COMMENT ON "RESEARCH AND ITS DISCONTENTS".

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Stivens, Maila
• Date: 01 January 1997

This short piece exploring the development of versions of homosexualities in Southeast Asia throws light on a number of key issues about research both into this issue and into research more generally in the region. A central point coming out of Altman's reflections on the problem of `doing research' is the impact of globalisation in Southeast Aria. This is not the place to explore the complexities of globalisation per se, except to note that, as Jonathan Friedman has argued, globalisation theory itself is a product of the parameters of modernity; that is, of the ways that modern subjects identify the world. (1995: 88) But Altman clearly points to the ways that global discourses inevitably construct the very terms in which his `subjects' experience and represent themselves and in which the researcher understands and represents those experiences.

Altman notes that lesbians seem much less able to produce/project a growing `community' than gay men, who can point to growing `gay' communities in Southeast Asia. He suggests that this may be partly because lesbian women have not been constructed as at risk...