Networking Asia Pacific: queer film festivals and the spatiotemporal politics of inter-referencing
Jia TAN
ABSTRACT Expanding on the critique of Euro-America-centrism in knowledge production, this article examines three spatiotemporal hierarchies through the inter-referencing practices of Asia Pacific Queer Film Festival Alliance. First, through the analysis of the documentary short Lady Eva and its circulation, I look at how the network opens up the issue of Pacific indigeneity in the transpacific context, which has the potential to unsettle the existing epistemic structures that rest upon the binary of West/non-West or white/Indigenous. Second, I investigate how the queer film festival alliance serves as sites for the articulation of queer rights, which sometimes cast a progressivist temporal narrative based on a hierarchical arrangement of geographical places. Third, through the case of ShanghaiPRIDE Film Festival, I examine how anti-institutionalism in film festival organizing offers a critique of gay-male dominated queer film festivals and the capitalist developmental logic that emphasizes profit and financial viability. By doing so, I scrutinize how the spatiotemporal hierarchies embedded in the film festival network complicate the understanding of inter-referencing as citation, collaboration, and competition. At the same time, I use inter-referencing to further the discussion of spatial politics in film festival studies by highlighting the spatiotemporal hierarchies.
KEYWORDS: Film festival; queer; Asia; Pacific; inter-referencing; network; rights
Notes on contributor
Jia TAN is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her doctoral degree in critical studies of cinema and television from the University of Southern California. Her articles on digital media, feminism, queer culture, and documentary have appeared in Crime, Media, Culture; Critical Studies in Media Communication; GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; and Journal of Chinese Cinemas.