AAAS 280B SUNY at Binghamton Chinese Experience in the Americans Discussion Explain the categories of “race,” “gender” and “sexuality” by using assigned re

AAAS 280B SUNY at Binghamton Chinese Experience in the Americans Discussion Explain the categories of “race,” “gender” and “sexuality” by using assigned readings, please use concrete examples from the readings to support your claim. 4 pages long, 12-pt font, double spaced Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies
Author(s): David L. Eng
Source: Social Text, No. 52/53, Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender (Autumn Winter, 1997), pp. 31-52
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/466733
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Social Text
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Out Here and Over There
QUEERNESS AND DIASPORA
IN ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Impossible Arrivals David L. Eng
For Asian Americans issues of “home” are particularly vexing. Historically configured as either unassimilable aliens or perversely assimilated
and thus “whiter than white” (the sojourner thesis versus the modelminority myth), Asian Americans have at best a dubious claim to citizenship and place within the U.S. nation-state.’ Sense of membership within
the larger U.S. national collective has traditionally followed the political,
economic, and cultural incorporation of a Western European ethnic group
under the banner of immigration and assimilation, and through the spatial
metaphorics of the United States as a point of arrival and melting pot.
However, recent debates in Asian American studies about diaspora-its
focus on point of departure and on displacement from origin-insist that
we (re)think the problematics of home in this field.2 Suspended between
departure and arrival, Asian Americans remain permanently disenfranchised from home, relegated to a nostalgic sense of its loss or to an optative sense of its unattainability.
Approaching this problem of home from a spatial angle, we might
reasonably wonder: Where, after all, is Asian America? Can Asian America finally be located, designated, or pinned down? A quasi-geographical
term that gained popularity in the 1970s, Asian America3 continues to be
invoked with increasing frequency today. A siteless locale with no territorial sovereignty, the term Asian America underwrites, as Sau-ling C. Wong
suggests, “a yearning for the kind of containing boundaries and contained
site enjoyed by the dominant society, a nation-state”-a home.4 To refigure, then, this particular spatial dynamic in relation to Oscar V. Campomanes’s suggestive claims about Filipino American literatures: Asian
American identity might well be considered more in conjunction with a
discourse of exile and emergence than with one of immigration and settlement.5 In this manner, considering diaspora in Asian American studies
works to undermine and to dislodge any smooth alignment of home and
nation-state. Moreover, the popular presumption in both Asian American
and American studies that our intrinsic fields of inquiry are necessarily
grounded in one location-limited to the domestic space of the United
States-would merit reconsideration through the lens of a more spatially
(that is, diasporically) encompassing theoretical framing.
Social Text 52/53, Vol. 15, Nos. 3 and 4, Fall/Winter 1997. Copyright ? 1997 by Duke
University Press.
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Thinking for a moment outside the traditional borders of Asian
American studies, for those of us also invested in the field of queer stud-
ies, questions of home prove equally problematic. The often literal ejection of queers from their homes-coupled with their marginalization by
pervasive structures of normative heterosexuality-attests to analogous
dilemmas around this issue. Traumatic displacement from a lost heterosexual “origin,” questions of political membership, and the impossibilities
of full social recognition dog the queer subject in a mainstream society
impelled by the presumptions of compulsory heterosexuality. In this particular ordering of the social sphere, to “come out” is precisely and finally
never to be “out”-a neverending process of constrained avowal, a perpetually deferred state of achievement, an uninhabitable domain. Suspended between an “in” and “out” of the closet-between origin and
destination, and between private and public space-queer entitlements to
home and a nation-state remain doubtful as well.6
How, then, might we think about queer notions of home in this particular context of impossible arrivals? To take one example, a film such as
Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, which obsessively rescripts house
and home in its narrative and thematic content, suggests that anxieties
about loss of home remain psychically central to queer cultural projects
and social agendas.7 Moreover, the political moniker of activist groups
such as Queer Nation, which tenaciously locates questions of membership
within a larger national collectivity, proposes that home as a regulating
principle might, on reflection, constitute one of queer activism’s organizing conditions of possibility. In its alignment with the nation-state, home
becomes the site of validation-the privileged location for the benefits of
citizenship. While Paris Is Burning and Queer Nation might offer potential
ways of disturbing traditional understandings of membership in the U.S.
nation-state, their multiple invocations of home nonetheless suggest that
queers, like Asian Americans, harbor similar yearnings for the kind of
contained boundaries enjoyed by mainstream society. Hence, despite fre-
quent and trenchant queer dismissals of home and its discontents, it
would be a mistake to underestimate enduring queer affiliations to this
concept.
Taken together, these numerous problems of home urge us to consider the intersection of queerness and diaspora-the implications of their
various crossings-in Asian American studies. How might we theorize
queerness and diaspora against a historical legacy that has unrelentingly
configured Asian Americans as exterior or eccentric to the U.S. nationstate? How might queerness and diaspora provide a critical methodology
for a more adequate understanding of Asian American racial and sexual
formation as shaped in the space between the domestic and the diasporic?
