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8. At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community?
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8 At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community? Karlyn Koh In her discussion of Asian American cultural production, Lisa Lowe cogently elaborates a theory of the emergence of new critical subjectivities that are multiple and heterogeneous. Speci¤cally, Lowe points out that the concept of heterogeneity enables one to envision subjectivities that embrace internal differences (such as gender, sexuality, and class) within an identity category. Indeed, moving beyond the necessity of “strategic essentialism” in earlier struggles against institutionalized marginalization, she proposes that “in the 1990s, we can afford to rethink the notion of racialized ethnicity” in terms of differences “rather than presuming similarities and making the erasure of particularity the basis of unity” (Immigrant Acts 83). However, while echoing Lowe’s call, David Eng and Alice Hom, the editors of the 1998 anthology Q&A: Queer in Asian America, note that despite acknowledgments of “heterogeneity”in racialized ethnic communities , the disciplinary gap between Asian American studies and lesbian/gay studies remains uninterrogated. For indeed, the extension of identity politics beyond such historical categories as racial ethnicity, class, and sexuality poses the question of what this new “Asian American”subject might be. As Dana Takagi insists in her essay contribution to the anthology Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of Gay and Lesbian Experience, “the practice of including gayness in Asian American studies rebounds into a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the concept ‘Asian American’ identity” (Takagi, “Maiden Voyage” 33), and, I would add, the very concept of racialized ethnicity. What are the implications of “including gayness” in studies of “race”? If the queering of ethnic studies skews, or “queers,” the lines that identity politics compels one to draw, then what are the assumptions of identity that need to be urgently reexamined? Karin Aguilar-San Juan poses these questions by way of an anecdote. In Q&A, she writes about an occasion when an editor soliciting her work for an anthology on Filipino American politics prefaced his invitation by asking her if she was a lesbian: “‘[I]f I am not mistaken,’ he said to her, ‘you’re a lesbian, right?’” (Aguilar-San Juan, “Going Home” 30). The editor presented her with this question because, according to Aguilar San-Juan, he had hoped that she could address the lack of writing by Filipino American lesbians.However,it provoked Aguilar-San Juan to ask herself, “He’s right, isn’t he? What kind of lesbian am I, anyway? Am I the kind of lesbian he means?” (30; original emphasis). Following this encounter,Aguilar-San Juan ponders on the problematics of authenticity , the appeal to which, she says, “is one way that Asian American lesbians and gay men confer upon ourselves the power of knowledge” (31). She suggests that this problem of authenticity is broached each time some aspect of experience is excluded in the invocation of a broad term; hence, one is perpetually appending more identities to a name so as to qualify it.1 For Aguilar-San Juan, the work of rethinking collectivity and community remains incomplete, a challenge that she formulates as such: In the end, no matter how inclusive we try to be—as editors of collections or as activists in social movements—at some point the line we draw must be exclusive of someone, because it is not possible to anticipate the in¤nite variety of human experiences or the social and historical circumstances that surround us. I see two ways around this problem. The ¤rst is to simply acknowledge the lines that we draw. The second calls for a deeper transformation, a world without lines. (33) Ironically, while the concept of community is premised on the gesture of inclusion , whereby individuals who share something in common are invited to come together,the very lines that are drawn around a community compel an exclusion of others. Between exclusion and inclusion, it seems to me, is precisely where community emerges—not as a place but as a spacing of ¤nite ¤gures crossing, shattering the mirror that grounds community as an experience that is shared. Thus, a world of possibilities is neither a world without lines (transcendence) nor community bound to its self (immanence),but the one in the other.Instead, a thinking of community obliges us to consider the stranger at the borders of our delimited spaces of belonging. But this obligation does not so much imply an arbitrary collapsing of historical and sociopolitical speci¤cities. It also does not mean one disregards the continuing exigencies of mobilizing in the name of community...