Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM) is nearing an end. The various months dedicated to the heritage and history of racial, gender, and sexual minorities are, for many, life-sustaining bursts of representation; they not only offer an increase in visibility, telling the stories of minoritized communities, but they also evidence the deep legacies of violence and inequity that continue to penetrate our times. This APAHM saw the premiere of the PBS original "Asian Americans," a 5-hour film series documenting the history of the fastest growing racial group in the nation. A thorough and unparalleled documentary, "Asian Americans" is a crucial addition to the archive of ethnic studies. Nevertheless, it is imperative we pay attention to the project's governing statistic; deeming Asian Americans as "the fastest growing population" is a piece of data not to take lightly. In our efforts to build and imagine a world without racism, we must understand the foundational tenet that racialized groups are not treated equally within white supremacy. That Asian Americans are the fastest growing population in America means, simply, that other racialized groups are dying at an exorbitant rate. [And no, I am not including white people here. The decrease in white Americans can be traced to an increase in interracial relationships; a history of racial mixture in which I just completed a dissertation on].

One need not look further than our current crisis -- COVID-19 -- to observe how death has racist preferences. Due to the long legacy of slavery, mass incarceration, and health and economic disparities, Black people in particular are the most vulnerable to dying from coronavirus complications. What's worse is that while the world seems to be operating on pause, the police have only carried on with their targeted violence against Black people. We are now months into the global pandemic, and while the virus still infects at an unprecedented rate, many are unwisely removing their masks and protesting for the reopening of the economy. Others are rightfully protesting the stolen life of Black people. The recent murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, as well as the recording of Amy Cooper threatening the life of Chris Cooper, are, unfortunately, not unprecedented. We are too familiar with this violence. Why then is there a surge to condemn anti-Asian racism? 

It is true that the past few months have shown an increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans. On the one hand, the increase in anti-Asian racism demonstrates the fragility of the model minority myth. Asian Americans -- primarily those with class privilege -- are often designated as “honorary whites” or as people who occupy a close proximity to whiteness despite not being white. The pandemic has been swift to remind us of how exclusionary and conniving whiteness can be. To regard Asian Americans as model minorities is to disregard the historical and contemporary dangers of yellow peril, orientalism, and xenophobia. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to remember the long history that connects Asians to disease. The racialized charge against Asian Americans that we are seeing currently stems from a moment long before the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China and well before western leaders weaponized rhetoric of “Chinese virus” or “kung flu.” We must remember that the first race-based immigration bans -- the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917 -- both suggested Asians are more likely to carry and bring disease, and thus should be prohibited from entering the country. The racist myth that Asians host and disseminate disease and illness conveniently conceals the nation’s practice of white supremacy and, with it, the exclusion of certain immigrants.

Last month, Rachel Chang interviewed me for a piece on Anti-Asian racism in the context of the pandemic. Today, I find myself reiterating my point on

“thinking creatively” about more effective ways to report incidents and learning from Black community organizers “who have built alternative models of safety, support, and healing.”

I was asked about how traditional Asian cultures grapple with the politics of reporting hate crimes. The numbers show how Asian Americans are less likely to report harassment. Shame, citizenship status, and a distrust in or fear of law enforcement may impact whether an Asian person feels inclined to report a hate crime. Of course, the degree of the attack matters. We must recognize how violence functions on scales - stabbing, acid attacks, verbal assaults, the petrifying stares. While we may attempt to look past the microaggressions, they still bear a burden. The more explicit attacks are almost impossible to ignore. Calling the police very rarely results in rescue, and often only perpetuates violence. Police brutality persists even during quarantine. Asian Americans can learn a lot from those who organize against anti-Black racism. Community organizers in the transformative and restorative justice movements have built alternative models of safety, support, and healing. Anti-Asian racism is experiencing a devastating surge, but calling the police does more harm than good.

