Queer southeast asia: An afterword

Queer Southeast Asia, Tang and Wijaya note, is for the moment a theoretical puzzle – a puzzle that doesn't so much need solving as productively unpacking and exploiting. Written substantively during the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the authors drew on ‘collaborative instincts and affective relationality' to drive the book forward. Distanced intimacies and camaraderie were, it seems, pretty common threads holding together many collaborative projects undertaken during COVID-19 lockdowns. Place is part of that connection, and for postcolonial migrant scholars seeking to destabilise the vestiges of Area studies, it's a lot of hard yakka to feel and be seen as a part of place. A powerful residue this book leaves is of a sense of flux, uncertainty and precarity. So much of queer scholarship, built as it is on radical feminism, postmodernism and decolonial studies, is focused, with good reason, on dismantling hierarchies of knowledge. Metaphorically life is enabled to escape from defined parameters and sealed containers.