What's queer about "Asian America"? All too often, queerness typifies signs of injury and victimization for this racial formation (e.g., castration, hyper-/de-sexualization). Historically, the legal and symbolic parameters for who counts as an American were fortified against the Asian body as a threatening alien Other. Cultural discourses invoked notions of deviant genders and perverse sexualities as proof that Asian/Americans are inassimilable to the heteronormative domestic ideals of the nation. Since these depictions were used to substantiate exclusionary policies, Asian Americans often unwittingly refute queerness in making claims to national belonging. Yet, this strategy effectively marginalizes LGBTQ groups among Asian American communities and further stigmatizes non-normative genders and sexualities. Countering these tendencies, scholarly works in queer Asian American studies join a growing corpus of Asian American creative works that feature LGBTQ protagonists in foregrounding the rich intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality. Guided by the theoretical insights of these writings, this course approaches queerness as not an identity, but rather a critical paradigm that elucidates and interrogates the inequities of US citizenship. We will explore how Asian American literatures envision queerness as a creative force for activating convivial practices, desires, and socialities that exceed disciplinary norms of the nation-state. This course may feature readings by such authors as Kiku Hughes, Maxine Hong Kingston, SJ Sindu, Kai Cheng Thom, and Ocean Vuong. This course satisfies the Global and Minority Literature Requirement.
Why are you excited to teach this course?
I'm always excited for the opportunity to teach students what it might mean to approach "queer" as not something we are (as in sexual identity) but something we do--a mode of political critique. This course in particular allows students to explore how Asian Americans have been pivotal in shaping the uses of queer as a mode of trenchant political organizing and theoretical paradigm. Looking at a wide range of scholarly and creative works, we'll contemplate how Asian American artists illuminate the expansive, imaginative capacities of queerness in remaking our worlds.
What are some course topics that you would like to highlight?
In this course, we'll explore how ideas about deviant genders and sexualities have been central to processes that have racialized Asian bodies in the United States. We'll think about how queerness intimately shapes ideas about what constitutes racial injury and racial repair in Asian American histories, including the Chinese railroad workers, the Japanese American internment during World War II, and the Vietnam War. Even more fun though, we'll engage with works by queer Asian American writers and artists that take on incredibly innovative and experimental modes of story-telling that signal how the intersections between the terms "queer" and "Asian American" can spark revolutionary possibilities for social transformation.
Chris A. Eng’s research examines how US ethnic literatures and performances chart imaginative visions that illuminate more capacious accounts of what constitutes national belonging, historical injury, and social justice. Eng’s work investigates the productive frictions and intimacies between Asian American literatures and queer of color critique. Forthcoming with NYU Press in the Sexual Cultures series (Feb 2025), his first book Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America (https://nyupress.org/9781479834662/extravagant-camp/), examines the implications of revisiting “the camps”—sites of biopolitical management—that populate Asian American history through the irreverent stylings of “camp” —a performative practice of queer excess. As a Faculty Fellow with the Center for the Humanities for Fall 2024, Eng will be continuing work on his second book project, White Gay Fantasies: A Queer Romance for the Asiatic Presence, which explores why deployments of Asianness prove so fecund at this historical juncture in substantiating the meaningfulness of “queerness” as signaling both a violent experience of alienation and the radical potential for social transformation.
Eng is also an Affiliated Faculty for the minor in Asian American Studies. His graduate teaching and advising span the fields of American studies, critical ethnic studies, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, as well as theorizations of affect, diaspora, empire, and post45 American literature. Beyond the campus, he has been involved in professional academic organizations, serving on the Minority Scholars’ Committee of the American Studies Association, the chair of the Queer Studies section of the Association for Asian American Studies, and the Asian American Literature forum of the Modern Language Association. He was formerly a Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Asian American Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a faculty member in the English department at Syracuse University. His work has been recognized by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars through a 2020 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty and by the WashU Graduate Student Senate through an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. In 2023, he received the Early Career Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.
