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Vincent Pak, "Queer Correctives: Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Pavan Mano, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Vincent Park. Hello, Vincent.
- [01:18]
C
Hi. Hi, Pavin.
- [01:21]
B
Now, Vincent is assistant lecturer in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. And today Vincent is going to be telling us about his new book, Queer Discursive Neo Homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore, published by Bloomsbury Academic. Why don't we kick off, Vincent with the dreaded question, but the question, which I'll force you to answer anyway, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
- [01:54]
C
It sounds like a dating question. Yeah, my name is Vincent. I am originally from Singapore. I went to school in Singapore. I grew up there, and I completed my PhD in a joint program between the National University of Singapore and King's College London. Like yourself, my PhD was in English language and linguistics. So that was almost two years ago, in 2023. So I lived in the UK for a while, worked there, and then now I'm based in Hong Kong. I now teach at the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. In terms of how I identify professionally, there's a bit of an identity crisis where I'm trained as a linguist, formally, both at the undergrad level and also in graduate school. But some linguists may not consider what I do as linguistics. So these days I tend to position myself as working in the fields of social linguistics and linguistic anthropology. I'm broadly interested in discourse studies, but with a focus on gender and sexuality. I finally started off, I guess, my interests in these fields as someone that was reading a lot of Judith Butler. So I was very interested in feminist theory and also gender studies in general. But later I focused on sexuality in graduate school. So that's me.
- [03:49]
B
Excellent. Well, so Queer Correctives is your first monograph and I imagine the product of all of this identity crisis and professional befuddlement that you're experiencing. So maybe that is a good way to kind of segue to the next question. Tell us a little bit about how you came to write Queer Correctives and everything else that's related to it.
- [04:17]
C
Yeah, I mean, you've also written your book quite recently, so you know how crazy the whole journey is. It was quite a long project for me if I really were to bring it back to where I started brainstorming and also conceptualizing the book. It started in 2018 when I was still in undergrad. I was preparing for grad school and I was applying, or rather I was preparing to apply. 2018 was also the year that TrueLove is, which is the organization that most of my book is based on, became operational. I really wanted to work on what they were doing for my undergrad work, my undergrad thesis, but I found that I didn't really have the resources and the knowledge or the training yet at the undergrad level. So I decided to put it aside for then. And eventually I wrote about coming out narratives for Singaporean gay men as my undergrad thesis. And when I went to graduate school, or rather when I applied to graduate school, I proposed working on this topic as part of the dissertation. And it was, I guess, well received then. And then eventually when I got to, when I passed my qualifying exams in year two, I think of the PhD, I then started to find that I was a bit more confident in working on this topic. I didn't really want to focus solely on True love is for data. So I also spent a couple of months doing some field work in Singapore. And this was during the COVID pandemic as well. So this was 2020, right at the thick of it, of the pandemic. And it did make data collection quite difficult because it was hard for me to first of all get people to participate in the interviews and also to interview them in person because of the restrictions. So that was tricky. But eventually I did manage to interview about 20, 21 people, and I specifically focused on religious sexual minorities in Singapore to see if their experiences were similar to. What I noticed about True Love is these were interviewees of all religious backgrounds. So I had interviewees that were Buddhists, some of them were Hindu, some of them were also Christian and Catholic. But eventually I only focused on the Christian and Catholic experiences and also some Muslim interviewees as well. And eventually I wrote the dissertation and passed viva, and I decided to rewrite some parts of the dissertation to package it as a monograph. And that's how it happened. It was initially titled Homecoming Queer. I was trying to be clever with the name because it sounded like Homecoming Queen, but Homecoming Queer. But it was too similar to another monograph of a very similar title. It was called Homecoming Queers. So my editor suggested that I change the name. So that's how we settled on. On Queer Correctives as the title.
