Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics

Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics explores how race, migration, gender, and disability entwine in conceptions of deserving citizens. V. Jo Hsu explores three archives of trans and queer Asian American (QTAPI) rhetorics, considering a range of texts including oral histories, photography, personal essays, and performance showcases. To demonstrate how QTAPI use personal narrative to critique and revise the conditions of their exclusion, Hsu forwards a critical approach to storytelling, homing, which deliberately engages sites of alienation and belonging. Through a practice of diasporic listening, Hsu tracks confluences among seemingly divergent journeys and locates trans and queer Asian American experiences within broader US and global politics.

The stories at the heart of Constellating Home center the voices of trans and nonbinary people, disabled people, and others often overlooked in conceptions of US citizenry. Hsu's analyses demonstrate the inextricability of Asian American activism from queer politics, disability activism, and racial justice, and they consider how stories network individual experiences with resonant histories and struggles. Finding unlikely intimacies among individual and communal histories, Constellating Home provides tools for fostering mutual care, revealing harmful social patterns, and orienting shared values and politics.

ISBN-13: 9780814214886

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Publication Date: 08-24-2022

Pages: 226

Product Dimensions: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d

Series: Intersectional Rhetorics

V. Jo Hsu (they/them) is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin.