i gave a talk at nyu's cinema studies student conference the other day about archiving queer fandoms from my own context. they're releasing documentation of the panels after the event is over -- mine will be an audio recording -- i'll link it here once i receive more info!

here's a PDF to my slides, and below is the presentation transcript:

Presentation Title:
Online Archives for Queer Emancipation (i changed my title last minute lol)

Survival in an Era of “Post”: Archiving Queer Histories Online

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[Slide 1]

Hello everyone, before I begin, I ask that there be no video/photographs be taken of me throughout this panel event. Thank you for your cooperation.

[Slide 2]

My name is Hua Chai, I use they/them/he/him pronouns, and I'm an MFA Media Arts student from UCLA. I also work closely with the UCLA Game Lab for public event programming as well as for my own artistic research in experimental games and websites for archival practice.

Today, I'd like to talk about the practice of archiving queer histories on the Internet as a means of surviving in an era of "post."

[Slide 3]

Here, I use the word "post" to refer to the postcolonial context I am coming from. By "post-colonial", I do not mean "after colonialism", for that would imply that we still do not live under its continued impacts, even after a nation's so-called political independence. I use the word "postcolonial" to describe a critical response to colonialism and its legacies, what it means to make work in this context, and thinking about collective survival, given that one cannot be so easily removed from this part of history. As Zedeck Siew best put it in his Author's note in Lorn Song of the Bachelor, "any text inspired by Southeast Asia has to reckon with colonialism. It is too much a feature of the region to ignore." To make any work about colonialism is to present a difficult situation; there are no easy solutions.

[Slide 4]

Section 377, for example, is inherited by and still implemented in many former British colonies as a law that criminalises homosexuality, regardless of whether consent is involved. Singapore has only recently repealed this law last year, but its conservative government remains insistent on maintaining the heterosexual definitions of marriage and families, as well as their position on other policies related to housing, education, media restrictions and so on. The symbol of postcolonial independence falters in this sense.

[Slide 5]

I also refer to the word "post" in terms of its multiple associations with the Internet. A post is a mode of sharing information on websites such as blogs and social media platforms. As a means of creative expression, it represents the power to create and distribute culture across space and time. Posting also entails the act of negotiating visibility and privacy, which requires a mode of criticality that specifically responds to the Internet's design. In other words, a post-Internet criticality.

I grew up in Malaysia and Singapore, where queerness is still taboo at best and a prosecutable crime at worst. It was only until I entered fandom circles on Tumblr when I encountered the notion of queerness for the first time. This was also the first time I could live as a queer person, albeit only online. I share this experience with other queer friends who are from a similar generation, some of which I went to school with, others I met online or later in life. Despite the fact that we were raised in Malaysia or Singapore, it was through international media and fandoms from other countries that we learned about what and who queer peoples were. And these eventually became our shared context for queer expression.

I say international, but much of my ideas of queerness were heavily contextualised in Euro-American media culture. My queer vocabulary is primarily defined by the LGBTQIA+ acronym and other English-derived identity labels, which I found poorly translated into my mother tongue or context. Japanese anime and Boys Love genres also had a significant role in my understanding of queer media, but terms like "yaoi" and "fujoshi" came with derogatory connotations in Western Internet circles for being fetishistic or problematic -- a result of Anglocentrism dictating what good or bad "queer representation" was, if not a limited understanding of what these non-Western subculture genres had to offer. Even then, I was still an outsider to either of these contexts. They were less a direct action or prescription to my own circumstances than a fantastical escape from them, the circumstances being the post-colonial elite's incessant efforts to clamp down on any sort of queer culture, whether it came from outside and within.

[Slide 6]

The censorship of openly queer Western films fed into their rhetoric of "protecting their own peoples from Western influences", in that queerness was mistakenly believed to be a Western import. This was happening alongside other local prosecutions of queer peoples, including raiding private events at queer spaces, publicly punishing those involved in consensual same-sex activities, dispatching cybertroops on social media to harass queer peoples, and denying queer peoples' rights to basic material needs or even the very right to exist as they are. This state-enforced amnesia upon the public ultimately creates the illusion that queerness has never belonged in our so-called "traditional Asian values," despite much evidence proving otherwise.