- [08:21]
B
Yeah. Because if you had titled yours Homecoming Queer, it obviously would have overshadowed what was already out there. So that could not have been allowed to happen. Let's. Where else should we begin? About the introduction, as most people do, and my eye was drawn to. Well, you associate with this guy called William Hogarth a lot in the opening lines anyway. And I was drawn to that, both personally, because I happen to live on Hogarth's Roundabout, which, you know, is the part of London which is almost enthralled to William Hogarth, but also intellectually, one thing about William Hogarth. Did you know Hogarth's best known pug dog, Answer to the Name of Trump?
- [09:14]
C
Oh, no.
- [09:15]
B
Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. So that's a trivia, a fact, as it were, a fact. But, yes, unfortunately. Well, I guess it was fine then. And, you know, it's one of those. That is not that great now. But. So, yes, that was something about William Hogarth, who's also buried quite close to where I live in. In any case, intellectually, William Hogarth, it's an interesting character in your book, and you draw on Hogarth because you talk about Hogarth and his commentary, I suppose, on lines. So you make references to the line and lines a lot. It's a recurring motif in your book. So tell us a little bit about how this is conceptually important to, you know, how you theorize and how you think about sexuality via the motif of the line.
- [10:14]
C
Yeah, I mean, I'm glad to know that, you know, you've got. So you resonate so well with Hogarth's work. Admittedly, I don't think I'm as familiar with his stuff, as I should be. But I got to know about his work on aesthetics when I was reading another book was called Life Destroying Diagrams. And it was basically a film theory book that talked about horror and horror movies, or horror in general and form or formalism. And Folgart was mentioning it. And I thought that what he was talking about in terms of the straight line and curved line was very interesting. But I think how I started thinking about lines and also drawing that link between lines and sexuality was when I started reading more about queer theory in general. But also quite a few scholars have already made that connection between sexuality and orientation. Most prominently in Sarah Ahmed's work. The book's called Queer Phenomenology. And these scholars have tried to spatialize queerness in some way that it's not only queer desires that are non normative or they're askew or they're offline in some way, but also the trajectories of their lives, both in terms of time and space. I think it was Elizabeth Freeman who talked about normativity in time as well. But what really inspired the motif, to use the word of the line was this scholar called Yi Fu Tuan, who is a humanistic geographer. And he wrote this really, really famous book called Space and Place. And in the first chapter he included a schematic to describe or to show how many more adjectives there were for lines than there were for curves in the English language. And his point was that this difference in the number of adjectives could be indicative of what is considered important for a particular culture. I guess, in this case, maybe English speakers or Anglophone culture. So you have a lot more ways to describe lines as compared to curves. So I thought that was very illuminating. It's something that I didn't really think about or notice at first. And then I started looking to lines a little bit more. I also made some comparisons with geometry, the definition of a line, and how it's sort of an elongated mark between two points. It's the fastest way to get from one point to the other. And also out of my own personal interest, one of my favorite films is from the Alien franchise, if you're familiar with that. One of the. I think in terms of the timeline of the Alien franchise, Prometheus was one of the first movies. And one of the starting scenes was when these archaeologists were landing on a new planet that they believe to be where the creators of humanity lived. So they were, I guess, our masters in some way. And so they were on the spaceship and as they were landing. There were these landscapes and mountains. And then one of the archaeologists jumped from his seat and he says there, God does not build in straight lines. And he was referring to these roads and runways that he noticed from the spacecraft. There was this sort of grid like formation on land, and they decided to land there. And he said that because I think the main point of that line was that lines were. Or straight lines in particular, were a marker of humanity in some way. Humans must have created these straight lines, and that's evidence of humanity. So there seems to be an obsession with straight lines that we have, and it does appear a lot in our lives. It's usually a marker of order, of civility. It compresses time and space in the sense that it allows us to get from one point to another most efficiently. It seems to be what makes us human. And so that's how I wanted to make the link between lines and also not normative sexualities.