What enduring roles do nations and nationalism play in the delineation of
32 David L. Eng
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such critical projects? What new forms of community emerge through a
diasporic and queer challenge to the linking of home and the nation-state?
In approaching diaspora and queerness through this particular set of
issues, I hope to create a productive dialogue between Asian American
and queer studies, bringing together two disciplines that have remained
traditionally unconnected. In considering the material and theoretical
intersections of racial and sexual difference for Asian Americans, this
essay also engages contemporary debates on the internationalizing of
American studies. Investigating American studies in sites outside the
immediate borders of the United States offers a new understanding for the
current, hateful conservative backlash against people of color as well as
queers. While it would be a mistake to align in too homologous a manner
the political agendas and intellectual concerns of Asian American, American, queer, or diasporic studies, it does seem clear from the above discussion of home that we must undertake a serious examination of how
social relations within our domestic borders inflect, and in turn are
inflected by, the diasporic-by framings of transnational capital, immigration, and labor. I offer the following speculations on queerness and
diaspora in Asian American studies with the hope of yielding some new
methods of thinking about how this rapidly expanding field provides
unexplored theoretical paradigms for a crucial evaluation of American
identity, home, and nation-state in an age of globalized sexual and racial
formation.
Heterosexuality and the Domestic
In order to trace what I see as an increasingly important relationship
between queerness and diaspora in Asian American studies in the late
1990s, it is first useful to consider a brief history of the Asian American
studies movement as it originally formed around the domestic imperative
of claiming the U.S. nation-state.8 In the shadow of 1950s and 1960s civil
rights struggles, the emerging Asian American studies movement focused
much of its political energy and theoretical attention on domestic-based
race relations within the geographical boundaries of the U.S. nation-state.
Modeled on the cultural nationalism of the Black Power movement, the
field during this period largely endorsed a political platform of identity-
based politics, racial separatism, and a Marxist-inspired class critique of
American capitalism. The Asian American cultural nationalist project,
perhaps best exemplified by Frank Chin’s Aiiieeeee! group, centered its
attentions on local Asian American communities as sites of resistance for
the mobilizing of political action, the building of alternative economic
institutions, and the creation of oppositional nativist culture.9
Out Here and Over There 33
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In the 1975 prefatory manifesto to their now classic collection of
Asian American writings, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writ-
ers, the editors note that “legislative racism and euphemized racist love”
have consigned Asian Americans to a state of “self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.”‘1 As a remedy, the Aiiieeeee! group calls for the
assertion of an Asian American identity with its own unique and recognizable parameters. Rejecting the dominant “either/or” conception of
Asian American identity as forever divided-split between the “Asian”
and the “American,” and between “Asia” and “America”-the editors
insist on claiming the domestic sphere as their own, linking entitlement to
the (public) nation-state with the (private) prerogatives of home.” Seizing
upon their own self-definition of Asian American, they emphatically state
that the
myth of being either/or and the equally goofy concept of the dual personality
haunted our lobes while our rejection by both Asia and white America
proved we were neither one nor the other. Nor were we half and half or
more one than the other. Neither Asian culture nor American culture was
equipped to define us except in the most superficial terms. However, American culture, equipped to deny us the legitimacy of our uniqueness as American minorities, did so, and in the process contributed to the effect of stunt-
ing self-contempt on the development and expression of our sensibility that
in turn has contributed to a mass rejection of Chinese and Japanese America
by Chinese- and Japanese-Americans.12
In delineating an integrally “whole” Asian American subject against this
model of either/or split subjectivity, cultural nationalism’s political project
centered squarely on Asian American claims to the space of the U.S.
nation-state as enfranchised citizen-subjects.
The Aiiieeeee! model worked to configure Asian Americans as a racialized minority group with its own inviolable political needs, economic concerns, and cultural contours.13 Rejecting the mainstream imaging of Asian
Americans as anomalous ethnic novelties ill-fitted to the general landscape
of the U.S. nation-state, cultural nationalism’s energies focused on not
merely defining but prescribing who a recognizable and recognizably legit-
imate Asian American racial subject should ideally be: male, heterosexual,
working class, American born, and English speaking. Noting that it “is an
article of white liberal American faith today that Chinese men, at their
best, are effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan and, at their worst,
are homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu,”14 the Aiiieeeee! group envisioned the prototypical Asian American male as a grassroots activist who
would counter dominant mainstream stereotypes of the passive Asian
American male sissy “devoid of manhood””5 through his consciously
oppositional voice, his militant attitude, and his resistance to bourgeois
social convention.
34 David L. Eng
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Past as well as present Asian American feminist and queer commentators have rightly noted the Aiiieeeee! group’s problematic assumptions in
positing such a narrowly defined concept of Asian American identity.16
These critics observe that by staking their cultural nationalist project on
such an inflexible notion of identity-on the recuperation of a strident
Asian American masculinity and a “pure,” heroic Asian martial tradition-the Aiiieeeee! group reinscribes a dominant system of compulsory
heterosexuality with all its attendant misogyny and homophobia. Para-
This coupling of
the cultural
nationalist project
doxically, then, cultural nationalist tenets mirrored back both mainstream
heterosexist and racist structures by which stereotypical conceptions of
Asian American men as “efficient housewives”17-as effeminate, illegitimate, and divided-were produced in the first instance.
