In his work Cruising Utopia, the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz describes places like the nightclub as a site with “queer world-making” capacities. It opens the possibility for community, celebration, and existence in an otherwise heteronormative world. While it may be perceived as a form of escapism by the dominant sphere, queer nightlife is a crucial space where queer performances and lives are produced and sustained. In performing new styles and connecting with other queer Asians, I have grown deeply interested in how individuals and communities within Asia navigate their regional settings that regulate and exclude particular forms of queer identity and expression. By continuing my engagement with new performances and immersing myself within these locations, I aim to discover how queer Asians struggle to adhere to these hetero-capitalist economies while creating their own regional worlds of queer life, networks, capital, and performance.
Exploring queer Asia de-centers the United States as the locus of queer life, and it broadens the scope of where and how queerness can be performed. Through my travels to Hong Kong, Bangalore, and Bangkok, I will not just learn how queerness is regulated within the nightclub, but discover how it can be modulated in spaces like the "home, workplace, streets, region, nation, and diaspora" (Khubchandani, "Dance Floor Divas: Fieldwork, Fabulating and Fathoming in Queer Bangalore"). Moreover, I will actively perform alongside these communities through new styles such as voguing, Bollywood-style drag, and K-Pop dance covers. Each of these sites and performance styles highlights the need to focus on various forms of self-expression, networks, and economies that deviate from the trajectories of the West.
While locating these spaces might be challenging, I will connect with queer organizations to guide me to particular nightlife sites and performers. Along the way, I will help plan an annual queer festival in Hong Kong, assist on a project that helps transgender communities in India find employment, and promote better livelihood options for sex workers in Thailand through social support groups. At the same time, I will be connected with queer student networks, local queer businesses, and key government and corporate stakeholders. These diverse interactions will provide additional lenses of learning how non-Western queer subjects make their livings, how they choose to perform themselves, and how they can build their own social, cultural, and economic capital via their local queer networks. Through these relationships, I hope to learn and contribute to localized efforts of coping with these queer struggles.
The goal of my project is to foreground the possibilities of queer world-making within a larger capitalist society. In concretizing the world I create with other queer performers, businesses, and organizations, I plan to develop a narrative that captures the memories, moments, and histories of these lived experiences through a collection of random, ephemeral paraphernalia—things like club vouchers, job flyers, photographs and personal vlogs, makeup brushes, and deflated balloons from house parties. Such objects serve as an alternative archive that speaks to and records these new economies and performances. It also spotlights the discourse of queer life away from the Western sphere and positions Asian subjectivities within their own local circuits and social terrains. By exploring these new geopolitical contexts from a variety of perspectives, I embrace a cross-cultural understanding of queerness, social, and economic policy that I plan to carry into my life’s work. More importantly, opening our queer-world making capacities allows us to imagine the potential for new queer horizons, untethered from the West and also from Asia, that find power through their own regional contexts in a capitalist world.