- [15:24]
B
Yeah, I mean, I find that quite interesting in what you're saying, particularly this sentiment that lines are socially produced and constructed in many ways. And in the introduction, there's quite early on, there's a line, if I may, where you say that you kind of quote Sarah Ahmed, right. And say that Sara Ahmed describes the act of following a line in life as a form of commitment as well as social investment, before going on to talk about how Sarah talks about the idea of lifelines with her own experience of living as a lesbian woman after previously identifying as heterosexual. And I just wonder if you could say a little bit about, you know, the line conceptually and how you make that connection to sexuality will be obvious to many listeners, but maybe not so to everyone. So I wonder if you could just lay that out a little bit. The link between the line and I think you're kind of getting towards it, the idea that lines are socially produced and constructed. And it's kind of how that allows you to make a link to sexuality, or what is that kind of link you're making.
- [16:42]
C
So one thing that I've tried to do when I was initially talking about the book was to have my audience members draw lines on a piece of paper. So without sort of contextualizing it, I would just say to draw a line on the paper. And then the next instruction would be to draw a straight line. And more often than not, I think most people draw straight lines for both instructions. And the point I'm trying to make there is that there is an assumption that a line is straight. And that seems to be the norm when it comes to thinking about lines. And so my question is, why is there that assumption that lines are straight? Of course, when I use the word straight, it's also that double meaning where it's also referring to heterosexuality. So what I am trying to do with this whole metaphor of the line is that we assume sexuality to be straight and any other sort of deviation is seen as abnormal or unwanted in some way. And that's also how we see normative sexualities, which is why I tried to use this line to think about sexuality and why we want to correct or why there seems to be a desire to correct any line that is not straight. Because we like straight lines. We seem to have an obsession with it. And so that's where the whole idea of correctives came about. It's that sort of desire for what I've called, I guess, the ontology of lines, which is that value of straightness, that rather than wanting to have a straight line, it's that is that inherent or ontological property of lines as straight that we seem to desire.
- [18:47]
B
I think we've missed an opportunity, Vincent, to get the listeners to carry out this exercise. You've given the trick away. We could have asked them to draw lines, but you've let the cat out of the bag. So we need to move on. Thank you very much. That was great. And I think that will help us in the rest of the conversation. Because.
- [19:12]
C
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- [19:39]
B
So you talk about the formation of the queer sinner, which is also when we meet this. This entity called True love is. Tell us more about this. What is. What is True love Is firstly and then what do you mean by the. The formation of the queer sinner.
- [20:01]
C
Yeah, so True Love is sort of the main character for the entire book. It features in most of the chapters. Or rather they identify themselves as a non denominational Christian organization, meaning that they don't exactly align themselves with a specific denomination. Rather they just sort of keep that information unsaid. So I have decided that non denominational is the best way to describe them. They are part of a larger church, so they call themselves a ministry, but they're also Part of a larger church in Singapore called 316Church, which has existed for longer. But True Love is themselves only officially opera. They officially came out on the scene, I guess in 2018 when they first sort of started making rounds on social media. It was based on a video that they've uploaded. It was a video testimonial of one of their, what I've called storytellers, where it was a woman who was talking about how she fell in love with another woman and that didn't end so well. But she found hope in Christianity and she's decided that this is the kind of life that she wants to be aligned with biblical teachings and she's sort of given up her same sex desires. And when that video first came up, it really became quite popular because a lot of Singaporeans latched on to the video as evidence of modern day conversion therapy. I'm quoting from an article that came out quite recently after True Love appeared. And they of course have denied conducting any sort of conversion therapy at that point. But they also started ramping up their production so they started to release a lot more video testimonials. And of course it was disturbing, but it was also very exciting to watch because they were really gaining a lot of traction and they were controversial in a different way and it gave people something to talk about. I think right now they've really sort of slowed down their video testimonial so they're no longer producing as many, but they're more active on Instagram and also Facebook where they post sort of maybe motivational quotes and things like that. These days, not so much video testimonials. So that's who they are. They have these storytellers that I think they. Motivational.
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B
Sorry, I'm just. Motivational in what sense? What kind of motivational quotes are we talking about?
