In Focus Introduction: Queering Asian Media

Abstract

It has been nearly a decade since the publication of Cinema Journal’s 2014 In Focus dossier on “Queer Approaches to Film, Television, and Digital Media.”1 The dossier powerfully demonstrated an essential scholarly refocus from “a US-based politics of ‘coming out’” to more diverse queer deconstructions, non -confrontational queer practices, negotiative queer productions in media and cultural studies.2 This shift was largely inspired by the late queer media scholar Alexander Doty’s “contra-straight” theorization of the seemingly heteronormative mainstream media text and context.3 Following this model, in combination with Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, recent scholarship has understood queer as not only minority identities but also disruptive positions, sentiments, styles, and practices that productively reorient normative imaginations, regulations, and sociopolitical identities in global media studies.4 In par-