Queer Asia as Method
Queer Asia as Method is now a six-year, community-embedded research and public engagement project that began with an interdisciplinary roundtable in 2021, bringing together scholars, artists, filmmakers, and practitioners from across East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and diaspora to challenge the dominance of Western queer theory. From 2021 to now, three public workshops were convened, combining academic discussion with practitioner contributions, artist presentations, and community dialogue. Participants included LGBTQ+ community organisations, independent filmmakers, youth workers, and cultural activists alongside researchers, with audiences spanning the UK, East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, and North America.
Working in partnership with Queer East and the Queer Asia Film Festival, the project developed a model of engagement that placed community knowledge alongside scholarly research. Film screenings, Q&As with filmmakers and producers, and curated cross-sector discussions made the research accessible to non-specialist audiences engaging with questions of sexuality, race, and cultural politics in Asian contexts.
The research firstly culminated in a co-edited special issue, “Queer Asia as Method,” published in Media, Culture & Society (2025), with contributions from scholars and practitioners in the UK, China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the broader Asia-Pacific region. A hybrid public launch event on 7 May 2026 at King’s College London, co-organised with Queer@King’s and Queer Asia, features a panel discussion with contributors, a Queer Asia Film Festival screening, and the launch of a freely downloadable digital resource pack for community educators, youth workers, cultural practitioners, and LGBTQ+ communities.
Queer Asia as Method Roundtable 2021
A two-day roundtable on thinking ‘Queer Asia as Method’ on 4 and 5 September 2021.
We ask that interested participants consider in their expression of interest the following questions. What is Queer Asia as method? How has the commingling of queerness and disciplinary projects in Asia inflected each other, and how do they enable a transgressive and transnational praxis that is critically informing the work of diversity and inclusion in the arts and humanities? Moreover, how does queerness in resistance/rupture and/or reparation inform the work of decolonising the curriculum? This Queer Asia as Method roundtable aims at exploring ‘What is queer?’, ‘What is Asia?’ and ‘What is “Queer Asia”?’. By pairing queer studies with area studies, this workshop endeavours to approach both queerness and Asianess as ‘a placeholder that might partly express a promiscuous or incoherent desire or a desire whose content continues to be under erasure’ (Arondekar and Patel 2016: 154).
​
Keynote Speakers:
Anjali Arondekar (Professor, Feminist Studies Department, and Co-Director Center for South Asian Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Geeta Patel (Professor of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures and Women, Gender & Sexuality, University of Virginia)
Petrus Liu (Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, World Languages and Literatures, Boston University)
Song Hwee Lim (Professor, Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Queer Asia as Method Special Issue Launch 2026
Queer Asia as method is built upon the larger discourse of Asia as method. This special issue brings together academics and practitioners reflecting on diversifying and decolonising our epistemes and methods of knowledge production. Emerging from a roundtable in 2020, contributors reflect on the questions of research, method, and pedagogy and reframing these within Asian practices and lived experiences as its technology of recognition.
Join us for a conversation launching the special issue on Queer Asia as Method, published in Media, Culture and Society, on 7 May 2026 at 1pm in Bush House (SE) 1.05 or Microsoft Teams. The contributors and editors share collaborative thinking about the questions raised by examining ‘Queer Asia as Method’ and the praxis informing the work of decentring and decolonising the globalised formation of queerness.
MENTAL HEALTH AND LGBTQ+ LIVES IN ASIA: CINEMA AND CONVERSATIONS
This special programme is a collaboration between the UK Asian Film Festival, Queer Asia, and Queer East, and brings together three films from India, Malaysia, and Indonesia with expert LGBTQ+ therapy practitioners, academics, and organisational professionals to engage with the complexity of mental health amongst queer Asian communities.
This special programme offers the space for a deep reflective conversation on mental health amongst queer Asian communities. Audiences are invited to watch, listen, and participate alongside one another in building a space for a deep conversation on queer mental health. Audiences are invited to stay on for a fundraising mixer after the programme raising support for MANTIS Collective working to support trans and queer communities.
Panel speakers: Prof. Doyin Atewologun (Delta Alpha Psi), Prof. Dinesh Bhugra CBE (King’s College London), Sanjay Kumar (Head of Conselling Services, NAZ Foundation). Conversation moderated by: Ilina Logani.
Asian Queer Knowledge and Politics Workshop
Supported by South West Queer Research Network and Research England at the University of Bristol.
Venue: 1.11 Old Council Chamber, Wills Memorial Building, Queens Road, Bristol BS8 1RJ
