Dr Chandra Shekhar Balachandran
The Indian Institute of Geographical Studies &
Chairman, The Dharani Trust,
Bangalore, India

His current efforts are to bring Geographical sensitivities to bear on HIV/AIDS prevention in India, promoting and building NGO capacities in the use of data as tools to reverse the progress of HIV, and popularizing Geography among the general public. He divides his time between Geography as a tool for research and outreach work, and Geographic pedagogy for schools.

Keynote Address Presentation

"Konjam jagaa vaangu, naainaa" * (Make some space, old chap):
Developing queer geographies in India

Abstract

Queer spatial productions in India have been increasingly visible especially in the past two decades. The many geographical parameters that shape India's queer spaces include urban/rural location, caste, class, gender, tradition, diasporic connections, and the increased visible global consumption patterns. The problematics of these spatial productions demand attention as the landscapes of desire, resistance to exclusion, fear, hope, and consumption find expression. The interconnections among the various modes of contemporary spatial productions present interesting and, in many ways, challenging patterns that indicate and reaffirm the Indian cultural spirit of making the 'other' one's own – a problematic process.

In this presentation, I will explore some empirical models of queer spatial productions that have been going on in India in recent times. What are the patterns of production, traversal, and sustenance of these queer spaces that have been increasingly visible of late? What do (and do not) we know about them? How have these queer geographies expanded or contracted? What role do the local, regional, national, and transnational flows of consumption play in the process of shaping these queer spaces? How does the increasing mobility of populations influence these? I will conclude with some questions that may be worth examining into this new century.

* A Tamil expression (stereo?)typical of the kind spoken in Madras (now Chennai)

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Rosanna Flamer-Caldera
Equal Ground
Colombo, Sri Lanka

Rosanna Flamer-Caldera was born in Sri Lanka and is from that country's Burgher community (of Dutch descent). After living in the USA for over 15 years, she returned to Sri Lanka and began activism in environmental conservation. Her focus shifted to LGBT activism when she joined a group of women interested in forming a lesbian organization in Colombo. Rosanna became a founding member of Sri Lanka's first LBT organization, and after working as the group's coordinator for several years established a new organization named EQUAL GROUND, the only mixed LGBTIQ organization in Sri Lanka. In the wake of the December 2004 tsunami tragedy, EQUAL GROUND sprang into action collecting "pink dollars" to assist with relief and rehabilitation in the affected areas of Sri Lanka.

Rosanna is currently Co-Secretary General of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) and Executive Director of EQUAL GROUND in Sri Lanka. ILGA is an international federation of LGBTIQ organizations that works with over 500 groups in over 80 countries and is committed to defending the human rights of all LGBTIQ persons across the globe. Rosanna was previously Female Representative of Asia to the ILGA Executive Board and was instrumental in organizing the first ever ILGA Asia Regional Conference in Mumbai in 2002. Rosanna has been invited to speak at many international events, including the First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies in Bangkok in 2005 and the Out Games Human Rights Conference in Montreal in July 2006. She is currently active in ILGA's accreditation process with ECOSOC and the UNHCR, two projects that have dominated LGBT agendas in the past 5 years.

Keynote Address Presentation

Sri Lanka in Crisis: The Escalating War and Its Fallout on the Sri Lankan LGBTIQ Community

Abstract

The civil war that has plagued the island nation of Sri Lanka for over 20 years resumed after a shaky four-year cease-fire ended in July 2006. On the North and East of the island hundreds are killed daily, while thousands flee from the fighting to areas that are considered safer. A major factor in this civil war that has killed thousands in the past 24 years is the emergence of homophobic intolerance and persecution from the Tamil and Muslim Militias that have sprung up in the aftermath of the war. Furthermore, the devastating Tsunami that hit this little island nation on 26th December 2004 killed thousands and rendered many more homeless, especially in the North and the East, areas already suffering from the civil war. The suffering people have endured, especially the much-maligned LGBTIQ community, is enormous. Sri Lanka is indeed in crisis. For the LGBTIQ people of these areas there seems to be no hope. In this talk I will speak on how the ongoing war and the result of years of violence and unrest have affected the communities in those areas and in areas where refugees fleeing the war have resettled. I will reflect on the stark realities of being LGBTIQ in countries such as Sri Lanka where one not only faces persecution because of antiquated laws prohibiting homosexual acts (for both men and women) but also confronts religious and cultural oppression and the violence of the ongoing civil war.