[Slide 7]

I was curious to learn what it was about fandoms and Internet spaces that afforded this freedom to engage with queer cultures and queer creativity, in spite of the hostility of state infrastructure. At the time I was conducting this research, Chaoyang Trap recently released this article on how fanfiction writers based in China invented new strategies to share their works after what is termed the post-AO3 ban era in 2020. After losing a social platform so important to their community, people resorted to alternative communication methods that could somehow get past the scrutiny of surveillance algorithms. These included "meal replacements" that used photos of cute animals to represent their couple pairings in acts of intimacy, image filters overlaying screenshots of their fanfiction, as well as encoding text into jargon such as animal sounds.

[Slide 8]

While this article was specifically based in China, I also observed stealth strategies being used by BL fan artists in local art events. Comic Fiesta, an annual comic festival in Kuala Lumpur, has set restrictions on what registered artist booths can sell during the event. Despite disallowing the sale of explicit or socially offensive material, local creatives have continued to exchange fan-made merchandise of their queer pairings through subtle visuals or doing unofficial "free art trades" at events. This practice is so prevalent that I'm inclined to believe there's also an element of "don't ask don't tell" among the organisers of these events that facilitates this grey area, where BL artists can negotiate with these restrictions and see how far they can get away with their queer creativity without getting caught.

This was what Dr. Khursten Santos was describing in her research of BL fandoms in the Philippines, in that the boundaries of queer expression is "heavily negotiated within religiously conservative spaces." BL fans have developed their own insider language, which is often defined by "ample visual cues" in place of something more explicitly queer, so that they can enjoy BL without the fear of catching the scrutiny of conservative authorities or the general public.

I believe these strategies parallel those deployed in the online setting, where people would add slashes or asterisks to words that would otherwise trigger censorship mechanisms or attract unwanted attention.

[Slide 9]

I was also thinking about how queer communities gathered on the Internet during the pandemic, when many in-person spaces were shut down. In 2021, Singapore's equivalent of a pride parade, Pink Dot, was held remotely. Usually, in a physical setting, there would be a "light up" event where participants would huddle together and turn on flashlights in unison as a celebratory or symbolic gesture of support for the local queer community. In the remote setting, however, the light up event was replaced by an interactive map where anyone could submit messages anonymously and pin them onto any location on the map of Singapore. I imagine that this was inspired by an existing website called queeringthemap.com.

[Slide 10]

This anonymity and accessibility meant that more people could participate without exposing their own identities, which also made it possible for non-citizens to join the event. This was significant in that those who were not citizens nor permanent residents were barred from participating in any physical demonstrations in the country. At the causeway that connects the borders of Malaysia and Singapore, you will notice that some people from Malaysia have pinned their messages of solidarity, which was really nice to see.

[Slide 11]

When thinking about how to approach the practice of archiving, I was looking to the work of Zoyander Street, particularly their ethnographic video game projects like Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan, and the writing they've done on historical practice. In Queer Games Studies, Zoyander wrote that queer game history should not just be about the subject matter of research, but also being critical about its practice. This meant re-evaluating traditional historical practices primarily canonised by old white men, abandoning the notion of the expert as intellectual authority and abandoning knowledge all at once. It also meant capturing history authentically in all its complexity, instead of trying to rationalise or narrativise it into something that fits the status quo.

It was through encountering Zoyander's work that I gained the confidence to try my hand at artistic research despite not being formerly practiced in the humanities. I was inspired to make queer archives from my own context with the creative coding tools I picked up in school, which led to the creation of s/f/wonderland.

[Slide 12]

However, I recently returned to their writing again, after creating this project and sharing it with the world, and found myself struggling to resolve the distance between what was practiced and what was preached. I will delve into those in further detail as I introduce this project, but broadly speaking, this struggle was mostly because I couldn't fully resolve the nuanced implications that visibility entails. At the end of the day, while I am grateful for all the support I've received in the process of making it, and I don't regret making it the way I did, I came out of the project frustrated, and you will see why in a bit.

I wish this was a presentation to celebrate the project, but it's not all sparkles and rainbows, despite what you see on the home page.

