“Queer Before Asian Studies”

Queer Asia 2: Texts, Readings, Flows

Association for Asian Studies – in – Asia
Bangkok, Thailand
July 2, 2019

Queer Before Asian Studies1

Andrew Way Leong

Assistant Professor of English
University of California, Berkeley

Our panel description describes “queer Asian studies” as an “emergent” field. In this morning’s

panel, Queer Asia 1, Audrey Yue distinguished between the temporalities of “emergency” as a

time of short-term crises and the “emergent” as a longer-term, potentially queer, temporality –

the emergent as that which takes time to “emerge.” Building upon this sense of the

“emergent,” we might ask, from where does queer Asian studies emerge? What are this field’s

origins?

One reading of the phrase “queer Asian studies” would point to the word “queer” as

marking the new, emergent thing that has come to modify an older thing called “Asian studies.”

But what if we were to invert the positions of this new/old dichotomy? What if we took “queer”

to be a centuries-old designation for a variety of concepts that are historically prior to this new,

upstart field called “Asian studies”? What if we were to read the phrase “queer Asian studies”

as following the order in which its words appear? What if queer comes before Asian studies?

1I would like to thank Grace Ting for organizing and chairing this panel under the auspices of the Society for Queer
Asian Studies (SQAS). EDIT (07/23/19) – This panel was not the SQAS sponsored panel at AAS-in-Asia, but the
second part of a two part series entitled “Queer Asia.”

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“Queer Before Asian Studies”
Queer Asia 2: Texts, Readings, Flows
Association for Asian Studies – in – Asia
Bangkok, Thailand
July 2, 2019

I ask this question not to deny the importance of providing an accurate historical

account of the emergence of a field called “queer studies” or “queer theory” in the 1990s. An

exemplary summary of “queer approaches to reading literature as they emerged in Anglophone

literary studies” can be found in Keith Vincent’s contribution to the 2016 Routledge Handbook

of Modern Japanese Literature. Vincent points to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the

Closet and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, both published in 1990, as “two books that are often

said to have founded the field.” Vincent emphasizes that in the 1990s and early 2000s,

“Japanese translations of English and French-language queer scholarship were not only greater

in number but also followed closer to the originals than any country [he] is aware of” (71). If we

expand our focus from 1990s-2000s queer studies in Japan to “queer studies in Asia,” then we

can also note that the abstract for our two roundtables on “Queer Asia” marks the “fourteenth

anniversary” of the “First Annual Conference of Asian Queer Studies, held in Bangkok in July

2005.”

These historical landmarks can give us as sense that “queer studies in Asia” or “queer

Asian studies,” is somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five years old. It thus seems a little

odd to describe the field as “new” or “emergent” when, for example, Vincent argues that there

have been at least two academic “generations” of queer studies scholarship (75), or when Hong

Kong University Press’s Queer Asia monograph series has published around seventeen books

over the last decade.

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“Queer Before Asian Studies”
Queer Asia 2: Texts, Readings, Flows
Association for Asian Studies – in – Asia
Bangkok, Thailand
July 2, 2019

If “queer Asian studies” maintains a sense of newness, then, this sense might only exist

in relative terms – insofar as “queer studies” at 15-25 years old seems newer than “Asian

studies.” But let us recall that the professional field known by the name of “Asian Studies” is, in

world historical terms, a pretty new thing. The Association for Asian Studies was founded less

than eighty years ago, in 1941. Without making an argument for strong causation, we can note

that the 1940s-1970s— the period in which the phrase “Asian Studies” came to replace

“Oriental Studies” in North America, Australia, and New Zealand—coincided with a decisive

shift in global hegemony from British to American empire. This was a period of intensifying

American military, political, and financial projection westward over the Pacific— an

intensification supported by the framework of the Australian, New Zealand, United States or

(ANZUS) Security Treaty of 1951. In these geopolitical contexts, thinking of Asia as fixed within a

geographic “East” or “Orient” would increasingly seem like a bizarre anachronism that could

only maintain its currency in the fever dreams of greatly diminished European powers (e.g.,

Great Britain and the Netherlands).

