Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women ed. by Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, Ma Vang (review)

Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women dives headfirst into rectifying the classic problem of the burden of representation—that Hmong women compose a minority population that is often forgotten or overlooked, and that when we do hear about them, their stories are inevitably limited to a set of reductive portrayals. Indeed, the book is wholly preoccupied with underrepresentation, or the concern that single images of Hmong women as rendered in photographs, scholarship, literature, and media will come to stand in for all Hmong women. Given that a meaningful solution to these problems is to populate the landscape with a plenitude of powerful scholarship that serves to diversify the available voices and perspectives, this collection is well positioned to address these concerns and others. Editors Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang have assembled an impressive collection of twelve chapters (plus introduction and afterword) documenting and theorizing the experiences of Hmong women that is both long overdue and sorely needed.

The book is organized into four sections: “History and Knowledge Formation,” “Social Organization, Kinship and Politics,” “Art and Media,” and “Gender and Sexuality.” While these sections reveal a broad interdisciplinarity and wide range of foci, the individual contributions connect strongly across sections. Throughout discussions of everything from military histories and divorce customs to Facebook use and genderqueer identities, the writers hew closely to the stated mission of the book—to center the voices and stories of Hmong women, and to theorize their agency and empowerment in doing so. The writers often build from seminal works in gender studies, postcolonial studies, as well as South and Southeast Asian scholars in their literature reviews—a citational practice that offers a strength to the collection, as it points to the larger conversations in which these pieces are engaged, and provides points of access and connection for scholars across disciplines. Moreover, the chapters often reference one another in building their arguments, which provides a coherency and depth akin to that of a monograph. The portrait that emerges is of a thriving and vibrant Hmong culture in which women are often at the helm, if we only know where to look and what questions to ask.

One of the central arguments of the book is that Hmong women’s empowerment can take place through and within Hmong culture, repudiating the assumption that Hmong culture is to blame for oppressing women, or that Western norms and cultures provide the only possibility for liberation. This is demonstrated through examinations of the active role that Hmong women have played in taking up employment and becoming educated, in rewriting the spiritual consequences of divorce, in creating supportive communities using online social media, and in developing sewing practices that document Hmong histories and support entrepreneurship and innovation, among others. Julie Keown-Bomar and Ka Vang hone in on the question of agency in a chapter that repositions Hmong families as a key form of support in helping Hmong women to achieve their goals, while Mai Na M. Lee reveals the agency embodied by military leader Vang Pao’s many wives, whose matrimonial form of political power has long been neglected and misunderstood.

The collection is at its strongest in chapters that move beyond critique and revision to specifically focus on building new theory and methodological approaches, such as Ma Vang’s “Rechronicling Histories: Toward a Hmong Feminist Perspective.” In closely examining Hmong women’s life stories and personal histories in terms of “narrative refusal,” or the limits and incoherencies of their accounts, she is able to posit a theory of movement as central to Hmong knowledge formation. This focus on the impact of forced migration and displacement upon Hmong families gives new meaning to the title of the book, as we see that the fraught act of “claiming place” itself is deeply connected to the production of knowledge...