[Slide 13]

s/f/wønderland is a project that tries to be many things.

one: s/f/wønderland is a labyrinth. the player enters the website and tries to navigate through its pages and descriptions to figure out what they're looking at, or what to expect. they begin their journey at the home page which contains a brief introduction and some instructions to start with.

two: s/f/wønderland is a research project. they see an extensively written about page with contextual information and visual documentation.

three: s/f/wønderland is a participatory project. they see a submit page which they can presumably find a use for;

four: s/f/wønderland is a visual library. they see a gallery page that features a wall of those who have successfully created and submitted something.

five: s/f/wønderland is a quest. their first challenge is to find the play button, which will direct them to this so-called "web based painting software" that's been documented all over the home page.

six: s/f/wønderland is a creative tool. upon finding the play button, players enter an audio-visual creative space reminiscent of old painting software like KidPix and MacPaint. their canvas is on the right half of the screen. what lies on the left half of the screen, however, was hardly mentioned nor addressed on the home page.

seven: s/f/wønderland is an interactive installation. players start with a template that centres a body-like form that matches the hollow silhouette of the pixelated film still on the left. an article with censored phrases overlays the pixelated image. something about Malaysia or Singapore, something about religious authority, something about behaviours contrary to normal human life. every stroke of paint on the right is transposed on the left, making an already illegible panel all the more illegible. Once the player lifts the digital brush, the article's text fades back in. The cycle repeats.

The player can only save what is on the right-half of the screen, and can choose to share their work with me via the submit page.

[Slide 14]

This work can be experienced on a single desktop, but it was also designed to be experienced in a multi-display layout. The left half of the screen would be projected behind the player, as they interact with the right half of the screen on their private monitor display. The audio is only experienced by the player alone, and not to the public.

[Slide 15]

s/f/wønderland was a struggle in terms of negotiating how visible these personal histories should be. On the one hand, I hoped to design this archive in a more openly accessible way, to be more generous with histories that have been silenced and dismissed for so long. On the other hand, I felt the obligation to safeguard this space from bad actors who seek this knowledge for ill intentions. s/f/wønderland ended up being hidden under layers and layers of obscurity, self-censored to the point of abstraction. As an archive I think this is something that I wish were different, but as a project about censorship and surveillance, I think its fate was almost inevitable.

there is also the question of my positionality as an artistic researcher. I was creating this project as part of my undergrad senior show in UCLA, where I only knew of one other queer person from my home context who would encounter this work. so what was the point of being generous? sure, the archive lives on the internet and is about the internet, but I was creating it at a physical distance from my home context - it is both a source of safety and also in some ways a form of complicity in extractive practices, even if it does come from a personal place. I think of the age-old paradox of privilege that I hear time and time again from Malaysian discourse -- it is a privilege to be able to leave the country, but it is also a privilege to be able to stay. I felt the need to leave the country in order to feel safe enough to create and share the work I wanted to make, and to exist as who I am. I had to first secure the safety of invisibility in order to feel safe enough to be visible on my own terms, but the resulting price to pay was huge, both financially and socially. I don't know what to make of my praxis. I can only come to terms with my artistic research as a personal practice that needs to be done for me to feel sane. I am still frustrated with this work, and the context I am working with. I'm sad to say I don't have any answers to this frustration.

[Slide 16]

I'd like to end off with this manifesto I've written more recently, which encapsulates the queer rage I've been feeling as of late.

[Play QUEER DEGENERATES 4EVER: A FUCKING MAD MANIFESTO]

[Slide 17]

Thank you.

[Slide 18: References]

• Lorn Song of the Bachelor – Written by Zedeck Siew, Illustrated by Nadhir Nor. Zedeck talks about his Author’s Note in this tweet thread.
• Screenshot of Section 377 came from this article: T-VINE. LGBT+ History Month: The legacy of British ‘anti-sodomy’ laws in Cyprus.
• Linking every Tumblr post would make this reference list very, very long. All images on that one slide are linked to the original post.
• Mashable - Under 21 in Singapore? You can't see 'Love, Simon' in cinemas.
• The Vibes – Malaysia to ban more LGBT movies.
• Chaoyang Trap - S02 Episode 8: Jokerfied on Literary Pornhub
• Comic Fiesta 2022 Booth Rules (Note: There is a slight discrepancy in time, in that the fanart works by nieniekoto and pastachyan which I referenced in my slides participated in Comic Fiesta 2019, though it’s unlikely that the regulations have notably changed much within that timespan.)
• Love Lives Here – interactive map for Pink Dot 2021’s light up event. Possibly inspired by queeringthemap.com .
• Dr. Khursten Santos discusses her research in BL fandoms in the Philippines in this virtual panel event: [EP14] Boys' Love: The History and Transformation of BL in Asia – The Japan Foundation, New York
• Zoyander Street’s Interactive Portraits: Trans People in Japan, and their chapter in Queer Games Studies, Queering Games History: Complexities, Chaos, and Community.
• s/f/wønderland
• QUEER DEGENERATES 4EVER: A FUCKING MAD MANIFESTO

[End of Presentation]