Q & A: Queer in Asian America

Several years ago, a senior Asian American studies professor attempted to set up a plenary panel on queer sexualities for an Association for Asian American Studies plenary panel on queer sexuality and she realized to her surprise that no established professor in the field was doing work on the topic. Instead, she found three graduate students or junior scholars to provide a glimmer of what was then an emerging field of inquiry within Asian American studies.

Today, we find an amazing plethora of Asian American scholarly and activist works in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer identities. Indeed, what was only seen as a relatively imminent field of inquiry is now a burgeoning and growing body of works that attempts to map out various intersections of race, class, ethnicity, and nationality with those of gender and sexuality.

One of the most exciting and extremely sophisticated collection of recent works in this area is Eng and Hom’s anthology, Q & A: Queer in Asian America. The title, “Q & A,” gestures to the kind of life-saving and life-affirming questions and answers contained in the anthology’s provocative essays. The title which uses queer instead of gay and lesbian makes strong allusions to recent scholarship that questions and critiques the global diffusion, circulation, and reception of “lesbian and gay culture.” The strategic use of the queer rubric allows for the broad spectrum of genders and sexualities that are present in all Asian American communities. Far from an uncritical usage of a “hip” term, Eng and Hom create a space to trace and chart the kinds of fluid, continuous, and discontinuous strands and relationships between “traditional” sex/gender systems to so-called “modern” sex/gender systems.

Their book, as they aptly state in their cogent introduction, will attempt “to delineate what . . . [they] hope will be recognized as strong and vibrant queer Asian America.” (p. 17) Queer Asian America, as Eng and Hom construct it, partakes of two important intellectual currents of critical Asian American studies. The first is the intersection of gender and race with citizenship, and the other is the rich tradition of community studies and its emphasis on social intervention and sociopolitical change. Yet, both editors strongly depart from this body of scholarship in their insistence that sexualities and genders be integral, not peripheral categories of analysis.

The book’s six sections reveal this editorial and political stance. The first section entitled “Working Out” primarily focuses on activist work and on the limits and possibilities of coalition-building across gender, race, class, and nationalities. Karin Aguilar-San Juan movingly and persuasively investigates a transnational fund drive and activist work by Filipino American lesbians for a case involving the unjust persecution of two lesbians in the Philippines. She finds very disturbing and conflicting issues involving a kind of reverse colonialism that is an undercurrent in many seemingly philanthropic acts of lesbian sisterhood across borders. As such, she questions the potentials and limits of the “travel” of lesbian identity and culture across national, cultural, and class boundaries.

The second section includes essays that explore the tabooed if not marginalized images of eroticism and desire. Here, two essays clearly stand out. Victor Bascara’s essay is a masterful reading of postcolonial hybridity, conflict, and desire in Michael Magnaye’s film White Christmas. Bascara attempts to locate Filipino colonial history with queer hybrid negotiations in the diaspora. Richard Fung’s essay “Looking for My Penis” can be considered to be the most pivotal if not pioneering piece of Asian American queer scholarship. When it was first published, Fung’s investigation into the festishization of the Asian male body and gay desire by mainstream gay porn was considered to be a groundbreaking one. For many early scholars in Asian American scholarship, stumbling onto Fung’s essay was like finding a life-saving oasis in a desert-like atmosphere of gay and lesbian studies that was devoted to mainly white, male and middle-class concerns.

The third section “investigates the status of...