What Difference?: Encountering Similitude and Internationalism in Researching Queer Korea (original) (raw)
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Go Home, Gay Boy! Or, Why Do Singaporean Gay Men Prefer to “Go Home” and Not “Come Out”?
Journal of Homosexuality, 2011
Anglo-American ontologies posit that gay men should come out to match their outer selves with their inner ones. In Confucianized Singapore, however, gay men refrain from coming out to their parents to avoid shaming their families. Instead, they couch their homosexuality in kinship terms and “go home” with their boyfriends (Chou, 2000). “Going home” gains familial acceptance, but it does not challenge mainstream discourses of homosexuality. By examining how Singaporean gay men negotiate their sexuality with their families, I question the validity of coming out and going home as both ontological discourses and strategies.
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The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2013
Developmental issues arising from the dilemma of the protogay male child (as defined by Blum and Pfetzing in 1997) and the assaults to his sense of self are discussed in the context of the impact of the analytic attitude. Clinical material is offered as a 50-year-old gay man, troubled by his inability to form a lasting loving relationship with a man, experiences integration in the analytic relationship, stemming from what he describes as the "Yes" offered by his female analyst.
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Prior to moving to the U.S., the author, a gay Japanese man, was secure in his multiple identities. After the cross-national transition to the U.S., however, he confronted unique and particular challenges in negotiating his multiple identities. As a foreigner, adopting the cultural discourse of the gay Asian-American identity as a way of life shocked and surprised him-especially because of the ways in which others communicated with him. In particular, others generally viewed his identity expression as reinforcing the stereotypical image of gay men and failing to conform with the social perception of Asian-Americans. Also, the racialized and gendered image of gay Asian-American men became a conflict in his interactions with gay and bisexual men because its image did not fully represent who he is. Being trapped by his dual-identity conflict, he faced difficulty in negotiating performative aspects of gay Asian-American male identity construction. At the same time, this contradiction became an opportunity for him to (de)construct his dual identity conflict and to finally name himself with such labeling. This analysis employs autoethnography to explore the author's cross-national transformation process of becoming a gay Asian-American man. Finally, this analysis intends to link his personal experience and the cultural and social experiences of gay Asian-American male identity.
Out of the country, out of the closet: Coming out stories in cross-cultural contexts (Proof)
Journal of Southern Linguistics, 2017
Coming out is a widely discussed aspect of queer life in Western societies (Zimman, 2009), having been examined in various settings, including family (Denes & Afifi, 2014), workplace (Marrs & Staton, 2016), and online (Gray, 2009). With increasing migration in the world, analyzing coming-out stories in cross-cultural settings (i.e. of immigrants in America) provides insights into storytellers’ perceptions of cultural differences, such as attitudes toward gayness. To investigate this, gay men with migration history and presently living in the DC area were interviewed about their coming-out experiences. This paper explores immigrants’ coming-out stories by analyzing a narrative told by a gay Indian man wherein he comes out to his Taiwanese classmate. Analysis reveals how the narrator positions himself at three levels (Bamberg, 1997; see also De Fina, 2013) to reflect a gender identity shaped by cultural awareness, in both his self-portrayal in the story world (level 1) and interactions with the interviewer in the storytelling world (level 2). In the story, the narrator comes out cross-culturally both in a foreign country and to his classmate from a different background. He discloses his gay identity by referencing “cut-sleeve,” an idiom indexing homosexuality in traditional Chinese literature. Demonstrating knowledge of Chinese culture, he comes out while positioning himself vis-à-vis his story-world classmate and the interviewer, who is also Taiwanese. Findings suggest that positioning in immigrants’ coming-out stories shows storytellers’ identity construction through their cultural understanding of both story characters and story recipients, thus contributing to our understanding of diverse coming-out stories.
Toward the Queer Child (1): Desire in Lee Seung-U's The Reverse Side of Life
Can the child be 'queer'? Can the absence and distance of the Father queer the boy child? When is one a child and when is one an adult? By 'becoming' an adult, has our childhood 'ended'? These are some of the questions, taking inspiration from Kathryn Bond Stockton's pioneering 2009 body of essays " The Queer Child-Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century " , which this paper seeks to approach. Queer children, Stockton illustrates, experience an additional death and birth compared with their 'straight' counterparts, and they seem to appear-like " ghosts "-to inhabit both the realms of the non-adult and the adult. The child with seemingly homosexual desires, the sexually abused child, and the bastard child are all queer for their apparent departure from a childly 'innocence' defined by adults, and for their sexually soiled selves. Through an examination of excerpts from Lee Seung-U's semi-autobiographical novel " The Reverse Side of Life " , this paper seeks to contribute to the quiet dialogue on the intersections of queer and the family in South Korean contemporary literature. In " The Reverse Side of Life " , we will see how the absence of a boy's father queers him in contrast to the 'normal' children around him, but also how the boy's seemingly homosexual desires for a mysterious man are problematised through the revelation of that man as his father. Finally, this two-part paper project aspires to come to some conclusions about the helplessness of the queer child portrayed by Lee Seung-U and Kim Hyena. Rather than negatively position these children as pitiable subjects of their more dominant narratives, the aspiration is to actually emphasise the child's positive, powerful hope despite their lived experiences of trauma and alienation at the hands of adults. It is these queer children who, regardless of the influences and strengths heteronormative constructs are presumed to hold over them, overcome marginalisation, look forward at their desires, and begin to pursue an authentic agency and autonomy both within and without childhood.
Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 2024
Given the residual homonegativity in evidence throughout our diverse communities, and given the large numbers of gay people who remain "in the closet", it is critical that we seek to understand in greater depth the complexities of the coming-out process with a view to dispelling some of the confusion relating to sexual identity. Internalised homophobia is more widespread than generally acknowledged, and it manifests in a variety of ways, including the sociological phenomenon of gay men remaining closeted until well into middle age. This article applies a hermeneutic phenomenological lens to examine the process of realisation, where an individual gradually becomes aware of his sexual orientation, and eventually acknowledges to himself that he is gay. This process can take decades. For this research project, twelve participants (gay men who have come out after the age of 40) from Aotearoa New Zealand willingly shared intensely personal accounts of their lived experiences. The findings indicate that individuals experience clarity about same-sex attraction in strikingly different ways. This study helps us to understand the difficulties faced by men who have lived the majority of their lives as "straight", then in middle age find themselves having to negotiate the tortuous terrain between heterosexuality and a new gay identity.
The journey to acceptance: Crossroads of Asian culture and queer identity
Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, 2011
In The Journey to Acceptance: Crossroads of Asian Culture and Queer Identity, Aldric Ulep provides an insightful look at the pressures that arise from the intersections of Asian culture and queer culture. He contends that while coming out is especially difficult for the queer Asian child, parents too struggle in accepting their child’s alternative sexuality in the context of ethnic traditions. Aldric focuses on the queer Asian child’s coming out experience from the parents’ perspective, analyzing the obstacles parents endure when their child, separated from them by cultural differences, comes out to them, and how the parents deal with those obstacles.
This article concerns Asian American queer masculinity and how the “coming out” process for gay Chinese men and their non-White immigrant families does not fit neatly within neat Western gender distinctions of public/private space. Using the film Ethan Mao as a primary text and case study, I argue for an intersectional approach to the coming out process for racialized sexual minorities. Ethan Mao is a film that tells the story of a Chinese American boy expunged from the home upon his family’s discovery of his homosexuality who returns to hold his family members hostage. The fictional story thematizes the indistinct spatial and symbolic boundaries of queer Asian American identity, masculinity, and domesticity. The film observes how gay men of color do not simply come out of the closet but break into it. Through an intersectional queer of color critique, I reconceptualize “the closet” as a synecdoche of the private home space, refiguring it as a contested site of belonging/exclusion to recognize the difficulties of “coming out” for certain queer racial male subjects.
When two young men find themselves in a situation where one tells the other he is gay, they become partners in the phenomenon of coming out. This complex process of sexual identity development, including the labeling of one’s attractions and desires towards taking up a subject position as a gay individual and the expression of one’s sexual identity to other people, is called coming out of the closet, or simply, coming out (Chirrey, 2003; Davies, 1992). This study attempts to examine how young gay men come out to others via a relatively novel perspective ‒ from the viewpoint of those to whom a gay man communicates and expresses his sexual identity. That is, from the perspective not of gay men themselves, but of those they come out to. Consider coming out as one form of communication of information regarding one’s sexual orientation and identity to others. It is helpful to distinguish between the two sides in this process: (1) the gay man himself, and (2) the person he comes out to. Using terminology borrowed from communication studies and the social psychology of self-disclosure, I refer to the first social agent as the discloser and to the second as the recipient or target of coming out. Mention the topic of coming out and perhaps the most intuitive, if self-evident, way to understand it will be to consider coming out as an experience exclusively of the disclosers. In this view, coming out is “about gay men” and exclusively about them. But what happens when we flip the coming out coin and focus the analysis not on disclosers but on their targets? And what can we learn about gay sexual identities and perhaps even heterosexuality, masculinity, and friendship when we consider the perspective of heterosexual male friends who are the targets of coming out? These are the questions I explore throughout this thesis. I begin with an overview of coming out as a focal point for lesbian and gay studies, with a particular emphasis on lesbian and gay psychology. I zero in on coming out to others as a social interaction process and present an argument for the analysis of targets’ perspectives, leading to the central research questions guiding this project. Finally, I describe my own standpoints as a researcher informed by more personal motivations as well as an academic interest in the intersection of social psychology and gender/sexuality studies.