As APAHM comes to a close, the work to hold each other accountable continues. The celebration of culture and identity need not mean denying our complicity in systemic violence. We can begin by acknowledging the culpability of the unnamed Asian cop who watched as George Floyd died from being pinned to the ground by a white cop's knee. There is space for an understanding of anti-Blackness even as we are attacked for being Asian. The common enemy is white supremacy. So, for those like me - both Asian and queer - there is more work to be done in June *Pride month* when so much attention will be on celebration, I hope we make room for criticism: against white supremacy and its disproportionate targeting of Black life.

​A few years ago, my dissertation advisor--the inimitable Alexis Lothian-- invited me to collaborate on the keyword entry on “Sexuality” for the MLA’s online volume Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. It was a joy to co-write with Alexis, an invaluable lesson in collaborative writing. In light of the global pandemic, the volume's editors decided to expedite the publication in an effort to provide a resource for professors who were forced to transition into online teaching in a pinch. The volume is one of a kind and is an excellent resource for those interested in learning about or teaching on the number of topics that makes the humanities such a vital means in which we can construct a more equitable and life-sustaining world. A complete list of the keywords is available here. 

“During the course of your research, was there any finding or revelation that you did not expect or challenged your preconceptions?” This was what my mom was going to ask me during the q&a portion of my dissertation defense. As soon as I finished my 20-minute presentation, my mother raised her hand (on Zoom) and prepared to ask me what would’ve been the most difficult question I’d have to answer. Instead, while holding back tears she told me how proud she was of me. When we Facetimed afterwards, mom said she wanted to ask a question that would stump me, but her emotions took over. Leading up to the day, I was nervous to see how my family would receive my work. In spite of the jargon and the content on racial fetish, they felt only joy for me. I’m happy to report, also, that I passed with flying colors and have only very minor revisions to complete. 

Soon after I finished writing my dissertation, the president deemed the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. This official designation was unsurprising news to me as I had been following the COVID-19 headlines for some time. It was, nonetheless, a crushing reality to accept. In a matter of days, I had to cancel my travel plans to DC, where I was to defend my dissertation in person, and quickly prepare to host the event on Zoom. After coping with the disappointment that my 6 years of doctoral training would culminate in my Vermont apartment, I settled into a comfort knowing that there was a silver lining to defending online: my family could tune in. And that they did. In addition to sharing the experience with some of my favorite colleagues and best friends, I had fam Zoom in from Manila, Vancouver, and all over my home state of California. 

After the fact, I celebrated with a handful of patient friends who stayed online throughout. We raised a glass together. My advisor sent me a gift basket with champagne and snacks. My partner had a funfetti cake delivered from Milk Bar in DC and surprised me with flowers. The plan, before the pandemic, was to splurge at the LINE Hotel in DC. We scored reservations at Bad Saint, a celebrated Filipino restaurant with a notoriously long line. We’d take a trip over the summer, but for the time being we’d celebrate in the city we called home for 5 years. 

I’m still reeling from it all; there is no replacement for liveness, but in its place the internet facilitated something I’ll never forget. As I settle into the moment, one that finds me now a Dr., I do so with an air of self-confidence - knowing I did it, I finished my PhD - as well as a more complicated feeling of somber gratitude - we are enduring so much loss, and yet, there is still much left to embrace. 


For the sake of archiving, I’m posting the abstract to my dissertation here:

​
A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal

This dissertation develops the concept of racial hosting to conceptualize mixed-raceness as an embodied palimpsest of past, present, and future. A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal argues for the importance of uncovering the disavowed, residual, and violent conditions of racial mixture. The project situates queer theories of temporality and feminist theories of situated knowledge in relation to Asian Americanist critiques of memory. I contend that the Asian/white subject is both an index to track the colonial condition across time, and a host that harbors the colonial desires we have come to name as hybridity, multiracialism, and post-racism.

