Over at Google Books you can read Syncretism and Synchronicity: Queer'n'Asian Cyberspace in 1990s Taiwan and Korea in 2003's Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (though a couple of pages may not be available). The article starts on page 87.
The observation that public lesbian/gay/queer (hereafter l/g/q) cultures emerge most frequently along with late capitalism, the rise of the middle class, consumer culture, urbanization, and mobility appears equally applicable to Asian contexts. Yet, in some cases - notably, those of many of the four "Asian tigers" or Newly Industrialized Economices (Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore) - these preconditions prevailed well before the rapid growth and emergence of l/g/q cultures at various points in the 1990s. Here, it seems plausible that an additional factor has been at play: computers and computer-mediated communication (CMC). This study reports on an analyzes data gather in the late 1990s to examine this hypothesis in Korea and Taiwan.
The article starts by tracing Korea and Taiwan's
The article continues with a discussion of the research methods and the weakness of their study. Of particular note is how Koreans tended to be more responsive to both surveys intended for activists and bartenders... I would have guessed that Taiwanese were more open to surveys on their sexualities. It then analyzes the ways queer Koreans and Taiwanese interacted on the net and the formation of relatively local communities. The authors conclude that 'Internet technology becomes, in these "other" places, a particularly efficacious catalyst for the negotiation of new and culturally syncretic formations of nonnormative sexual identification and community, which can be read as foregrounding the historical specificities and limits of the Anglo-American sexual cultures rather than simply as "spreading" or reproducing those cultures.'
Check out the article here (go to page 87).
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