Queering Activism in Southeast Asia (workshop)
Activism has never been tidy or transparent, but today’s turbulent political landscape makes its contradictions and creative frictions even more salient, demanding a shift in our epistemic and analytical frameworks.
Building on Butler’s (1990) and Sedgwick’s (1990) critiques of the naturalisation of identity categories, queer as method refuses to take categories such as gender, sexuality, and race as given, instead asking how they are produced and regulated (Brim and Ghaziani 2016). By queering activism, we propose a methodological and conceptual orientation that unsettles assumptions of activism as the straightforward expression of pre-constituted identities.
Instead, queering draws attention to how activism itself participates in constituting and reworking categories such as gender, sexuality, and race. Queering activism also unsettles what counts as politics, making space for practices and political labour that are illegible or invisible, including embodied and affective modes of resistance and fluid coalitional politics. This approach involves being attentive to political subjectivities that do not fit neatly into the liberal Western paradigm, and focusing on vernacular conceptions of rights and resistance (Alatas 2024; Chua 2022; Kjaran and Naeimi 2022; Madhok 2021). Finally, queering activism traces how moral economies and normative frameworks operate within movements themselves and not just as external constraints. For example, activism may privilege particular subjects, thereby reproducing hierarchies within activist spaces and more widely.
Such an analytical starting point thus opens space to rethink the political possibilities of resistance, interrogate hierarchies that shape whose claims and labour are recognised as political, and reimagine activist practices beyond the familiar vocabularies of recognition and inclusion. We focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas not as a stable geographic or analytical category, but as a historically constructed and contested field of study whose layered colonial histories, diverse political formations, and vibrant activist landscapes offer fertile ground for rethinking categories and methods (Peletz 2012; Rodan 2022; Tang and Wijaya 2023).
About the workshop chairs
Dr. Sharmila Parmanand is an Assistant Professor in Gender, Development and Globalisation at the LSE Department of Gender Studies and Associate Academic at the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre.
Prof. Meredith Weiss is a professor of political science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY) and founding director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium. She specializes in comparative politics, with a focus on Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia and Singapore. Her research centres on questions of social mobilization, civil society, parties and elections, governance, and drivers of political stasis or change.
Workshop schedule
9:00 Registration
9:30 Opening remarks (Dr Sharmila Parmanand and Professor Meredith Weiss)
9:45 - 10:15 “Exploring the ‘Asian Queerscape’ of East and Southeast Asian film festivals in the UK” (Suyin Hayes)
10:25 - 10:55 “Staging dissent: queering cultural activism in 1990s Singapore” (Dr How Wee Ng)
11:05 - 11:35 “Fragmented friendships and knotty solidarities: sex worker movement organising in Singaporean civil society” (Raksha Mahtani)
11.45 - 12.15 “Space-making through everyday activism: language learning and communal eating among sex workers in Thailand” (Chihiro Toya)
12.15 - 1.15 Lunch
1.15 - 1.45 “Queering the Grammar of Activism through Humor: Rights Talk and Vernacular Politics in Thailand’s ‘Nong’ Community” (Tinnaphop Sinsomboonthon)
1.55 - 2:25 “Politics of Care in Indonesian Queer Activism” (Dr Ferdiansyah Thajib)
2:45 - 3:15 “Queer Feminist Authenticity in the Digital Age: Media, Identity, and Activism in Thailand” (Nattamon Saphaokham)
3:25 - 3:55 “Transmasculine health activism in Thailand: Resistance and Resilience through Fluidity” (Adrian Beyer)
4:05 - 4:35 “Mobilising Near and Afar: Post-Coup Activism Among Myanmar Diasporas” (Dr Nyi Nyi Kyaw)
Speaker bios & abstracts
“Exploring the ‘Asian Queerscape’ of East and Southeast Asian film festivals in the UK”
The last five years have seen a growth in activism under an umbrella East and Southeast Asian identity in the UK, evidenced through increased organising, visibility and promotion of ‘community’ oriented events (Yeh, 2020 and 2021; Lam, Ma et al, 2022). A key site facilitating this connection is the film festival, which offers an opportunity for cosmopolitan assemblage and diasporic cocreation through programming decisions, audience responses and filmic texts presented in the host location’s cultural institutions (Acciari, 2017). This paper analyses the contribution of two key film festivals to this landscape, drawing inspiration from Audrey Yue’s Asian ‘queerscape’ within global cinema (Yue, 2014). Yue’s discussion of queer Asian cinema and media studies emerging in and through the intersections and linkages between social, cultural and intellectual forces are embodied in two film festivals that signify a distinct form of diasporic activism. The two case studies in this paper are: Queer East, first held in 2020 and self-described