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 and Merle Woo, to David Henry Hwang鈥檚 queer reimagination of Madame Butterfly, to Fatimah Asghar鈥檚 hybrid novel When We Were Sisters, 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 fetishization, 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 one midterm paper, and have the option of doing a creative or critical final project.
