Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction by Stephen Hong Sohn (review)

In this much-anticipated new book, Stephen Hong Sohn invites us to contemplate, on a continental scale, the thematic and formal innovations of literatures that center LGBTQI storytellers. Invoking the enduring racial trope of Oriental inscrutability, “inscrutable belongings” gestures toward the historical, legal, sociopolitical, and cultural discourses across North America that deem Asian-raced bodies and their intimacies perverse, deviant, and nonnormative in order to rationalize various forms of exclusion, regulation, and containment. Accordingly, as both a noun and an adjective, Sohn’s “queer Asian North American” signals not so much a category that asserts empirical certitude, but rather a figuration and provocation for apprehending the points of resonance in (negotiating) the critical confluences between processes of sexualization and Asian racialization across the United States and Canada. This transnational figuration thus highlights corresponding material contexts that shape the difficulties experienced by queer Asian North American communities as well as the activist legacies and survival strategies developed to navigate and challenge these obstacles. Notably, Sohn elucidates the forms of “material violence” (4) and “social eccentricity” (27) that structure continual modes of precarity and vulnerability for these communities. Sohn means for us to grapple with the persistent realities of legal discrimination and differential political exclusion, along with palpable risks of violence and death that radically trouble celebratory accounts of queer progress that herald achievements in inclusion and rights.

Queer Asian North Americans, their socialities, and their desires cannot be fully incorporated into, are unsupported by, and therefore are potentially antagonistic toward several prominent configurations of reproductive futurity among dominant accounts by mainstream LGBT and Asian North American discourses: claims of national citizenship and inclusion through securing rights to domesticity and normative kinship; demands for upward mobility within model minority discourses; fantasies of progress signaled by assertions of a “post-racial” landscape; and the insistence on deferring life in hopes of a putatively happier future as promised by the “It Gets Better Project.” A key structuring force to these disparate discourses, Sohn posits, is the “North American heteronuclear family” (12). Insofar as queer Asian North Americans craft alternative forms of sociality, collective practices, and erotic desires that exceed and remain illegible within these dominant normative discourses, Sohn’s formulation of inscrutable belongings also aims to illuminate how these wayward modes of being elucidate, challenge, and reimagine existent frameworks—for theorizing, organizing, and living—outside the sanctioned parameters of domesticity and their attendant forms of violence.

Sohn argues for examining literary texts as intellectual works that theorize this doubleness of inscrutable belongings. Given that narratives and discourses of reproductive futurity set the terms of legibility that differentially determine what practices and intimacies are valued or not, fictions are especially significant in reckoning with such mechanisms of valuation. Accordingly, “queer Asian North American” also names an intertextual coalition as Sohn’s monograph assembles an archive of literary texts published mainly after the year 2000 that follow and tease out the contradictions underwriting the ascension of progress narratives promulgated by dominant efforts for LGBT rights. He thus charts an impressive “typology of queer Asian North American fictions” (246n2) that not only apprehends the social structures that create conditions of inhospitality for those racially and sexually marginalized, but also gestures toward the strategies for navigating and potentially revising such conditions.

Neither totalizing nor exhaustive, Sohn’s typology astutely discerns recurring patterns and enactments performed across this impressive archive of fictions. Elaborating on the theoretical framework, the first chapter explicates the patterns that emerge from texts that do not feature a prominent queer protagonist, while the second examines those texts that do. Chapter 1 explores how the former category of texts affords what Sohn calls “tactical diversions” (27), which function as a form of critical disidentification whereby authors strategically work within and against dominant narrative forms, reorienting their primary characteristics to make space for the proliferation of queerness. The main diversions Sohn assesses situate queerness within...