Each chapter builds towards a methodology of memory to, on the one hand, track the sensorial life of mixed-raceness, and on the other hand, document how the discourse of multiracialism obscures mass violence and the colonial ideology of racial purity. Chapter one advances the framework of white residue through an examination of the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Japanese/white police officer serving 263 years in prison for assaulting 13 Black women. I then narrate the life of Elliot Rodger, the Chinese/white mass shooter and involuntary celibate. Opening the study in this way dispels the notion that racial mixture renders racism’s past obsolete. I then shift to mixed race artists whose performances of desire, memory, and time include a fervent belief in queer and feminist possibility. Chapter two illuminates how a femme aesthetic of retribution surfaces as a response to racial fetish. This chapter spotlights performances by Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Maya Mackrandilal. Chapter three forwards the concept of muscle memory to study how the accumulation of history is deposited into the body and enacted through movement. Here, I contemplate the queer and trans dance of Zave´ Martohardjono. Chapter four de-idealizes hybridity through the oeuvre of contemporary artist Saya Woolfalk. To end, I refer to the photography of Gina Osterloh to force a reckoning with the pressures to remember and claim ancestry. Mixed race subjection, I conclude, is an embodied phenomenon with reverberating implications for the structure of racial form writ large. 

I'm thrilled to share that I defended my dissertation prospectus in May and am now ABD! Completing and defending the dissertation is my final requirement before I secure the doctorate. My eyes are set on a May 2020 graduation. 

It's been a busy few months since I became a candidate: I taught an online course on LGBT Film and Video, conducted research at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, attended a week-long summer institute in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, and I presented at the Affect Theory Conference in Lancaster, PA this past weekend. ​

My dissertation is titled Bad Memory: Colonial Afterlives in Mixed-Race Asian American Art and Performance. I argue that the formal institutionalization of the “multiracial” category in the 1990s has left little room for minoritarian and speculative practices of racial hybridity to emerge. Narratives of racial mixture not only render the mixed-race person as a harbinger of post-racism, but reinforce the hegemony of reproductive futurity and conceal the ways in which war and empire continue to haunt the construction of mixed-race. My dissertation examines mixed-race Asian art and performance in order to, on one hand, inquire into the colonial legacies that the contemporary language of multiraciality obscures, and on the other, build a methodology for tracing how the body retains, remembers, and contests those colonial legacies. To these ends, Bad Memory reveals moments in art, record, and practice in which memory has failed, gone awry, or is otherwise incomplete, imagined, dangerous, fantasized, or defiant. The contemporary works of art and performance featured in this dissertation compile an archive of decolonial and queer aesthetics which I analyze as alternative modes of entry into the politics of multiracialism. 

While much of the research conducted in studies on multiraciality utilize qualitative and quantitative methods such as ethnography, data analysis on the census, observation of media, or journalism, this project examines art and embodied performances as sites where the convergence of racial histories linger both in the body and outside the bounds of linear straight time. Drawing from queer theory’s perspective on temporality, its critique of reproductive futurity, and its historical speculation into undocumented moments of queer desire, this dissertation considers the racialized, gendered, affective, and temporal projects of mixed-race Asian art and performance. The ultimate goal of this project is to envision a methodology of memory that tracks historical silences through the body.

My use of the term “bad” raises a critical eye towards multiracialism’s reparative and celebratory stance as well as its reification of interpersonal and systemic racial violence. Badness at once denounces the well-held notion that mixed-race citizens will cure America from its racist past and muses over how mixed-race people may actually be bad themselves. I locate badness, then, in various colonial afterlives - the enduring restraint of linear straight time, the shifting terrains yet lasting presence of toxic white masculinity, hidden, shameful, or untranslatable narratives of war and exile, and growing levels of environmental decay. Each chapter is an attempt to trace how and at what consequence the mixed-Asian body confronts these colonial afterlives. I argue throughout the dissertation that a focus on colonial afterlives in studies on Asian multiraciality in particular unearths elusive, corroded, and queer lineages of transpacific history. 

