[csaa-forum] Reminder: Public Lecture: DIvergent Queer Modernities; and Launch: Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia

[Vera Mackie]

Forum on Human Rights Research

Public Lecture

Divergent Queer Modernities: Rethinking Religion, Capitalism and
(Post)Coloniality

by

Professor Peter A. Jackson

Friday 7 November

4:00 p.m.

Lecture Theatre 20.2, Building 20, University of Wollongong


followed at 5:30

by the launch of

The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia (edited by Mark
McLelland and Vera Mackie).

All welcome but please reply to Vera Mackie <vera at uow.edu.au> by 3 November
2014 for catering purposes.


Abstract of Lecture:
In this lecture I build on some of my earlier work on gender, sexuality and
modernity in Thailand and place Thailand in the context of recent debates
on modernity. Ultimately, a consideration of what have been called
'divergent' modernities can force a rethinking of models of modernity which
were originally developed to describe European societies.  Arif Dirlik has
argued that the decline and fall of socialism in the 1980s not only opened
the way to the globalisation of capital but also led to reimagined forms of
“tradition”, “culture” and “religion” taking over from “a now defunct
socialism the task of speaking for those … cast aside by capitalist
modernity”.  The result, Dirlik argues, has been a post-Cold War
“proliferation of modernities, which now find expression in the
fragmentation of a single modernity into multiple and alternative
modernities”.  I draw on several lines of research in Thai queer history to
argue that in key respects twenty-first century East and Southeast Asian
queer cultures are diverging from LGBTQ cultures in the (post)Christian
West and other world regions, such as the Muslim societies of the Middle
East and Africa.  In particular, I consider: diverging fundamentalist and
supernatural trends in Asian religions; capitalism as a domain of queer
autonomy in Asia; and the historical roles of “non-colonised” Thailand and
Japan in the emergence of modern queer cultures in Southeast and East
Asia.  My aim is to critique twentieth-century theorisations of religion
and modernity, capitalism, and postcoloniality as a starting point for
developing analytical models better capable of describing and accounting
for the diversity of queer cultures that inhabit the early twenty-first
century world, which we might refer to as 'divergent queer modernities'.

Biography:
Peter Jackson is Professor in the Department of Gender, Media and Cultural
Studies in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National
University. He has written extensively on modern Thai cultural history with
special interests in religion, sexuality, and critical theoretical
approaches to mainland Southeast Asian cultural history. '
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