DIVA collection of essays on the uses of new media in the formation of East Asian and Pacific queer identities./div

Mobile Cultures provides much-needed, empirically grounded studies of the connections between new media technologies, the globalization of sexual cultures, and the rise of queer Asia. The availability and use of new media—fax machines, mobile phones, the Internet, electronic message boards, pagers, and global television—have grown exponentially in Asia over the past decade. This explosion of information technology has sparked a revolution, transforming lives and lifestyles, enabling the creation of communities and the expression of sexual identities in a region notorious for the regulation of both information and sexual conduct. Whether looking at the hanging of toy cartoon characters like “Hello Kitty” from mobile phones to signify queer identity in Japan or at the development of queer identities in Indonesia or Singapore, the essays collected here emphasize the enormous variance in the appeal and uses of new media from one locale to another. Scholars, artists, and activists from a range of countries, the contributors chronicle the different ways new media galvanize Asian queer communities in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and around the world. They consider phenomena such as the uses of the Internet among gay, lesbian, or queer individuals in Taiwan and South Korea; the international popularization of Japanese queer pop culture products such as Yaoi manga; and a Thai website’s reading of a scientific tract on gay genetics in light of Buddhist beliefs. Essays also explore the politically subversive possibilities opened up by the proliferation of media technologies, examining, for instance, the use of Cyberjaya—Malaysia’s government-backed online portal—to form online communities in the face of strict antigay laws. Contributors. Chris Berry, Tom Boellstorff, Larissa Hjorth, Katrien Jacobs, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Mark McLelland, David Mullaly, Baden Offord, Sandip Roy, Veruska Sabucco, Audrey Yue

What do we really know about mobile phone culture? This provocative and comprehensive collection explores the cultural and media dimensions of mobile phones around the world. An international team of contributors look at how mobiles have been imagined through advertising and social representations - tracing the scripting and shaping of the technology through gender, sexuality, religion, communication style - and explore the locations of mobile phone culture in modernity, urban settings and even transnational families. This book also provides a guide to convergent mobile phone culture, with fresh, innovative accounts of text messaging, Blackberry, camera phones, moblogging and mobile adventures in television. Mobile Phone Culture opens up important new perspectives on how we understand this intimate yet public cultural technology. Previously published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.

How mobile communications in Japan became a pervasively personal tool that connects families and friends, creating "always-on" social engagement.

Taking the plane or sending an e-mail: globalization has become part of the fabric of our daily lives. And yet it is often seen as an impersonal force that is threatening to destroy identities and undermine nation-states. In this major new book, Jean-Franois Bayart offers a radically new account of globalization which challenges the way it is interpreted both by neo-liberals and by the anti-globalization movement. Bayart argues that globalization is something that we ourselves have created, and the nation-state is actually a product, and not of a victim, of this process. Far from being synonymous with alienation and social disintegration, globalization establishes transnational solidarities and networks which overlap with nation-states without necessarily undermining them. Globalization has also refashioned sexual identities, transforming, through the representation of female and male bodies in the media, in advertising and in the Internet, the way individuals in different parts of the world have learnt to recognize themselves as sexual subjects. It has created new cultures of consumption which stimulate new desires, new techniques and technologies of the body and new forms of tension and conflict. Drawing on Foucaults notions of governmentality and subjectivation, Bayart develops a rich and illuminating account of how the social relations constitutive of globalization produce new forms of subjectivity, new lifestyles and new moral subjects, from the colonisers and colonised subjects of nineteenth-century India and Africa to the spread of new kinds of transnational and ethnicized subjectivities and lifestyles today. Spanning two centuries and drawing on his deep knowledge of Africa and the Middle East, Bayart shows that, if globalization is our handiwork, its development and thus our history will be decided on the contested terrains where new ways of life, new modes of consumption and new types of struggle are being invented.

This new volume in the Studies in International Performance series looks at feminism's engagement with and relationship to global change. The contributors attempt to develop a global scholarly dialogue by using examples from a range of countries (Israel, Japan, Korea, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Italy) as well as more familiar perspectives from the US and UK. The book aims to show a variety of performance practices which are considered to be 'feminist' from a large number of representative countries and locales.