The first chapter I’ll write is the dissertation’s last. Chapter 4, "Transpacific Collapse, Apocalyptic Aesthetics, and Bad Futures of Multiraciality," engages new materialist thought in order to ask the following question: What remains concealed if the politics of multiracialism is not examined with a thorough attention to accelerated environmental decay? I examine Jenifer Wofford’s 2016 solo exhibition “Collapse” and Saya Woolfalk’s multi-year and mixed-media project “The Institute of Empathy.” Wofford’s “Collapse” is a collection of paintings featuring roads destroyed by seismic rupture across the Pacific Rim; Woolfalk’s “Institute of Empathy” creates a fictional race of women able to alter their genetic make-up to fuse with plants. Where Wofford’s work draws our attention to the earth’s deterioration and demise, Woolfalk’s project imagines a feminist praxis of hybridity in a post-apocalyptic world. By placing “Collapse” against “The Institute of Empathy” I juxtapose two historical events: seismic rupture and the looming multiracial majority in order to exhibit utopian performatives and multispecies possibilities of biocultural hope.

In the winter I'll begin writing Chapter 1 “White Residue.” This chapter features a comparative case study on mixed-Asian and white monsters: serial killer Andrew Cunanan, mass murderer Elliot Rodgers, and serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw. I bring together the cases of these three mixed-Asian and white men in order to explore the ways in which their proximity to whiteness breeds a legacy of mass violence. Quite opposite from the figure fastened to multiracialism’s often exemplary depictions of mixed-Asian and white bodies, Cunanan’s, Rodgers’, and Holtzclaw’s deviations from this tenet of multiracialism demand an interrogation of the shifting terrains of white masculinity. Set against both the historical interpretation of mixed-race monstrosity (Nakashima, 1992) and the contemporary celebration of growing numbers of mixed-race citizens, this chapter articulates what I name to be "white residue." 

Chapter 2 “How To Be a Monster” analyzes performance artist Chanel Matsunami Govreau and her evil alter-ego Queen Gidrea and feminist artist Maya Mackrandilal and her photography project “How To Be a Monster.” Both Govreau and Mackrandilal’s project’s illuminate a relationship to femininity that merges the desire to kill with the desire to seduce. Through these artists’ projects, I document the aesthetics of mixed-race Asian monstrosity as I argue that a queer femme positionality reverts the narrative of violence to reveal the lasting presence of coloniality through a queer articulation of femininity. 

The 3rd chapter, "Muscle Memory," continues my project’s focus on the body as a site of imperial debris by exploring the performative ways the mixed-Asian body remembers and relays colonial trauma. I trace the intersections of affect studies, critical trauma studies, and performance studies’ theories on hybridity and cultural memory in order to articulate the ways the mixed-Asian body houses afterlives of conquest and memories of migration and exile. I highlight the performance art of Zave´ Martohardjono. I read Martohardjono’s work outside linear time thus situating the enigmatic figure of the queer mixed-Asian body as one that emerges and fades beyond the frequency of straight time.  

Last Friday April 22, I presented a paper titled "The Glorification of Mixed-Race as Reparations | M!xedness Beyond Repair" at the DC Queer Studies Symposium. The theme of this year's symposium was Queer Beyond Repair. I juxtaposed Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's memoir Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home with the case of Daniel Holtzclaw in order to explore counterdiscourses of mixedness in general, and mixed-Asianness in particular. Much of the conversation on mixed-race identity formation and embodiment regards multiraciality as an indication of a post-racial contemporary moment; the acceptance and proliferation of mixed-race bodies is seen to be on the right side of history. Within this train of thought, mixedness serves as a reparative tool that positions the nation as a progressive entity. In writing this conference paper I read the phrase “beyond repair” as a call and demand to situate our questions of queerness, difference, and recovery alongside a critical mixed race perspective that both complicates dominant processes of racialization and emphasizes the mutability of race. How can mixed-race be employed to do things other than repair histories of slavery and exclusion, to indicate something other than a hybrid future? 

I concluded my talk with a musing on m!xedness. Rather than perpetuate narratives of repair, my use of m!xedness with an exclamation served as an exclamation: a sudden reaction, remark, and demand that racial mixture does so much more than signal progress. 

I'm blogging this morning with another exclamation. It's been more than a week after the symposium, and I'm still thinking about conversations on repair. What is beyond repair? How might we consider queer critique beyond repair? The symposium featured an amazing slate of panels. I find my thoughts of the day, however, hinged on the keynote address delivered by Kathryn Bond Stockton. 

Queer critique needs repair!