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C
Oh, so they would say things like should the church really support gay people? For example? And then they would quote scripture. And then they do take quite, I guess, a unique position in terms of if you compare it to past discourse on sexuality or non normative sexuality that comes from the Christians. They do tend to be a bit more progressive. So they encourage people to come out. They encourage people to come home. That's their tagline, come out, come home. And they say that, you know, we should treat gay people with, with grace and we should accept them, we should love them. So it's very much a very positive embracing of gay people, which is quite different from what I used to read about.
- [24:00]
B
Okay, so these are not. These are not, you Know those cringy motivational quotes of success is a journey. Not. It's not that kind of.
- [24:08]
C
No, no, no. Yeah, they're a bit more Gen Z, I think.
- [24:11]
B
Yes. Okay, okay. And it's, it's, it's aimed at sexuality and it, it has a different positioning of in particular homosexuality. So you use the, you use the word. And I, I'm interested in this as well. You used the word earlier, same sex desire and that's. It sounds unusual to me. Is that a new term?
- [24:34]
C
I don't think it's a new term per se. I think maybe scholars have used it in the past as well. It seems to be a way of describing homosexuality in a way that does not assume identity. So I think these days we say gay and lesbian and bisexual lots and these are all predicated on identity. But same sex desire sort of shifts that focus away from identity towards desire. So it's more like object choice rather than who you are.
- [25:09]
B
Right, okay. So I cut you off as you were, I imagine transitioning towards the notion of the formation of the queer sinner. Please continue.
- [25:20]
C
Yeah, so the queer sinner is something that they didn't come up with. I came up with it when I was writing the book as an analytical point of departure. It doesn't come out of nowhere, of course. It draws from true love is own demarcation of an in group identity that they have called Christians with unwanted same sex attraction. It's quite a mouthful, it's quite a long name. But they do explicitly sort of label this identity as something that all of their storytellers have or that they are a Christian with unwanted same sex attraction. This is an explicit in group identity that they want to market as desirable for Christians with same sex desires. But to do this there must be a foil against which they can position themselves. So in order to identify as this in group, there must be an out group that they are identifying against. And so I started to think about who exactly are they trying to get away from to identify as this, as this Christian with unwanted same sex attraction. And so I came up with the identity also of the queer sinner that they have constructed for their storytellers that they were before they became Christian with unwanted same sex attraction. So the queer sinner is debtfoil. It's an explicit identity category that comprises of various traits or characteristics. And in the book I specifically identify these as firstly addictive behavior and then secondly same sex indulgences. The former is marked by impulsion of sorts. It's something that they cannot fight against. And they do use a lot of, I guess, linguistic strategies to show that they're sort of unable to resist partaking in same sex behavior or having, I guess, casual sex with the. With the same sex. Whereas for same sex indulgences, this is more of a calculated, conscious decision to engage in same sex behavior. So that's the sort of distinction that I've made. But together they form what I've called the queer sinner, which is constructed rather than innate. Right. And the whole point of these video testimonials is to show how they have moved from being a queer sinner to finding Christianity, and then now they've settled as a Christian with unwanted same sex attraction.
- [28:35]
B
So in some of these stories coming out of True Love is you talk about the space time dimensions around them, particularly in relation to the Baptinian notion of the chronotome. Right. Tell us a little bit more about this. How is space and time organized in these stories? And what do you find particularly significant about that?
- [29:00]
C
So this, the whole Baktunian chronotope was a chapter after the Queer Sinner. And I deliberately placed it after because it's sort of a more macro look at True Love is video testimonials as data. So for the first, for the queer scene sort of analysis, it was a. I took a closer look at the content of the videos and then when I moved to the chronotope bit, I was. I was zooming out a little bit to look at the form of the stories, the structure of the stories as, you know, a repertoire. So when I was looking at these videos and they've got about, I think I looked at about 18 videos in total, There was quite an obvious pattern in the way that Trailerfist was telling these stories. And these stories follow a pattern that is mostly chronological. Rather they follow the linear flow of time. But some of them involve shifting around elements of the story. My sort of intervention is identifying these elements as a chronotope. And the chronotope is of course taken from Buckhton's theory, where he looks at these literary novels and identified the chronotope as specifically or rather simplistically understood as spacetime, Kronos as in time and atropos as in space. So it originated from literary theory. But linguistic anthropologists have sort of co opted it, stole it. And they used it as a point of analysis where narratives usually deploy these chronotopes as what linguistic anthropologists have called invocable histories. It's another way of thinking about context. Right. So Anything that we say or do is always governed or constrained by the time period that we are in and also the space that we are in. So it's really a more complicated way to think about context or contextualization. So for True Love is these stories follow the pattern of a very specific pattern of when the storytellers in their youth, so as a kid, which always involves some sort of traumatic event, and then they shift towards adulthood. And then after that it's when they find Christianity. And then finally the last chronotope is the present day self. So that's a very chronological flow. But some of these stories also involve the shifting around of the chronotopes. So sometimes the youth chronotope gets shifted to the second or third position of disorder. And that changes the way that audiences, or at least that's my argument, how the audiences would receive this information, how they make meanings from the stories as it's presented as a whole. So that's broadly what the chapter is.
- [32:29]
B
About would be it, would it be a kind of rhetorical device? Am I misunderstanding that in a way.
- [32:36]
C
I think I've also linked all of that to affect theory of sorts, rather the ideas of how effect can flow between parts of a story. So when we are presented with a chronological, linear, flowing story, the story makes sense and we are sort of experiencing a very expected sort of trajectory of how we would feel when we encounter a story. But when these elements are shifted around, it sort of changes the kind of excitement or sadness that we feel at different parts of the story. And that has an impact on the kind of meaning making processes that occur when we watch these stories.
- [33:28]
B
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C
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- [34:45]
B
What interests you about truth telling? So it's clearly an important concept to you, and you spent an entire chapter on it. So this is three. Three questions in one. It's a trap, Vincent. It's three questions in one sentence. Tell us. Tell us a little bit more about truth telling as well as this concept that you term and theorize. Discursive metanoia. And the third thing, how does it operate in the political context of Singapore?
- [35:18]
C
Wow, that's a lot of questions.
- [35:20]
B
That's a lot.
- [35:22]
C
You might have to remind me of the question.
- [35:27]
B
Let's start with truth telling. So tell us a little bit more about truth telling.
- [35:32]
C
Yeah, I think truth telling was one of those things that really stood out to me when I was reading a lot about Foucault and his work. Michel Foucault's work, and, I mean, whose work features quite prominently in. In the book. I draw a lot from his ideas. And if you have read the first volume of the History of Sexuality, which is probably one of his most famous works, there is a line in there that says, the Western man has become a confessing animal. And so the idea of confession stood out to me a lot. It really made me realize that a lot of what we say or what we disclose is just permutations of, I guess, the ancient practice of confession. And of course, it originates from Catholicism in the church, but now the confession has taken on more contemporary forms. We confess. I don't know if you want to use a more recent example. You have YouTubers coming out on online. You have politicians or celebrities confessing or apologizing for their indiscretions with each other. These are all, I guess, more modern forms of the confession. And so that's what got me interested in truth telling. And I wanted to see how truth telling would work in the interview data that I collected. So I've shifted away from True love is. And this chapter focuses on the interview data that I've collected. Yeah, so it really is about what Foucault says, that there is a difference between truth telling and truth doing, and both are sort of ways to extract the truth from oneself. But I wanted to focus on truth telling because of the element of verbalization. So Foucault does talk a lot about verbalizing the truth, but he doesn't really. I mean, he was not a linguist, but he doesn't really link it to, I guess, communication theory or linguistic theory. So one of the main goals of this chapter was to explicitly theorize truth telling as a linguistic act. Right? That it does something when we tell the truth. So based on the interview data, you would see that there were some of my interviewees experiences where they were maybe made to say certain things about themselves, for example, that their sexuality is heterosexual or that their gender identity is something that they're not. And because there is this belief that telling the truth will make it happen or it will materialize some sort of outcome that is normatively desired. So that's.
