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education, 2007-12-01)
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ItemGay Asian Sexual Health in Australia: Governing HIV/AIDS, Racializing Biopolitics and Performing Conformity(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2008-02)This article critically examines how the public health governance of HIV/AIDS has constructed the racialized biopolitics of the gay Asian Australian community. The old biopolitics of health that excluded the Asian at the turn of the 19th century is now eclipsed by a new biopolitics that foregrounds the racialized body as a site of inclusion. The new biopolitics has emerged from within policy innovations in Australia's multicultural sexual health programs. Since the mid-1990s, the diversity of Asian communities was recognized in various AIDS councils through the employment of ethno-specific social workers, carers and peer-to-peer educators. This article problematizes how diasporic gay Asian sexuality has emerged in queer, mainstream and modern Australia through such a viral politic of containment. These policies, I argue, have paradoxically contributed to the production of a new queer Asian Australian body aesthetics that has enabled the conditions of possibilities for new sexual subjects.
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ItemIntroduction: Chinese cinemas as new media(Informa UK Limited, 2009-01)
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ItemQueer Asian Australian migration: creative film co-production and diasporic intimacy in The Home Song Stories(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2008)
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ItemSame-sex migration in Australia - From interdependency to intimacy(DUKE UNIV PRESS, 2008)In 1985 Australia became one of the first countries in the world to accept same-sex relationships as the basis of migration. Under the compassionate and humanitarian visa category, same-sex applications were assessed through ministerial discretion. In 1991 the “interdependency” category was introduced to recognize nonfamilial migration. Same-sex migration has been hailed as reflecting Australia's progressive sexual law reform and modernizing Australia's immigration history. Since 1991, more than 7,500 permits have been issued. Between 1991 and 2005, gay Asian migrants made up the largest group of interdependency settlers. This article analyzes the development of same-sex migration policy to show how official immigration policy discourses have transformed their visa codifications from humanitarian in 1980, to interdependency in 1991, and family stream same-sex interdependency in 2000. These categories mobilize different politics of intimacy to assimilate the queer migrant into the logics of transnational capital and new nationalism. Thus interracial gay Asian Australian migration functions as a buffer and tension between the nation and its others, government and people, policy and politics.