I'm posting the open letter to Stockton in full here:

On Friday April 22, you closed the 9th Annual DC Queer Studies symposium with a keynote titled, “Impure Thoughts and All They Birth: What Does the Dildo of the Future Look Like?”. After a long day, the four of us (one black queer woman, two mixed-race queer women, and one white queer woman) were excited to listen to your talk. As we sat down and your talk progressed, a flood of emotions overtook our bodies: confusion, anxiety, disgust, anger. We began shifting in our seats, looking around, fidgeting. These corporeal movements transformed into visceral responses: a churning stomach, nausea, an accelerated heartbeat. Our bodies were under attack.
​
While most of your talk was unsettling, we would like to focus on our larger concerns:

• Penetration:  Throughout the talk, you used “penetration” as a central metaphor - equating teaching as penetrating and learning as receiving. What violence occurs when you fail to contextualize and historicize sex (penetration, barebacking, dildo-ed/ing, receiving, kissing, orgasm) as a metaphor? We live in a rape culture in which sexual violence goes unseen and unacknowledged. You asked, “Did you feel that? I just penetrated you,” which conveys that this penetration was an unexpected violence. Your use of penetration without communicating consent perpetuates rape culture. How does a queer white body that can be read as masculine continue to perpetuate white heteronormative masculinity? Or, how does a queer white female body make invisible sexual violence within queer communities?

• Race:  The teaching and circulating of stereotypical characterizations of Eldridge Cleaver privileges white students and renders students of color, and the trauma their bodies carry, as invalid. While you claim “historicizing doesn’t fit the way we read,” what violence occurs when you don’t contextualize and historicize a complicated figure such as Cleaver? As problematic as Cleaver is, exhibiting him and his “codpiece” pants serves as more than just a punchline in your keynote address but continues to perpetuate the fetishization of the Black body.  
• You justified usage of, and risk the reification of, these over-simplified archetypes through pedagogical commitments, arguing that Cleaver’s work is demonstrative of the ways that “we are all infected with racial cartoon,” which students need to recognize, and by declaring this exercise as an “equal opportunity offense.” However, the operating assumption at work here is that your students are equally unaware of “racial cartoon,” thereby presuming a white student as subject – presuming your students are sheltered by whiteness, allowing them the privilege to not see themselves in racialized terms. Further, in suggesting that these generalizations function as “equal opportunity offense,” you refuse and obfuscate a historicization of the explicitly racialized, sexualized nature of these representational tropes, which disproportionately influence depictions and popular understandings of Black women and men. Given the way these images and characterizations have populated our collective national imaginary throughout history, and still haunt depictions of blackness today, these tropes are anything but “equal opportunity offense.” It is epistemically violent to presume that “stereotypes” about white people are weighted, circulated, and concretized in the same ways as are stereotypes about Black people. How might our theories be compromised when we don’t acknowledge our positions of power? How does a queer white body simultaneously silence and speak for racialized bodies?
• Trickle-out theory: We understood your notion of trickle-out theory as an attempt to disrupt the hierarchical dispersion of knowledge: “trickle-out theory vs. trickle-down economics” as you distinguish. By positioning academics as “repair queers,” you center the academy and decenter those “at the dinner table.” Your notion of “succinct complexity”, the ability to translate theory at the dinner table, mirrors code-switching, the practice marginalized students employ in order to communicate their academic endeavors to those who have been historically disenfranchised. You proffered the concept of  “swiss-cheese” minds; not everything we learn will remain and this is okay. You claim students no longer need to articulate rigorous theoretical language. What is disconcerting is the lack of recognition that this rigorous theoretical aerobics has historically been and continues to be a key mechanism used to deny marginalized persons access to the academy. How is the queer white academic body exempt from the standards placed upon academics of color?

We composed this letter in order to ask questions, and while this letter is addressed to you, we are fully cognizant that your theorizations emblematize the structuring logics of the neoliberal academy. It is not that your keynote “kisses” racist and colonialist discourses, but is made possible through these logics. We cannot begin to express what it feels like to sit in a majority-white audience as they laugh at rape jokes and racialized bodies. We hesitated to bring these points up during the Q&A - were we understanding correctly? Being too sensitive? Too emotional? We questioned what our bodies were telling us, our embodied ways of knowing that you so easily dismissed. This is the power of Academia. We have similar fears about this open letter - will there be consequences for speaking our voices?

