Visualizing the Invisible: Social Constructions of Straight Identified Men Who Have Sex With Transsexuals and Feminized Gay Men On/Off Malaysian Film

Abstract

Our introduction is to a panel that considers two films, The Tale and Leaving Neverland. Both films feature adult protagonists reclaiming memories of their disavowed childhood sexual abuse, and both were released amid #MeToo and a proliferation of other films, TV shows, and memoirs depicting seduction trauma in the context of a family romance plotline. Together, they suggest features of a universally taboo story (of childhood sexual abuse), compounded by psychoanalysis's primal taboo: incestuous desire. It is argued that though psychoanalysis recognizes the reality of sexual abuse, it nonetheless seems to discount, as did Freud, its ubiquity, and, too, may leave underexplored the incidence of pedophiliac fantasy. Further, and ironically in light of psychoanalysis's history, it underestimates the survivor's investment in her romantic fantasy, and its identification itself with her aggressor's "grooming," as a force that denies the real of her trauma. Both films depict the ongoing therapeutic action of après-coup, in the quest to (re) tell truth between memory-desire, omnipotence-agency, truth-fiction, and reparation-(imaginative) apology.Grappling with how to explain his turn to the contradictory form of the autobiographical novel to make sense of his life, which would mean to lay bare his trauma, the author Alexander Chee (2018, p. 212) writes, "Plot was also a way of facing what I couldn't or wouldn't remember . . . I would need a way to descend [into the past] and return safely. Turning myself into a character, inventing a plot, turning that past into fiction, I hoped, could solve for all of this." Chee's comments find resonance with what would seem the ironic choice made by Jennifer Fox, a documentarian, who turned to feature film to tell a fictionalized account of real events. That film, The Tale, is based upon an unnamed tale she'd written at age 13, described as a love story, but that harbors within it a story of sexual abuse, and links, through its title, to timeless fairy tales. As critic Rachel Syme (2018) observes, "The fictional translation allows Fox to control her very delicate story, but also to explore the gaps within; she never attempts to fill the lacunae where things make sense with evidence or with justification."What's more, Fox doesn't only turn to fiction to tell her story, she-through a voiceover of the protagonist, who shares the director's name, breaking the fourth wall-tells the viewer that the story they are about to see "is true (pause) as far as I know." By means of this directorial sleight of hand, or of reality, a parallel process between Fox's experience and that of the viewer is set in motion. The viewer, as was Fox, is drawn into questioning what is real and what they imagine, into deciphering ambiguities and gaps between historical and psychic reality, and into memory's messy malleability and the way in which it subverts narrative coherence and agential sovereignty.

‘Our Online-Ness Matters’: The Construction of Social Media Presences by Malaysian LGBTQ Communities

“…"hard women") (Pang 2015). There are also individuals (e.g., heterosexual men in particular) who do not use any specific terms to describe their sexual attraction towards transsexuals and/or feminised gay men (Lim 2015), thus revealing "the vague, fluid and unbounded ways many Malaysians view the myriad manifestations of nonnormative gender and sexual expression" (Pang 2015, p. 362). Despite such a broad variety of local terms, the abbreviation continues to be used for numerous purposes (e.g., self-identification, selfrepresentation, self-liberation) in various contexts and settings.…”

Public Receptivity Towards LGBT in Recent Times Malaysia: LGBT Perspectives

“…Terms such as lelaki lembut (soft men), songsang (inverted), bapuk, ah kua, mak nyah, pak nyah (specific forms of transgenderism), and wanita keras (hard women) are often used to describe individuals of nonnormative gender and sexuality locally (Pang, 2015). There are also individuals (e.g., heterosexual men in particular) who do not use any terms to describe their sexual attraction towards transsexuals and/or feminized gay men (Lim, 2015) -an example that reveals "the vague, fluid and unbounded ways many Malaysians view the myriad manifestations of non-normative gender and sexual expression" (Pang, 2015, p. 362).…”

Queering the ‘straight’ line: men’s talk on paying for sex

“…Although men may pay all kinds of trans women for sex there is one kind of trans body that is particularly desired and highly visible within the sex industry. To be successful in the sex industry, trans women should appear extremely feminised in their features -usually having breasts and other distinctive, traditionally attractive hyper-feminine characteristics -but they must also retain their penis (Kulick, 1997;Lim, 2015;Weinberg & Williams, 2010). In addition to various iterations of the category 'transsexual women', trans sex workers are often referred to and describe themselves as 'shemales', 'chicks with dicks', or 'ladyboys' 3 on sex industry websites and advertisements (See Vartabedian (2017) who presents a discursive analysis of websites where trans women advertise their services in Portugal and the UK).…”