Film Study: KL Menjerit

It turns out that I'm not the first person to publish a discourse on MotorQueer culture. David Lim published a paper titled "Cruising Mat Motor: Malay biker masculinity and queer desire in/through KL Menjerit" last March in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. This paper was first presented (I believe) at the 1st International Conference of Asian Queer Studies in Bangkok in July 2005 (the next one takes place later this month in Sydney, Australia). Below is a summary of the content of Lim's paper, as taken from the journal and conference abstracts:

KL Menjerit is a 2002 film by director Badarudin Azmi; the title literally translated means "Kuala Lumpur Screams". This is a biker film produced to appeal to a largely male Malay audience and mainly to Malay youths interested in “rough activities” such as illegal street racing. Everything about the film – from the biker subculture it portrays to the Mat Motor lead character – exudes the unmistakably aura of working-class kejantanan (masculinity). Everything that is, except for a supporting character who develops a subtextually homoerotic relationship with the male biker protagonist, whose masculinity he eroticises and obsesses over, literally to his death. Lim’s argument is that the film's representation of the Mat Motor protagonist as unbendingly straight and heterosexually jantan – while imaginably gratifying to the core audience of Mat Motors – actually belies the opposite reality of Kuala Lumbur’s (KL’s) “forgotten” underside, where gender and sexuality are much more fluid and malleable than is sanctioned by society and the state.