Ultimately, we are writing this letter because we cannot let this violation of our bodies, knowledges, and experiences remain invisible. Your keynote was a visceral reminder of not only (white) queer theory’s limits but also that the Academy is in need of desperate repair. You asked us if we felt you “penetrate” us and we can guarantee that we did and continue to feel this violation. In fact, your non-consensual “penetration” birthed this letter.

QX Collective 

Other than teaching, coursework, and conferencing, this semester has seen the beginning of SPREAD. 

This particular tea bag came with the following words of wisdom: “Live to share”. Dumplin’ A looked at Dumplin’ M. Light bulbs went off. They decided that instead of lamenting about not having a community, they needed to cultivate a space where good people can come together and share good food. The two dumplin’s decided to bridge community and cuisine. 

After weeks of deliberation, they decided that the bridge would be: the dumpling. Why dumplings? Dumplings can be found in all cuisines but they go by several different names: the Nepali momo, Puerto Rican pasteles, Indian samosa, Italian ravioli and more (seriously. check out the Wikipedia -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpling). Dumplings are small pieces of dough wrapped around a filling. This concept of an ingredient wrapped in dough can be found in all cultures.
​
We came up with an idea. Now, came the issue of naming.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s memoir Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home is not your traditional survivor memoir. Dirty River tells the story of a queer disabled femme writer and mixed-race activist of color whom, after years of abuse at the hands of her white mother, fled the US and sought refuge in Canada. Leah ended up in Toronto where she was offered promises of love, revolution, and queer South Asian dance parties. As she struggled to obtain citizenship and as she dealt with a turbulent queer brown love, Piepzna-Samarasinha remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. 

Dirty River begins with a declaration; one that proclaims surviving abuse is a “choose-your-own-adventure story”.  The memoir is, according to Piepzna-Samarasinha, “heroic, not heartwarming”. It strives not to tell a survival story where the end is becoming normal, but instead offers a riveting detail of how running away from abuse & from America towards a queer brown love revolution in Toronto reveals how a disabled queer woman of color navigates the past, disrupts normative representations of trauma, and ultimately dreams her way home. 

Piepzna-Samarasinha begins her chapter “Learning to Be Brown, Parts 1-3” with the following anecdote: 

“I don’t know how to write about becoming brown, but I know I have to. 

Learning how to be brown is a process some of us go through. Most of us don’t talk about it. We shut the fuck up, study up, and pass into brownness as fast as we can. We don’t want to admit our dorky inauthentic, mixed-race roots. We are fragile. We are making up for lost time. People already laugh at us mixed-race kids because we look weird; they’re going to laugh harder if we admit what we don’t know, what we were never taught by parents who were trying to survive by assimilating into whiteness, or at least not being noticed, as fast as possible. We have to get it back, get it all back.”

Growing up with a white mother who encouraged her to pass and a Sri Lankan father who shielded her from Sri Lankan culture and language, Piepzna-Samarasinha was an awkward mixed kid who never learned what it meant to be brown.  

“She’s not white, she’s mixed. Biracial. I know she looks white, but she’s mixed. I have to ask you a question … are you mixed? I knew it? I couldn’t tell what you were. Mixed people are so beautiful! Oh. You’re the best of both worlds, huh. Oh. You must be confused.”

She began to study what brownness was. At 22, she put away feelings of inauthenticity rooted in her light-skin and lack of cultural competency and faked it until she made it. She read South Asian & feminist of color anthologies, got down at queer South Asian dance parties, and began to cultivate a queer South Asian community. Throughout the chapter, Piepzna-Samarasinha shares her efforts learning how to be a brown queer woman and many of these efforts revolve around food [1]. As she made her way through Sri Lankan cook books, restaurants, and grocery stores, Piepzna-Samarasinha began to cook her way to becoming Sri Lankan. She mastered the spices and perfected dishes, all while ballin' on a budget. 