- [38:39]
B
How, how does, how do you, how do you thread this into the, the concept of, of discursive metanoia? It's something that you've theorized in that chapter. How, how does this feed into it?
- [38:53]
C
So the discursive metanoia is a concept that, that I've sort of put together for the sake of the book. But the idea of, of metanoia is not new. It's, it's very, I guess, maybe not so much common Christian community, but it does appear a lot in biblical, I guess, discourse. And it's this idea of change and transformation, or rather specifically spiritual change and transformation. I wanted to focus on metanoia as an idea again because of Foucault. He talks about it in his latest posthumous publication of the History of Sexuality, the fourth volume. And he talks about metanoia a lot as a process of spiritual change. And I think because of how true love is, has been talked about in the public sphere, especially by activists who try to pin it down as convergent therapy. I found that not so useful in terms of thinking about what true love is doing. Rather, I think what they're advocating for is change and transformation. I think that is their strategy. They want to make it such that things are more neutral. And they are calling for people to literally reorientate themselves towards the Bible, towards Jesus. And in that process of changing and transforming themselves spiritually, the sort of non normative sexual desires will also be corrected in some way, which is how that links to truth telling. Because Foucault argues that truth telling, when we tell the truth about ourselves, it involves a rupture in our identity. It involves an externalization of our sins, of our bad behavior, and that primes us for that sort of change and transformation.
- [41:02]
B
So you don't talk about this in abstract. Right. So this is the sort of the final clause, I suppose, of the title, that all of this is happening in Singapore. True Love is an organization or an entity in Singapore. And you theorize discursive metanoia as well as, you know, the Foucaultian notion of truth telling within this context. So how, how do you see this operating within the, the social, political context of, of the country? Is it significant? How has it worked into your, your theorization of, of that, that concept and, and that chapter?
- [41:44]
C
Yeah. So I think one thing when I was writing the book, at the end of it, I was asking myself, go back to home. How does this lead me back home, which I understand as Singapore? And one of the related questions was, why is this phenomenon of discursive metanoia happening in a place like Singapore? What is it about Singapore that allows discursive metanoia to happen? And so I started looking into sort of the maybe more recent partnerships between church and state. Right. I'm not saying that there is an explicit endorsement of Christianity as a religion that's maybe more important than the other religions. This is not true at all. But rather, I think there have been case studies in the past in Singapore where there seems to be an alignment of church and state interests. And this all converged on the idea that non heterosexual people do not serve these interests. And so I talked about two episodes in Singapore that have happened and one of them is what is more commonly known as the AWARE saga. AWARE is a feminist organization that was notoriously taken over by a group of Christian women. And these group of Christian women took over the organization because they were upset with the sort of, the pro homosexuality sort of narrative that AWARE was advocating for. And they said, oh, we need to, we need to bring it back to Christian values and this is what Singapore would want. And then also the other episode that also happened was this other group called Love Singapore that organized these prayer walks, what they would call prayer walks. And they would literally walk around the country and they would pray for Singapore. And then one of these other things that they were doing was to go to each apartment building, each apartment block, and they would also spread the word in some way literally quite, or rather evangelizing in the country that is supposed to be secular. So there seems to be, I think these two episodes point towards a desire for certain groups of people to align themselves with the more, I guess, conservative social policies of Singapore, where heterosexuality is still the norm and still celebrated. And we don't really want to bring in queerness into the equation. And so it's in this context that I think have allowed discursive metanoia to germinate as a form of what I've called neo homophobia. It's in this context that have allowed true love is to, to have the kind of discourse that they do is sort of a not so explicit homophobic attempt to denounce non heterosexuality. But it's also, it's very implicit in some way, it's very covert.
