On the back of hosting a Queer People of Colour Leadership and Social Change meeting at the Melbourne City Library last Saturday (3rd Nov 2012), a small group of us, comprising:
Shinen (myself)
Miyuki
Tim
Fei
and Jacqui
brainstormed creating a blog as a platform to share ideas and create community here in Melbourne. Tim has since created this lovely prototype of a blog, the Melbourne Colouring Book...
The truth from me, is that our first meeting was majority of Asian descent, and there is a certain disingenuity that I feel in myself in being able to represent all people of colour in the context of this space. Tim has wisely, thus, carved out this honest space to explore the specificity of Queer Asian subjectivities here in Melbourne, with my added shared intention of being open to exploring broader themes that concern other queer people of colour...
About Me:
Ok, in general, I'm not as smarmy in real life as this picture may suggest, but my self-concept is that I'm camera-shy, and have few other good pics of myself to share at the moment (that... you know... aren't all meticulously crafted for a gay personals site).
My name is Shinen.
I have a blog that I co-write with my older brother, called Psychonaut Erotica, where we explore a range of issues, all in the theme of "transforming postmodern malaise through meditative inquiry".
I was born in Malaysia in 1984, and am ethnically Hakka, Hokkien, Cantonese, and Peranakan in my heritage (though, I suppose if we want to go far enough back, chances are there's some Mongolian-Chinese border stuff going on). When I was 3, I moved to Singapore, where I was raised in an English-speaking family, going to English-speaking schools, and feeling resentful about being taught Mandarin from textbooks that emphasised heteronormative Confucian values.
(incidentally, it was in one of these schools, an all-boys Methodist school, that I first met Tim, who posts here as Bubbler)...
I lived in Singapore until I was 18, after which I went to Dartmouth College, in rural New Hampshire, USA, for University, where I studied Gender Studies and Comparative Religion (among many other interdisciplinary things... such is the nature of a liberal arts degree).
I graduated in 2007 and moved to San Francisco, where I began my more professional forays into the world of health promotion and non-profit industrial complex-ities. More on that in later posts, likely...
I moved to Melbourne in June 2008, because I couldn't get a work permit to stay in the USA continuing my work around condom-reinforcement based sexual health work for Asian gay men... From San Francisco summer to Melbourne winter.
MAJOR Sad Face.
In October 2008, I moved to Sydney, where I began writing for Fridae.com (now Fridae.asia), graduated from University of Sydney with a postgraduate degree in Buddhist Studies, and followed all that up with 3 years of additional work experience in sexual health promotion for young gay men.
Along with my wonderful colleagues Min & Kevin, I co-edited A-MEN magazine, which was funded as an HIV and sexual health promotion magazine for Asian Gay Men... You can view a copy of it here:
I moved back to Melbourne in March 2012 to start afresh and explore some new directions.
....
This autobiographical post is a chronologically-orderly narrative about my journey til this "now" moment, and has mostly explored the What-Happened of my life... In future posts, I would like to be more specific about my intentions around generating some discourse and dialogue around Queer Asian-ness in Melbourne and Australia at large, while making room more broadly for the inclusion of narratives, ideas, and explorations about queer people of colour, with other like-minded bloggers.
No comments:
Post a Comment