How do we queer the archive?
In the late 1980s, Thailand’s first lesbian magazine was published. Although most of the readership were concentrated in Bangkok and other metropols, there were entries from ‘women loving women’ from Patani —the borderland of Thailand and Malaysia where the Muslim minority are a majority. This is an area where Queer stories have been silently erased from history. Much has been said about male homosexuality in Islamic history and culture, and while there is a rise in feminist scholarship in Patani, it only seems to focus on the experiences of cis-female and heterosexual women. Furthermore, there is a tendency to compare the feminist movements that are happening in Patani to the Middle Eastern Arab world, but few have compared the situation to neighbouring Islamic societies such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei Darussalam.
For the fourth talk in the Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2026, it is with pride that the U.P. Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) announce a jointly-sponsored talk: Mapping Sapphic Patani, Tracing the Southeast Asian “Queer Regional Imagination" to be given by Kukasina Kubaha from the University of Hamburg via Zoom. The talk is on Friday, 27 March 2026 at 5:30PM [UTC +8 Philippine Standard Time (PHT) / 11:30AM UTC +1 Central European Time (CET)]. The talk is also in celebration of the National Women's Month in the Philippines.
In this project presentation, Kukasina Kubaha intends to trace the queer movements in Islamic Southeast Asia, especially in works of art, to see the negotiations between the self and religion, the conversations, and the influences they had on each other. Thus, mapping and archiving the ‘queer regional imagination’ (Gopinath, 2018.) The project will touch upon two main notions: the archive and Queerness. By delving into entanglements of Southeast Asian queer art networks along with its connections to outside the region, the talk intends to ‘queer’ the archive both in terms of the thinking about the archive as not static, and to tell more stories or Queers who are often left out of main historiography, while also challenging the notion of archival violence and how the archive can be imagined otherwise.
Kukasina Kubaha is a translator, writer, curator and dreamer of better worlds. She is currently completing a Master’s degree at the Universität Hamburg, where she is pondering the question of the archive and how to build a counter-archive of queer women in Thailand's Deep South through literature, film, and contemporary art. Her recent historical fantasy, ‘Nidra Nirat: A Dream Depository’ is published with New Naratif (https://newnaratif.com/nidra-nirat-a-dream-depository/) and a collage of prints she made based on her archival research is exhibited in the upcoming edition of Southeast Asia Queer Cultural Festival which can be found here: https:// seaqcf.net/. Her curatorial projects also aim at using art as a form of activism and advocacy.
The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly lecture given by academic scholars, field-based geography practitioners, members of the local community, and spatial justice advocates to share their knowledge- and practice-based research undertakings. Jointly presented by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), the Heo/Geo Lecture Series which previously underwent several iterative rebranding positions geography as a discipline that not only straddles the realms of natural/physical and social sciences, humanities, political ecologies, regional and area studies, GI technologies and geospatial storytelling, it is also a vibrant and convivial space that welcomes multiplicities and plural voices. The name Heo/Geo is itself an accommodation to the various understandings, meanings and pronunciations of geography in its indigenous and vernacular forms and the Anglicized name that has since been adapted in the local lexicon.
This Heo/Geo Lecture is presented by the Human Geography (HUG) and the Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanities (MELANGE) research groups of the UP Department of Geography and is in line with the SDG #4 (Quality Education) and #15 (Life on Land) of the United Nations.
To participate in the lecture, click this link to register via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/2phrrfdp
References:
Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly visions: The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora. Duke University Press, 2018.
