Queer Asian Pacific American Literature

Course Description

Summary

To be LGBTQIA and AAPI is to occupy two disparate, marginalized identities that seem to be be in constant flux. 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 Chinese American lesbian poets of the 1980s to Fatimah Asghar's recent cross-genre coming-of-age novel; from David Henry Hwang’s reimagining of Madame Butterfly to queer Hawaiian reclamations of aloha; and beyond. How do discourses of racialized identity negotiate—even depend upon—gender and sexuality, and how might indigenous perspectives offer alternate histories of the latter? How have writers of literature engaged with concepts such as fetishization, kinship, assimilation, and camp 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 texts of Queer, Asian American, and Pacific Studies. Students will submit weekly responses, write two short papers, and do a final project with both critical and creative options.