This critique of cultural nationalism is by now not only well known
but well rehearsed. In criticizing the Aiiieeeee! group’s reliance on this narrow definition of Asian American identity, however, Asian American cul-
with the
heterosexual is
neither intrinsic
nor determined.
tural commentators have failed to remark upon the specific connection
between the Aiiieeeee! group’s focus on the domestic and their focus on the
heterosexual-that is, their implicit linking of cultural nationalism’s claims on
the domestic space of the nation-state as a naturalized function of compulsory
heterosexuality. In this instance, the paradoxical double meaning of domestic as both the public space of the masculine (nation-state) and the private
realm of the feminine (home) is brought into relief and contradiction, the
forced reconciliation of their relationship being contingent on the strict
repression and disciplining of the latter to the former. In other words, a
public Asian American male identity is purchased through the emphatic
possession of a popularly devalued private realm, constituted here as both
the feminine and the homosexual.
This coupling of the cultural nationalist project with the heterosexual
is neither intrinsic nor determined.18 Thus, we must be careful not only to
critique vigorously the patriarchal complicities of the Asian American cul-
tural nationalist project, but also to consider how this disciplining of the
domestic-the forced repression of feminine and homosexual to mascu-
line, and of home to the nation-state-is a formation in need of queering.
How does Asian American cultural nationalism’s claiming of the domestic
through the heterosexual preempt a more comprehensive investigation of
an Asian American identity and a political platform informed by queerness and diaspora? If the elevation of the domestic and the heterosexual in
Asian American cultural nationalism has worked to disavow and to pre-
clude a discussion of the diasporic and queer from the movement’s political and intellectual inception, how might we rethink the historical effects
of the Asian American movement’s (heterosexual) desire for the domes-
tic? How might we invoke a queer and diasporic assumption of the
domestic to denaturalize any claims on the nation-state and home as
inevitable functions of the heterosexual?19
Out Here and Over There 35
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Return of the Repressed:
Risking the Hyphen in Asian(-)American Studies
The relative success of Asian American cultural nationalism’s (heterosexual) desire for the domestic might perhaps be best examined in light of the
continuing debates on Asian American as a hyphenated identity: Asian
American versus Asian-American. As I understand the argument, attempts
to excise the hyphen from this term reflect on a grammatical level cultural
nationalism’s desire to eschew the notion of a split subjectivity, while
claiming the uniqueness of Asian American identity as “whole” and
wholly viable within the space of the nation-state. Hence, the elimination
of the hyphen from this term claims entitlement to Asian American mem-
bership within the larger U.S. national collective. If diasporic tenets sug-
gest a suspension between departure and arrival, origin and destination
for the Asian American subject-the sustaining of a spatial hyphen-then
cultural nationalism’s desire to claim the space of the domestic as our
own relies upon the definitive excision of this marker.
The hyphen debate remains interesting to me for several reasons. The
frequency with which the repressed hyphen returns to mark the term
Asian(-)American with utter randomness clearly suggests that Asian Amer-
ican claims to the domestic space of the nation-state as home and as citizen-subjects are far from resolved.20 The difficulty of banishing the
hyphen from this term functions, then, as a grammatical symptom vitiat-
ing Asian American claims to membership in the U.S. nation-state. More-
over, the slippage of “Asian” and “American” calls to our attention the
tenuous coupling of the “nation” and “state” itself, whose own hyphenated stability is secured, among other ways, through the sustaining ambi-
guity of Asian(-)American as a hyphenated identity.21 The arbitrariness
with which the hyphen continues to reappear thus underscores the conceptual and political limits of cultural nationalism’s (heterosexual) desire
for the domestic-to challenge effectively enduring historical configurations of Asian Americans as “aliens,” exterior to the nation-state, divided
between an “over here” and “over there.”22 If the continual return of the
repressed hyphen marks the impossibility of cultural nationalism’s naturalizing turn to the domestic and heterosexual-functioning as the enduring symptom of the vicissitudes of this turn-then might we begin to
reevaluate the efficaciousness of cultural nationalism’s domestic and het-
erosexual project against alternative theoretical models and strategies?
Can the hyphen in Asian(-)American only ever be a grammatical effect
of mainstream prejudice and domination? Might we begin to reconsider
the hyphen not just as a grammatical marker of Asian American disenfranchisement from the sphere of the domestic (in both its private and
public manifestations), but as a necessary risk for a more sufficient analy-
36 David L. Eng
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sis of old and new forms of Asian American racial and sexual formation?
Might risking the hyphen yield a theoretical model beyond the domestic
and the heterosexual as the presumptive limits of an efficacious Asian
American political project? Are there historical reasons and current polit-
ical uses that call for a hyperbolization, and not the re…
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