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Dr J. Neil C. Garcia
University of the Philippines
Diliman, Quezon City

J. Neil C. Garcia finished his BA Journalism (magna cum laude) at the University of Santo Tomas in 1990 and completed his PhD at the University of the Philippines in 2003. He currently teaches creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where he also serves as an associate for poetry in the Institute of Creative Writing. Neil is the author of numerous poetry collections and works in literary and cultural criticism, including: Our Lady of the Carnival (1996), The Sorrows of Water (2000), Kaluluwa (2001), Philippine Gay Culture: The Last Thirty Years (1996), Slip/pages: Essays in Philippine Gay Criticism (1998), Performing the Self: Occasional Prose (2003), The Garden of Wordlessness (2005), and Misterios and Other Poems (2005). His latest critical work, Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics: Essays and Critiques, is a revised version of his PhD dissertation in English Studies: Creative Writing. He is currently working on a full-length book, a postcolonial survey and analysis of Philippine poetry in English.

Keynote Address Presentation

Philippine Gay Culture: An Update and A Postcolonial Autocritique

Abstract

A decade has passed since the publication of my historical survey and analytic study of the discursive self-expressions and social ascriptions that constituted significant aspects of urban gay (bakla and "male homosexual") culture in metropolitan Manila from the 1960s to the 90s. In the meantime, exigencies of the real and theoretical sort have forced me to revisit and reconsider some of the basic assumptions, concepts, and allegiances of this work, even as they have also affirmed and validated my faith in others, particularly the chiefly deconstructionist procedure of its decidedly oppositional thrust.

In this paper, I wish to bring the concerns of this project to the immediate present, primarily by providing an updated empirical survey of events that have since then continued to animate and impinge on the lived dailiness of Filipino gays. Perhaps it is inevitable that with the heightened sexualization of urban consciousness in the Philippines—courtesy of, among other things, the unstoppable march of cultural and economic globalization, the massive revolutions in information technology, and the local resistance to these various and related processes—such events would need to take on an increasingly "national" character (and indeed, as my paper will try to show, in the case of the Philippines, they have).

The renewed importance of the national level of culture in the lives of Filipino sexual minorities provides me with the perfect opportunity to perform a postcolonial critique of Filipino discourses of nationalism, but still from a self-reflexive and politically "gay perspective." Examining the contact zones between postcolonial and antihomophobic (which I still prefer over the contentious "queer") theories, I will attempt in my paper to resituate the interests and questions of my work within the frame of imperialism and the anticolonial (nowadays, postcolonial) resistance to it. This project will argue that, as in other places in the Third World (in which the nation continues to possess enormous political force that inspires devotion and is still seen as the most potent and poignant battle cry for anticolonial resistance), nationalism in the Philippines isn't a unified discourse, but rather fundamentally riven between its arguably modern project of emancipating all its diverse members, and the nativist reaffirmation of communitarian—and thus imaginary—customs, practices, and identities.

To be more specific, I will argue that antihomophobic discourse in the Philippines needs to be cognizant of the postcolonial and specifically nationalist contradictions within which it exists. To the degree that projects of this sort seek to locate themselves in a national space, then they cannot help but tap into and "implicate" nationalism. As such, they must be held accountable for nationalism's likely "excesses": that while purporting to speak for the collective, it is in fact produced and championed by the elite class, whose interests it serves; that it is itself an offshoot of imperialism, against which it emerged as a response, and on which it relies in order to conceptually exist; that it is an "Orientalism in reverse," inasmuch as its struggle to recuperate a lost precolonial identity is in fact premised upon the struggle for independence, and thus is underwritten by a desire to be affirmed and acknowledged by the colonizer, whose imprimatur it seeks; and finally, that it constructs a bourgeois (and heteronormative) narrative of anticolonial resistance, and in doing so suppresses alternative narratives from subalterns who were the earliest to resist imperialist annexation. Clearly, insofar as the discourse of homosexuality itself is a colonial endowment (and a postcolonial appropriation) that has tended to settle in wealthier, more Westernized nooks in any colonized country, antihomophobic discourse—a discourse that is typically spoken in the registers and languages of colonization—can likewise be readily critiqued for comparable forms of such "excesses."

On the other hand, the postcolonial imperative does encourage a rethinking of theories and methodologies, as well. Performing an autocritique of my own work, I will argue that an over-reliance on Western postmodern theory, while initially enabling of both the postcolonial and antihomophobic positions in the West, need not be the situation everywhere else. The incongruence between these locations is clear. After all, in the West, postmodernism decenters liberal humanism's individual subject, while in the non-West postcolonial discourses (chief of which is nationalism) affirms an alienated subjectivity—an identity that postmodernism inevitably precludes. We can, I believe, rightfully insist that postmodernism, a highly elitist and "parochial" development in relation to the rest of the world, need not be seen as the standard for all kinds of theorizing. Like other postcolonial critics, I will therefore argue that while oppositional intellectuals in the non-West (or to be more specific the global South) must avoid all forms of essentialism (except perhaps only in the most unavoidable and strategic of situations), they must nevertheless seek to negotiate their way between the essentialist and constructionist positions by looking for traces of split, hybridized, syncretic, double (or even multiple) consciousness in their own non-Western traditions, and for "antecendents" to poststructuralist theories in their own national texts.

