Jin Haritaworn
Media and Communications Studies Department
Goldsmiths College, London 

(Reino Unido)

How can we study 'Queer', or indeed, should we? Drawing on fieldwork with people from part-Thai families in Britain and Germany, and reflecting on my own coming out as FTM (female-to-male transgendered) during the research, I reflect on the role of difference, similarity, and change in the production of emancipatory queer knowledges. Queers of colour, it is argued, have a particular stake in queering racialised heterosexualities; yet differences within diasporic spaces clearly matter. 

I examine the implication of 'queer' directionality - whether we ‘queer up’ or ‘down', and of the anti-racist feminist principle of positionality, for a queer methodology of change. This is explored with regard to a variety of empirical and cultural examples, including the debate around Jenny Livingston’s film about the Harlem house/ball scene Paris is Burning, the appeal that a racialised heterosexual artist such as South-Asian pop singer MIA can have for queers of colour, the camp role model which Thai sex work femininity can represent for queer and trans people from the second generation of Thai migration, and the solidarity of a Southeast Asian butch with feminine women in her diasporic collectivity.

About Jin Haritaworn

Jin Haritaworn is a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in the Media and Communications Studies Department at Goldsmiths College. His current research topics include an exploration of debates on citizenship, civil rights and civil liberties with regard to multiculturalism, women's rights and gay rights, a critical interrogation of the usage of 'ambiguity' and 'border crossing' in queer and postcolonial theory, and changing notions of hybridity in a post-9/11 context of European nationalism. Publications include the co-editing of a special issue on polyamory and non-monogamy in Sexualities (2006, 9(5)), articles in edited volumes such as Geographies of Sexualities (Brown, Browne and Lim, 2007) and Out of Place: Queerness and Raciality (Kuntsmann and Esperanza, forthcoming), and in peer-reviewed journals, including Women’s Studies International Forum (2007, 30(7)) and (all forthcoming) Darkmatter (issue 3 on Postcoloniality and Sexuality), Feminist Theory (special issue on new feminininities, ed. By Rosalind Gill), Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Femina Politica and Sociological Research Online.