Queer ‘East Asia’ as an assemblage of power, alterity, and postcolonial affect: an action note

This paper looks at how queer politics emerge in East Asia, a context where globalised LGBT rights discourse and activism has provoked state-sponsored queerphobia. This paper applies Deleuzian assemblage theory to analysing the way in which the global, national, public, and private dimensions of queer East Asia are interrelated and co-contribute to nationalist paranoia and queer schizophrenia. Drawing on the field notes concerning activists’ ambivalence towards international human rights agenda, queer ‘East Asia’ consists of a coalition assembling pow-er/powerlessness, nationalist-ego and queer alterity, and postcolonial affect regarding the globalisation/localisation of sexuality politics. Such an assemblage consists of many informal connections between activists and the queer communities they represent, as well as how they, discretely yet unitedly, respond to the high politics between states dominating their bodies, desires and lives. Nevertheless, such a coalition may however be-come the engine for other kinds of social justice movements against nationalism-based discrimination.