This way, we can see how the antihomophobic, postcolonial position in fact shuttles imaginatively and "theoretically" between both the colonizing and the colonized cultures. This kind of complicated project situates Western theory within the history of Euroamerican imperialism. Nonetheless, unlike merely cultural or nativist nationalism, this project does not merely reverse colonialist binaries. It also acknowledges—even as it critiques—the relevance of European postmodern theory in relation to the question of colonial and postcolonial identity.

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Professor David Halperin
W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Visiting Professor to the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building, UTS

Dr David M. Halperin is the W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he teaches English, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature. A classicist by training, his early publications were on Hellenistic Greek poetics and ancient Greek philosophy. He went on to contribute to the growth of lesbian/gay studies and queer theory, founding and editing (with Carolyn Dinshaw) GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies from 1991 to 2005, editing The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (with Henry Abelove and Michele Aina Barale) in 1993, and publishing One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), Saint Foucault (1995), and How to Do the History of Homosexuality (2002). A new collection, edited with Valerie Traub, entitled Gay Shame , is forthcoming in 2007, as well as a short book, Sex at Risk , from which his paper at "Queer Space" is drawn. He is currently at work on a study of male homosexuality as a cultural practice.

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Dr Dédé Oetomo
Founder and Trustee, GAYa NUSANTARA Foundation;
Special Reader, Postgraduate Program, University of Surabaya, Indonesia

Dédé Oetomo finished his PhD in linguistics and Southeast Asian studies at Cornell University in 1984. In March 1982, he helped found Indonesia's first homosexual organization, Lambda Indonesia (1982-1986). He is also co-founder (1987) and a member of the board of trustees of GAYa NUSANTARA Foundation (www.gayanusantara.org), an organization originally working for the sexual health of gay men, transgenders, and male sex workers, based in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. Early in 2004, the organization expanded its mandate into research, education, public awareness, advocacy, networking, and provision of services in the area of gender, sexuality, and sexual health and well-being. Dédé is also active in the Asia/Pacific Rainbow network of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex/indigenous, and queer (LGBTIQ+) organizations. In 1998, he received the Felipa de Souza Award from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and in 2001 the Utopia Award for Pioneering Gay Work in Asia. Academically, he is a Special Reader at the Postgraduate Program of the University of Surabaya in Indonesia. He has been active in Indonesia's pro-democracy movement since his student days.

Keynote Address Presentation

Navigating Media, Health and Human Rights: Gay, Other MSM and Waria in Contemporary Indonesian Society

Abstract

The presentation will look into developments in media presence and coverage; STI, HIV and AIDS programs; and human rights and democratization programs and how they are impacting gay, other MSM and waria (M-t-F transgenders) in Indonesian society after the change of governments in 1998. It will carefully consider explicit intentions and hidden agendas of different players and whether these are really changing the lives of gay, other MSM and waria for the better or not. Special attention will be paid to the continuing heterosexism as well as sporadic (?) instances of political (but not social) homophobia. Questions will be raised in connection with visibility and inclusion of gay, other MSM and waria in the various social phenomena, including especially issues of direct or indirect involvement.

Shih-Hue Tu
Taipei National University of the Arts
Taipei, Taiwan

Shih-Hue Tu received her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College (New York) in 1997. In 1998 she returned to Taiwan to continue her theatre career, where she is a writer, director, producer, and performer. In 2004, she worked with Spilt Britches in the Taiwan Women Festival and wrote and performed in a lesbian play. She was awarded the British Council Arts Scholarship of 2001, and the 2004 International Artist-in-Residence in Australia organized by Taipei Artist Village. Her first text collection, "A Breakfast for One", was published in 2002 and "A Voyage to the Island ~ A Solo Operetta" was published and produced in 2003. She is one of the commissioners of Gu-Ling St. Avant-Garde Theatre in Taipei as well as an instructor at the Theatre Dept. of Taipei National University of the Arts.

Keynote Address Presentation

The Importance of Being Vague
Created and Performed by Shih-Hue Tu (Taiwan)

Abstract

Abstract

In Taiwan, there are three stereotypical definitions for lesbians. "T" meaning butch, "Po" for femmes, and "Bu-Fen" translated neutral. The two words "Bu-Fen", taken separately also have their own meaning; "Bu" means No, "Fen" means Separation. So "Bu-Fen" also means "no separation". A "Bu-Fen" is dangerous because you can’t assign sexuality from their appearance. Lesbians see "Bu-Fen" as bisexuals; untrustworthy lovers open to too many possibilities. "Bu-Fens" are also fortunate because they are safe in the working environment, especially a conservative one – their protection is their appearance. This presentation is a monologue about a Bu-Fen girl’s observations about life in Taiwan as well as her thoughts on queer love life.