Course Description
Summary
To be LGBTQIA and AAPI is to occupy two disparate, marginalized identities that seem constantly to be shifting. What might the literature of this intersection teach us about larger questions of community, belonging, and resistance? This 2000-level class attempts to locate a Queer Asian Pacific America through literature, from the work of early Chinese American lesbian poets like Kitty Tsui, to David Henry Hwang鈥檚 queer reimagination of Madame Butterfly, to contemporaries like No鈥榰 Revilla and Fatimah Asghar, and beyond. How do discourses of AAPI identity negotiate鈥攅ven depend upon鈥攇ender and sexuality? How have writers of literature engaged with concepts such as hypersexualization, kinship, assimilation, and 鈥渟aving face鈥 as a matter of craft? And what possibilities for postcolonial and diasporic being may be opened up by queer/trans life, literature, and language? We will engage these and other questions by reading works of fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as critical and theoretical texts. Students will submit weekly responses, write two short papers, and do a final project with both critical and creative options.
