This address was intended to be and remains about global circulatory processes and the ways that human societies have sought to deploy, control, or regulate these processes. In this essay, I principally consider how nationalist ideologies regulate global circulatory processes. The parallel with the current COVID-19 crisis is evident, and my remarks do suggest some similarities. Although COVID-19 is not the topic I engage here, my theme alerts us to thinking methodologically about largely invisible or inconspicuous modes of circulation and their consequences, less dire but deeply transformative.

Pigs have played a central role in the subsistence and culture of China for millennia. The close relationship between pigs and people began when humans gradually domesticated wild pigs over 8,000 years ago. While pigs initially foraged around settlements, population growth led people to pen their pigs, which made them household trash processors and fertilizer producers. Household pigs were in daily contact with people, who bred them to fatten quickly and produce larger litters. Early modern Europeans found Chinese pigs far superior to their own and bred the two to create the breeds now employed in industrial pork production around the world, including China. In recent decades, industrial farms that scientifically control every aspect of pigs’ lives have spread rapidly. Until recently, most Chinese people ate pork only on special occasions; their ability in recent decades to eat it regularly exemplifies China's increasing prosperity. Meanwhile, vast areas of North and South American farmland are now devoted to growing soybeans to feed hundreds of millions of pigs in China, and the methane, manure, and antibiotic resistance they produce creates environmental and health problems on a global scale.

The South Korean radio docudrama and adapted novel Take Me Home (1978) were based on the real-life case of Chol Soo Lee, who in 1974 was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States. Lee was later acquitted following a series of investigative reports and amid an emerging social movement calling for his release that spanned South Korea and the United States. Influenced by both the American civil rights movement and the Korean progressive minjung ideology, Take Me Home is among several popular radio programs and novels that helped spark this transpacific movement by critiquing US hegemony and Korean state nationalism and by reimagining the figure of the tongp'o in the context of a nascent pan-Korean consciousness. This article traces how the tongp'o is foregrounded, constructed, and ultimately saved in Take Me Home and argues that the radio novel's sonic imagination played a crucial role in broadcasting solidarity across the Pacific.

As anyone who has written a book can tell you, when you finally finish wrestling with it and it is confined between covers, or tucked away in e-book form, it goes on to have an afterlife, sometimes quite a complicated one, which the author may glimpse only in intermittent and fragmentary form. An original and provocative book such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble will travel to places its author never anticipated and become embroiled in conversations the author may not overhear. A book's influence on another field far from its point of origin is not best assessed by a citation index—though Gender Trouble's numbers are massive. To take the measure of the work that Gender Trouble has done for scholars working in Asian studies (itself a constructed and constantly morphing category, like gender), we should ask how the book traveled. Which pieces were taken up by scholars of Asia, and what conversations and challenges did the book enable, not as a blueprint but as an incubator of locally grounded thinking? How has it been adapted, pruned down to one or two insights, or expanded into new domains?

Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble, published in 1990, enjoyed its thirtieth anniversary in 2020. To that end, the Association for Asian Studies, the United States’ largest association of academics working on Asia, invited scholars to consider the importance of her arguments and ideas for Asian studies and scholarship in Asia, including how scholars have diverged from and expanded their studies of gender and sexuality in ways not anticipated by Butler when she first published the book. In this essay, I examine the impact of Butler's book in Southeast Asia. Out of the abundance of scholarship stemming from and about the region's eleven diverse countries and their histories, I prioritize those works that explicitly engage the theoretical insights in Gender Trouble to elucidate the lives of gender-nonconforming communities in Southeast Asia. I include scholarship that allows me to explore the disjunction between categories of analysis that are foundational to Butler's theory and those at work in Southeast Asia. Far from rendering Butler's theory and methodological intervention inapposite, this mismatch has catalyzed productive rethinking of Gender Trouble and its implications for the region.

It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher of gender, sexuality, and governmentality, Judith Butler. When Gender Trouble came out in the United States, it hit the stands like a hit; it transformed and unraveled the modalities through which ontologies and epistemologies of gender came to be. This was especially the case with the trouble, the disturbances, the turbulence that Gender Trouble carried along with it. Gender Trouble's thematics sometimes syncopated against familiar habits of belief that were and are carefully nursed and held to one's heart, upending them in sometimes unexpected ways. The concept of “performativity,” for instance, generated a buzz, partly because it unhinged and reoriented several fail-safe, deeply felt materialized beliefs, such as the ontological immutability of gender cohering resolutely and unremittingly in and through an inveterate notion of the biological (belief certainty in the sense that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might intend as the unnoticed grounding of one's sense of and use of language itself laid in so deeply that it disappeared from immediate purchase). Gender Trouble also asked us to address the seemingly intransigent separations between interiority and exteriority and the obdurate artifice of an “interior core” (psyche, soul, etc.), which, because it was constituted as a priori, meant that people believed it lay beyond being touched or constituted by any social, economic, or political exigencies, “regulations,” or “disciplinary practices” and thus “preclude[d] an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject.”

I am most honored and perhaps also startled to read these comprehensive scholarly essays dedicated to the question of the appropriation of Gender Trouble in Asian studies. Sometimes “appropriation” is a problematic activity, such as the cultural appropriation of artworks and styles from minority communities, such as the indigenous, for the purposes of market circulation, profit, or the augmentation of human capital. But when texts such as Gender Trouble enter the global market of books, a different kind of appropriation becomes possible. The book is at once taken up and refused, indicating the limits of translation or marking a resistance to cultural imperialism.