as “a cross-disciplinary festival that showcases boundary-pushing LGBTQ+ cinema, live arts, and moving image work from East and Southeast Asia and its diaspora communities”; and Hong Kong Film Festival UK, first held in 2022 with a mission to “introduce high quality independent cinema from Asia, especially Hong Kong to the UK”. This paper will explore the inclusion of LGBTQ+ programming within both film festivals since their inception as well as their broader roles in facilitating understanding of ESEA identities in the UK. It will argue that Queer East and HKFFUK are exemplary zones of public culture (Appadurai and Breckenridge, 1995) and sites of diasporic activism, facilitating cultural debate and contributing to new understandings of, as well as challenges to, ESEA identities in the UK.
Suyin Haynes is a lecturer in journalism at City St George’s, University of London, and an MA student in South East and Pacific Asian Studies at SOAS.
“Staging dissent: queering cultural activism in 1990s Singapore”
This paper treats queer Singapore Chinese theatre as a vital platform for queering activism and as an archival resource for the queer social history of 1990s Singapore. Alongside a brief survey of the period’s theatre scene, I examine key productions that emerged amid cultural liberalisation and persistent state repression. Rather than a formalist reading, the study treats these performances as documentary evidence of how queer people in an illiberal polity made claims to recognition, intimacy and belonging outside the vocabulary of Western rights discourse. I argue that queering activism onstage and in adjacent cultural fields, reshapes what we understand as politics by making room for practices that rights-based frameworks may overlook: embodied, relational and affective forms of resistance and care. Although theatre reached far fewer people than mass media in Singapore with tightly controlled news outlets, it was pivotal: theatre was where sexual taboos were challenged, solidarities were forged, and a sense of community took root. That mattered all the more because mainstream newspapers were often openly hostile to homosexuality, and moral panics about AIDS circulated stigma and fear. In this tense context, theatre created a rare public sphere for locally intelligible claims-making and care networks, i.e. spaces where dissent could be voiced through performance and intimacy rather than through straightforward political mobilisation. Using archival press coverage and original interviews with creative practitioners, the paper centres first-hand testimony as historical evidence. These accounts recover affective labour, tactics of sense-making, and the social practices through which theatre critiqued homophobia and AIDS discrimination, built safer spaces, and staged culturally legible dissent. Historicising these practices reframes late twentieth-century queer cultural production as formative of alternative political subjectivities across Southeast Asia and highlights local routes to rights, resistance and belonging at a moment before queer personhood and visibility was shaped by the attention economy.
Dr How Wee Ng is a senior lecturer at the School of Humanities, University of Westminster, and co-founder of ACPAC (Association for Curators and Programmers of Asian Cinemas).
“Fragmented friendships and knotty solidarities: sex worker movement organising in Singaporean civil society”
Singapore's civil society continues to be stymied via a growing arsenal of repressive laws and expanding executive powers that enable the state to shut down political organisations and target activists, creating a chilling effect on organising and movement building in the city-state and increasing pressure to cooperate. Political participation becomes especially fraught for those on the margins. Singapore’s sex and entertainment industries are often hailed as a port of call for migrant sex workers from the Global South seeking upward social and economic mobility, where intimate work is predominantly performed by women, racial minorities, migrants, and LGBTQ people, despite the illicitness and risks involved. Alongside locals and more embedded migrants, connections and solidarities are transient and difficult to maintain in sex worker movement building, especially as families and communities work as sites of control around participation in stigmatised work and further stigmatised organising around social change. Against a backdrop of social inequalities and stigmatization, this paper examines friendships and connections within the local sex worker movement in Singapore, including how internal hierarchies of class and stigma shape how these connections form and fracture. Utilising data from my masters’ thesis work of ethnography and interviews with 30 participants, volunteer work with a local sex worker advocacy organisation, and in my lived experiences, my paper will discuss how sex worker activists sustain their political participation beyond occupational bounds through safety and kinship practices in a fractured social and political landscape. This case study aims to interrogate hierarchies around whose claims and labour are recognised and included and hopes to enrich our understanding of diverse political formations in communities on the margins in Southeast Asian cities.
