Abstract
The lives of young people in Asia have been transformed in recent decades as a result of rapid development, industrialisation and globalisation. From new life-making subjects to civic netizens, the embodiment practices of young people are central to these narratives of Asian modernities. Exemplary here is the role that sexuality has played in constituting new desires and identities. From the correctness of suzhi (human quality) in China to gay consumers of creative economies in Thailand and Singapore, the practices of sexual embodiment have become new agents of complicity and change. In this chapter, I critically introduce and canvass the field of queer Asian studies to showcase a range of key case studies that demonstrate these practices of embodiments. Further considering how these practices foreground the convergence of the two formations of ‘queerscape’ and ‘youthscape’, I show how youth sexuality, as a site of embodied modernity, can be a productive arena to consider the challenges of transitions and futures as populations and places are constantly being made and remade, and called into becoming. I conclude by further demonstrating these practices using trans-embodiment through the figures of the tomboi (in Indonesia), the boy-head (in Hong Kong) and the butch (in Singapore).
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Notes
- 1.
Between 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘Asian Tiger’ was used to refer Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, countries that achieved an annual growth rate of more than 7 %. In early 2000s, the acronym BRIC was coined to refer to Brazil, Russia, India and China, the big 4 countries whose combined economies were predicted to eclipse the most developed and richest nations of the world.
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Yue, A. (2016). Queer Youthscapes in Asia: Embodied Modernities and Trans-Embodiments. In: Coffey, J., Budgeon, S., Cahill, H. (eds) Learning Bodies. Perspectives on Children and Young People, vol 2. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0306-6_2
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