Pink Pride in Bangkok. Asian-Transgender and Transnational Mobility in 'Out of Place'

Centering on the politics of mobility, I aim to examine various aspects that are implicated in transgender narratives from the documentary Out of Place, such as spatial displacement, physical malleability, and social activism. With differential interpretations of mobility, I bring attention to a wide breadth of transgender identification which unravels both the limits and potentials of transgender movements across Asia. Only with a nuanced understanding of transgender movement in a non-Western context, I propose, can we overcome a parochial conception of transgender identity that is caused by epistemic asymmetry and geographical distance between China and the West. I argue that the transgender stories allow us to see how individuals rely on distinctive strategies for transgender identification, all of which entail a situational consciousness of their reified circumstances.