- [45:28]
B
Well, so in the book you use a number of terms, you just used the term homophobia, but in the book you use a number of terms that I, I suspect are related but not synonymous and not identical.
- [45:42]
C
Right.
- [45:43]
B
So you have homophobia, neo homophobia, anti queer, queer animus. So I don't want to be pedantic, but I think, as I suspect you also do, that there is some value in distinguishing between these various terms. Is that the case?
- [46:04]
C
Yes. So admittedly I think I didn't want to repeat myself too much by using the same term. So part of my reason for using these different terms was to eschew repetition. But I think one distinction that I want to make between homophobia and neo homophobia is maybe more theoretical. I do subsume neo homophobia as a subset of homophobia, but I use the prefix neo to mark that resurgence, but also emergence of a new form of homophobia that is not quite as recognizable as what we used to see in the past, especially in Singapore, where if we're talking about sort of just anti queer or homophobic sort of statements, the church used to be a lot more open about celebrating changes to non heterosexuality. But with true love is, it's more covert, it's more subtle. And so the prefix of neo I think was to highlight that shift in discursive tactics. Something that I do wish I did a bit better in the book was to bring up the link between neo homophobia and neoliberalism. And that sort of, I do talk about it a little bit in the book, but I wish I did that more. And it was to make that link between the individual. Right. I wanted to show how these changes, or rather anti queer sentiment has been individualized. These changes are expected to be made by the individual now. Right. The onus is on the queer Christian to change themselves, to transform themselves. And I think this in a way gives organizations like True love is a free pass so that they can say, you know what, I'm not responsible for any changes. But if these Changes occur if it's agenda. Right. These people have chosen to do it themselves and it's not up to us, so we cannot be blamed. And yeah, I wish I sort of brought that out a little bit more in the book, but that's sort of the distinction that I wanted to make between homophobia and neo homophobia.
- [48:45]
B
Yeah, excellent. Well, listen, Vincent, we've taken up a lot of your time and this has been really interesting. It's been wonderful chatting to you and learning about your book and hearing about about it more. The traditional final question I ask on here is what is the next project you're looking forward to?
- [49:07]
C
Do you want to hear an academic project or a non academic project?
- [49:13]
B
Well, I guess the choice is yours really, but I could say both.
- [49:19]
C
Okay, I'll do both. Let me start with the academic one. So I think maybe I've always worked a lot on sexuality, but I think maybe it's a good time, with the publication of this book, it might be a good time to sort of shift my focus a little bit away from sort of a full on sexuality studies. And I guess maybe more predictably I wanted to focus on sort of the recent emergence of AI companions. With the whole AI era that we're in now, I'm sort of quite taken by the emergence of AI companions, how chatbots are used to generate these characters that users can relate to and have some sort of a relationship with. Right. So I'm very interested in how users themselves use natural language to quite literally construct and generate a companion that is I guess, assembled by these linguistic cues or forms. And then on the other hand, how these AI companions, which are basically excellent text prediction software, they can simulate that empathy, that wisdom, that intimacy that the user is looking for. So it's sort of that human machine interaction that I'm interested in. There's a lot more work to be done. The ideas are very rough, but that might be something that I want to work towards in the future. And then for the non academic projects, I think I really want to start watching more horror movies. I've always had an interest in, I guess macabre and just everything that's horror related, horror games, horror movies. And maybe I'll find some sort of link there to also my research. So yes, definitely more horror.
- [51:30]
B
Yes, AI is the horror, Vincent. That is the horror that we are faced with. The research is the non academic stuff that you're also working on. Terrific. All of that sounds, sounds really grand and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it develops. Listen, I want to thank you for being on New Books Network with us today. It was brilliant. And thank you Listener for tuning in. Queer Correctives is out now with Bloomsbury Academic and you can get it directly from their website as well as other major booksellers. You will also enjoy the bonus of appearing very well read if you're holding a copy of it. But until next time, stay well and and take care.
- [52:17]
C
Thank you. Pavilion.