Raksha Mahtani has an MA in Sociology from the Nanyang Technological University and is a research associate with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Singapore. Raksha is also vice-president of the board of Project X.
“Space-making through everyday activism: language learning and communal eating among sex workers in Thailand”
People join social movements for various reasons — to improve working conditions or change laws — but finding a community where they belong is especially important for marginalised groups such as sex workers, migrants, and sexual and gender minorities.This paper focuses on the role of food and the language school as key forms of space-making, examining how sex workers in Thailand create spaces to gather, support one another, and mobilise.Can Do Bar is a bar managed by Empower, a Thai sex worker–led organisation founded in 1985. The bar not only demonstrates the group’s advocacy for safe and decent working environments but also serves as a vital community space where sex workers work, meet, and build solidarity. Since first visiting the bar in 2016, the presenter has visited regularly — joining the language school during the day and the lively bar gatherings at night — and has learned how sex workers build and strengthen their community.Empower was initially built through free language classes for sex workers who wanted to learn how to communicate and negotiate with their customers. Workers gathered in the space every day — not only to learn languages but also to gain information about STDs, learn about laws and their rights, and to meet friends and exchange information. Food, too, plays a significant role in space-making within Thai sex worker community. They eat and drink together after classes, behind the bar at night, and after demonstrations.Workers often visit each other’s bars to support their friends’ businesses, to catch up on rumours, and to meet new people — weaving networks of care and solidarity through everyday acts of gathering.While performances, talks, and demonstrations often draw more attention in discussions of activism, this paper highlights how everyday practices as space-making sustain community and empowerment among sex workers.
Chihiro Toya is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS.
“Queering the Grammar of Activism through Humor: Rights Talk and Vernacular Politics in Thailand’s ‘Nong’ Community”
This paper interrogates how queer humor in Thailand’s “Nong” community reconfigures the terrains of activism by troubling normative understandings of identity, rights, and political participation. Sitting at the intersections of digital culture, queer world-making, and rights discourse, Nong is a primarily LGBTQ-oriented online space whose memes, parodies, and embodied gatherings function not simply as entertainment but as critical, affective, and culturally embedded interventions. Rather than taking categories such as “queer,” “citizen,” or even “victim of rights violation” as given, Nong’s carnivalesque humor—deeply informed by camp and local idioms—refuses identity consolidation. Instead, it foregrounds contradiction, ambivalence, and discordance. Jokes about gender, sexuality, region, disability, and monarchy do not merely represent identities; they actively constitute, distort, and re-shuffle them, dramatizing how activist claims rest upon unstable epistemic ground. Nong’s practices thus exemplify “queering as method,” where critique emerges through playful repetition, incongruity, and the subversion of moral-political seriousness. Amid Thailand’s authoritarian repression and increasingly liberal rights-oriented activism, Nong intervenes in rights discourse by parodying the languages of freedom, civility, and political correctness. Humor becomes a vernacular mode of rights talk that democratizes participation: no one is exempt from ridicule, and everyone may occupy shifting roles—joker, audience, and object of critique. This practice exposes internal hierarchies within the queer movement—between PC-oriented activists and those who reject sanitized modes of political action—revealing how activist spaces reproduce exclusions even as they contest them. Drawing on online/offline ethnography and multimodal discourse analysis, the paper theorizes Nong’s humor as a queer political labor that exceeds liberal vocabularies of recognition and inclusion. Ultimately, it argues that Nong is queering activism by unsettling the very categories through which activism is thought, practiced, and policed, thus expanding the horizons of resistance in contemporary Southeast Asia.
