Queer Asian mobility and homonational modernity: Marriage equality, Indian students in Australia and Malaysian transgender refugees in the media

Abstract

In recent years, the regulation of mobility has seen marriage equality emerge as a homonational discourse of progressive gay and lesbian politics championed on the erasure of homophobia to end systemic discrimination. While homonational modernity promotes the superiority of a nation through sexual openness, it also mobilizes the fear of homophobia to marginalize racialized and sexualized minorities through sexual quarantine. Using media case studies on Indian student migrants and Malaysian transgender refugees from the Asian Australian diaspora, this article examines how homonational modernity regulates the queer mobility of diasporic Asian subjects. The article uses these case studies to interrogate homonational modernity and, in doing so, hopes to create a critical platform for a politics of queer Asian mobility. Critically illustrating how ‘Asia’ (e.g. Malaysia and India) and the Asian diaspora (e.g. Asian refugees and queer migrants in Australia) have been made present in Australian’s homonational modern imagination as sites of inclusion and exclusion, this article provides a critical approach to the regulation of mobility that allows for the intervention of and accounting for the uneven distribution of race, sex and gender that conditions personal mobility, revealing the institutional constraints and privileges that shape queer liberalism and homonormativity.