Piepzna-Samarasinha's “Learning to be Brown” is an intentional and moving process that prioritizes survival and self-creation in addition to receptivity and affinity. At once a mental awareness and a physical navigation of cultural space, learning to be brown as a representation of mixedness uncovers how non-binary experiences cultivate an embodied consciousness rooted in ambiguity. In this "choose-your-own-adventure-story", Piepzna-Samarasinha's Dirty River alludes to the ways in which queer mixed-race folks imagine and create themselves after familial and state violence and trauma. Rather than reach towards normality, Piepzna-Samarasinha struggles, keeps on, and struggles some more. Her story is her gift to us. She leaves us with a challenge:

"You ran away to find freedom, and you found it. You made it. Now you gotta tell it. You gotta figure out how to tell the story."




[1] future post in the works about my take on this. Hint: #decolonizingdumplings

I don’t know how, but spring semester is here. I’m a TA for “Women’s Bodies in Contention,” enrolled in a “Comparative Race and Ethnicity” graduate seminar, and faced with the task of completing my second year interdisciplinary paper (IDP). During the first meeting for Comparative Race and Ethnicity, our professor reminded us of the simple question we must ask ourselves: “so what?” These two words bring me back to “Ethnography and Performance,” one of my first graduate seminars in Fall 2014, when my professor also pressed us to ask ourselves why our work and research questions matter. 

So what?

This question is a timely one to ask as the semester begins. I’m continuing to make my way through coursework while also working towards completing my program’s next benchmark, the IDP. In coursework I’m constantly immersed with new and exciting theories&texts, making my task of selecting an IDP topic challenging. The IDP is rooted in original research, should draw on at least two modes of inquiry, and should mark a familiarity with the relevant theoretical literature. I have some ideas - I just need to narrow. Blogging weekly will hopefully help with this process. In this semester's first musing I’ll tackle the simple yet complex question, “so what?”

I wonder why some consider our contemporary moment a post-racial one. I wonder how the mixed-race body factors into this progress narrative. Why am I concerned with the body? The body, so what? To me, the body is an agent - an acting subject rather than a malleable object. (Or the body is part of a subject - the body, mind, soul, and machine exist in a vortex). Rather than consider the mixed body as fetishized, sexualized, or glorified, I want to think about the ways in which mixed people enact agency. In this vein, I consider the body to be an archive, a corporeal collection of lived-experience, trauma, and emotion. I wonder how these things get branded onto the flesh. I wonder how the body resists normalizing apparatuses.

With these questions and curiosities in mind, my attention has focused on images of mixed-race bodies. Do these images of mixed-race people contribute to a post-racial myth? How do these images get circulated? How might these images objectify mixed-race bodies? How might they also restrict understandings of mixedness? What do I mean by mixedness? How could we represent/document/portray mixedness as a bodily phenomenon without subjecting mixed people to objectification or glorification? How does mixedness contribute to anti-black racism? How is mixedness always already framed by whiteness? How does mixedness offer a way to move beyond dichotomous identity categorizations? 

While the body is usually characterized in physical and external terms, I want to think of how mixed people are more than that. I’m eager to explore how mixed people enact their mixedness beyond the flesh or photographic image. How does mixedness become an intentional mode of navigating public space or a queer way of building relationships? What would happen if we view mixedness less as an exotic set of features and more as a borderlands consciousness?

I’ll use visual culture to critique the objectification/glorification that occurs within the images of mixed bodies. Then will use queer of color critique and women of color feminism to think about this form of consciousness. I think this form of consciousness can be traced not in the images of mixed people, but in the mixed-up narratives they construct themselves; cultural productions such as memoir and poetry.

If the social materializes in the flesh, how can mixedness transcend the subject-object duality that Anzaldúa speaks of? Maybe I'm less concerned with the body and more concerned with how a mixed person is racialized as such as well as the effects of this racialization. I wonder not only how mixedness is embodied, but how that embodiment is transformed/evolved into a form of consciousness.

​So what? 

“The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. ... A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war” (102) - Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.