Tinnaphop Sinsomboonthong is an assistant professor in Sociology at the Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University, Thailand, and currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore.
“Politics of Care in Indonesian Queer Activism”
This presentation examines the evolving dynamics of queer movements in Indonesia through the lens of care-based ethics and politics. Over the past five decades, queer activism has navigated a complex landscape shaped by intersecting social, political, and cultural pressures. Modernity and urbanisation fostered the emergence of imagined communities of sexual and gender dissidence, occupying “in-between spaces” such as dunia gay (Boellstorff, 2005) and dunia lesbi (Blackwood, 2010). These spaces, once sites of relative visibility and belonging, are increasingly constrained by criminalisation, societal backlash, and violent oppression (Thajib, 2021). Amid these threats, activists aging alongside their work face additional burdens in sustaining the movement, particularly in maintaining intergenerational knowledge transmission and coping with dwindling international funding. In response, queer movements in the country have diversified strategies, with a growing emphasis on the politics of care. Rather than relying solely on rights-based claims—often dismissed or weaponised by state and religious elites—local actors enact practices grounded in relational interdependence and mutual support. Initiatives such as the Waria Crisis Center in Yogyakarta demonstrate how community-led infrastructures provide shelter, social support, and everyday security for older trans women. This example reflects broader patterns across the country: pooling resources and attending to immediate community needs exemplifies an ethic of care that prioritises solidarity and responsiveness over formal organisational structures. These practices do more than shield communities from harm; they cultivate alternative modes of living and relating that do not depend on tropes of visibility, productivity, or institutional recognition. By creating mutual aid networks, safe spaces, and healing practices —across digital and physical spaces— as affective infrastructures that respond to the toll of persistent sociopolitical hostility on well-being and community life, queer activists in Indonesia enact a model of interdependent survival that enables collective flourishing amid deepening repression.
Dr Ferdiansyah Thajib is a senior lecturer at the elite master program “Standards of Decision-Making across Cultures” (SDAC), Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. Ferdi is also actively involved with KUNCI, a transdisciplinary research collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, which has been experimenting with ways of producing and sharing knowledge through collective study since its founding in 1999.
“Queer Feminist Authenticity in the Digital Age: Media, Identity, and Activism in Thailand”
This paper employs a media ethnography approach to examine how queer feminists in Thailand engage with media as a critical site for identity formation and collective authenticity, situating this process within the framework of the culture industry in the digital age. Drawing on my role as co-founder of Sapphic Pride, an LBQ+ women’s community in Chiang Mai, the study documents the legacy of queer feminist activism in Thailand and its advocacy for gender equality shifted from physical into digital spaces. Contemporary queer feminists in Thailand diverge from earlier generations in how they articulate authenticity through personal expression, identity construction, and media representation, all shaped by the pervasive influence of social media and its algorithmic structures. This paper analyzes the strategies employed by queer feminist collectives to represent feminist movements and explores how online communities embody and assert authentic queer feminist identities. It also considers their potential to challenge dominant liberal feminist ideologies that continue to shape mainstream narratives on gender and activism, while remaining informed by the historical trajectory of the Thai women’s movement. Generational differences are central to this analysis. Earlier queer feminists conceptualized authenticity through activism, solidarity, and lived experience rooted in historical struggles for rights and visibility. In contrast, younger feminists raised within digital ecosystems often define authenticity through self-expression and curated online identities shaped by algorithmic feedback loops of likes, comments, and hashtags. While these dynamics risk commodifying queer feminist identity into consumable frameworks, they also create transformative spaces for political and cultural negotiation. Ultimately, this paper argues that online queer feminist communities in Thailand navigate a complex tension between genuine self-expression and commercial interests. These dynamics highlight how authenticity, identity, and activism are continually reshaped by the digital culture industry and its influence on feminist movements.