Let us now think of the origins of the word “queer” as an English word whose

emergence dates to a much earlier period, long before the rise of Britain as a hegemonic world

center during the long nineteenth century. 2 According to Will Fisher, a professor of early

modern English literature, “[a]lthough the slang term ‘queer’ is now generally understood to

refer to homosexuals, it has been used in referring to counterfeiting and counterfeit money

2Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, (London: Verso, 2010).

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“Queer Before Asian Studies”
Queer Asia 2: Texts, Readings, Flows
Association for Asian Studies – in – Asia
Bangkok, Thailand
July 2, 2019

since at least the seventeenth century.”3 Fisher makes the provocative argument that

“counterfeiting appears to have been linked with homosexuality (or, less anachronistically,

sodomy) before the word queer came to mean homosexual.” As Fisher puts it, in a

seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century social world were “coining and sexual

reproduction were homologous, counterfeiting and sodomy were to be understood as

equivalent perversions of them: just as counterfeiting was considered to be a false imitation of

legitimate monetary production, sodomy was figured as a false imitation of heterosexual

generation” (1).

Thinking about the emergence of “queer” as a seventeenth-century English vernacular

reference to false or counterfeit coin can help us make a surprising connection through the

recent work of comparative literary scholar Ning Ma, and her monograph The Age of Silver: The

Rise of the Novel East and West. Ma draws on the work of historians such as Andre Gunder

Frank and Giovanni Arrighi to characterize the “sixteenth through eighteenth centuries” as an

“Age of Silver” where the massive silver flows from South America and Japan to China produced

the “emergent realist narrative forms of the early modern era” (7). Ma traces these emergent

realisms in texts ranging from Jin Ping Mei (c. 1610), Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), Ihara

Saikaku’s Life of an Amorous Man (1682), and Robinson Crusoe (1719). If we were to think of a

synthesis of Fisher and Ma’s claims, then we might fit late seventeenth and early eighteenth-

century British concerns about queer coinage and sexuality within a broader world historical

3 Will Fisher, “Queer Money” in ELH, 66 (1999), 1.

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“Queer Before Asian Studies”
Queer Asia 2: Texts, Readings, Flows
Association for Asian Studies – in – Asia
Bangkok, Thailand
July 2, 2019

picture. In other words, what if we were to think of the seventeenth-century emergence of the

British term “queer” as already deeply embedded in social anxieties about sovereign monetary

crises associated with massive flows of silver to China?

There’s a lot more to be said here – but to give a quick taste of how this way of thinking

about a longer history of “queer” through international money flows has helped me in my own

recent work, I want to share a quote from an English-language text published in 1900 by the

Japanese poet, and later Keio University English professor, Yoné Noguchi (1875-1947). It will be

helpful to recall that 1900 marks a world moment dominated by concerns bimetallic (silver and

gold) or gold-only standards for the convertibility of currency. Consider here how the “queer”

as counterfeit, but also as homo-eroticism, overlap in this scene where Noguchi describes his

interactions with a man he describes as a “negro gentleman-waiter” in a Chicago hotel.

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“Queer Before Asian Studies”
Queer Asia 2: Texts, Readings, Flows
Association for Asian Studies – in – Asia
Bangkok, Thailand
July 2, 2019

Works Cited

Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times,
(London: Verso, 2010).

Fisher, Will. “Queer Money” in ELH, 66 (1999), 1-23.

Ma, Ning. The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017).

Yone, Noguchi. “From the Story of Yone Noguchi” in Selected English Writings of Yone Noguchi:
An East-West Literary Assimilation. Vol. 2: Prose. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. (London:
Associated University Presses, 1992). 212-270.

Vincent, J. Keith. “Queer Reading and Modern Japanese Literature,” in Routledge Handbook of
Modern Japanese Literature. Eds. Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton Douglas.
(Abingdon, GB: Routledge, 2016) 71-81.