Homing Story: Constellating Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics

This session excerpts from a book project that examines Asian American racialization in connection with U.S. colonialism and anti-Blackness. I focus particularly on how model minority and yellow peril tropes collude in alternately aligning or counterposing Asian Americans with white middle-class gender norms and capitalist paradigms for productivity. In this talk, I posit storytelling as queer diasporic “homing”— as a means of finding and forging community in the absence of physical common ground. For LGBTQ+ Asian Americans, who are often implicitly or explicitly excluded from U.S. national imaginaries, homing becomes a way of composing community unbound from any fixed locale. Emphasizing mobility and dynamism, I argue that our bodyminds—our scars, fears, and aspirations—archive our social histories. With story as archival description, I use narrative to hold still, redefine, and/or reimagine my experiences in relation to other trans and queer of color rhetorics. What emerges is a personal narrative told in concert with voices of chosen family—with the LGBTQ+ Asian Americans and other crip, trans, and queer of color theorists and artists whose works have enabled the ways I write and live. As constellation, our stories network into a broader portrait of how norms surrounding race, gender, and (dis)ability conspire to enforce the boundaries of national and social belongings.