Nattamon Saphaokham is a Ph.D. Candidate in Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Transmasculine health activism in Thailand: Resistance and Resilience through Fluidity”
Previous literature on Thai transmasculine communities typically operate within an identity-based framework that approaches “transgender” or other non-normative gender subjectivities as discrete, stable, and unchanging formations. However, my ethnographic fieldwork with a Thai grassroots transmasculine activist group demonstrates alternative modes of subject formation outside of an identity-based framework. I argue that my interlocutors draw on material fluids and metaphorical fluidity to formulate a collective transmasculine subjectivity to resist cisheteronormative infrastructures of health and healthcare in Thailand. Considering bodily fluids as an intellectual departure point, I examine how menstrual blood, sweat, and cross-sex hormones construct the gendered experience of my interlocutors. I argue that Thai transmasculine activists lean into the messy and generative potential of fluids in order to cultivate a broader coalition in their health advocacy efforts, subverting and queering conceptions of health that triage bodies into rigid and discrete identity categories. Diverging from past conceptualizations of fluids as contaminating, polluting, or dangerous, I argue that Thai transmasculine activists forge resistance and resilience through emphasizing the body’s permeability. Centering on these fluids enables a conceptualization of the body in change and in flux, allowing this transmasculine activist to illuminate shared health concerns in order to create a broader activist coalition in struggling for health equity. I point towards Thai transmasculine health activism and their emphasis on fluids and fluidity as a promising intervention in the struggle for queer and trans bodily autonomy and health equity.
Adrian Beyer is a Ph.D. Candidate in Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Mobilising Near and Afar: Post-Coup Activism Among Myanmar Diasporas”
Since the 2021 coup, the homeland activism of a section of the Myanmar diasporas—through protests, movements, and armed resistance—has become markedly more widespread, participatory, inclusive, and innovative than ever before (Banki 2024). Having migrated and permanently settled, or been resettled, abroad over decades prior to the coup, many Myanmar-origin diasporas were often formed or perceived along ethnic lines. In contrast, the post-coup diasporas are notably more pluralistic and united in their opposition to a common enemy: the Myanmar military. This unity in discourse and performance, however, does not imply that they constitute a homogenous group of long-distance nationalists (Anderson 2012). This article examines homeland-activist or long-distance nationalist Myanmar diasporas across the globe and proposes two approaches to unpacking and understanding them. The first is geographical or political-geographical, based on the degree of permanence in their current locations. While some communities have permanently resettled in geographically distant countries such as the US, UK, and Australia, others remain semipermanently or temporarily in places like Thailand and Singapore, closer to home. The second approach is sociological, drawing on Brubaker’s (2005, 13) framework of diasporic “stances, projects, claims, idioms, practices, and so on.” Using the lens of contentious politics theory, four post-coup diasporic stances or projects are identified—often overlapping and not mutually exclusive, yet analytically distinct: the Protester (direct action), the Mobiliser (strategic coordination), the Fundraiser (resource mobilisation), and the Framer (interpretive and emotional support). Nearly five years after the coup, at least the more politically active segments of the diasporas remain largely undaunted. Their resilience stems partly from dashed hopes following earlier political transitions in Myanmar, and partly from their mobilisation in support of armed resistance and humanitarian efforts within the country. The article concludes by examining whether these louder and more visibly activist diasporas have contributed to irresponsible radicalisation back home (Conversi 2012).
Dr Nyi Nyi Kyaw is a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol
References
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Kjaran, J.I. and Naeimi, M. 2022. Queer social movements and activism in Indonesia and Malaysia. Palgrave Macmillan.
Madhok, S. 2021. Vernacular rights cultures: the politics of origins, human rights and gendered struggles for justice. Cambridge University Press.
Peletz, M.G., 2012. Gender, sexuality, and the state in Southeast Asia. The Journal of Asian Studies, 71(4): 895-917.
Rodan, G., 2022. Civil society in Southeast Asia: Power struggles and political regimes. Cambridge University Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. 1990. Epistemology of the closet. University of California Press.
Tang, S. and Wijaya, H.J., 2023. Queer Southeast Asia: Itineraries, stopovers, and delays. In Queer Southeast Asia. Routledge, 1-14.
This workshop is funded by the LSE Global Research Fund and co-hosted by the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and LSE Department of Gender Studies.
*Banner photo by Raphael Renter | @raphi_rawr on Unsplash
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