Queer Imaginings and Traveling of “Family” Across Asia

Abstract

This chapter engages with the theme of migration and journeying in what may come across as slightly unconventional. I am not primarily concerned with the actual physical movement of individuals across national and cultural borders. Rather, I focus on the transborder travelings of ideas, imaginings, discourses across what Arjun Appadurai in his much-cited theorization of globalization refers to as “scapes” of ideas, imaginings, and discourses. The term, as Appadurai explained in his original discussion, “allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes [of globalization]” (1990, 296). Moreover, rather than being rigidly defined, these scapes are “deeply perspectival constructs” (296). In his analysis, Appadurai was concerned specifically with the five scapes of techo-, finance-, ethno-, idea-, and media-scapes. In this chapter, I am specifically concerned with the last two, as well as what I term “emotion-scapes” (Dasgupta 2011) in relation to imaginings of notions of family and kinship, and the ways in which they traverse borders and scapes, both globally but more specifically in the context of Asia.¹