Relationality in Queer, Trans, and Crip Asian/American and Asian Diasporic Literatures and Cultural Critiques (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: stef torralba

Co-Oranizer: Phuong Vuong

Since its inception, the interdisciplinary field of queer of color critique has recalibrated commonplace understandings of ethnic and racial difference by foregrounding the imbricated relations between race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. More recent interventions into and departures from the field, such as the “emergence” of trans and crip of color critiques, have further illuminated the import of thinking with gender variance and disability in theorizing the relations between racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual formations. These intellectual areas that take inspiration from and exist intimately with queer of color critique have opened up previously under-considered avenues of relational thought––transnational frameworks of gender nonnormativity (Snorton and Haritaworn 2013) and horizontal networks of interdependency (Kim 2020; 2025) as a couple examples. Key as this scholarship is for studies of literature, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity, the histories, cultures, and experiences of queer, trans, and disabled Asian diasporic subjects are still often marginalized in this work. Intersectional scholarship on Asian diasporic subjects has tended to focus on ethno-racial particularities (Manalansan 2003; Gopinath 2005; Fajardo 2011, as some examples), but has tended not to investigate “Asian” or “Asian/American” as carrying relational potentials excessive of multicultural logics.

This seminar asks: Is “Asian” a relational formation that, despite becoming politically legible through liberal multiculturalism, has been shaped by multiple prior and still-ongoing histories of racial, colonial, imperial, gendered, and sexualized terror? How might Asian/American and Asian diasporic literatures and cultural critiques allow us to examine queer, trans, and crip racial forms of relationality differently? While we wish to think about relationality expansively vis-à-vis the intercorporeal and intersubjective relations between bodyminds, things, species, and environments in and across spacetimes, we aim to center two understandings of relationality in particular. The first, per Édouard Glissant (1990) and later expanded by Amber Musser (2018), Xine Yao (2021), and Vivian Huang (2022), is a nonhierarchical decolonial ethic that imagines beyond majoritarian logics of togetherness premised on knowability––i.e., opacity. The second is a framework for intersectionality in dialogue with Black and other Feminisms of Color that recognizes race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and dis/ability as co-constitutive formations that take shape in relation with each other in plural historical and cultural contexts. We encourage work deploying comparative and relational race and ethnic approaches to highlight confluences, affinities, and coalitions across histories and geographies.

Please submit an abstract (300 words) and bio (250 words) to https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting by October 14, 2024.


Contact: torralbas@grinnell.edu