The Homeless Diaspora of Queer Asian Americans

Introduction THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES POSSIBILITIES FOR CONCEPTUALIZING QUEER DIASPORA AS a critical practice in cross-border organizing. It also addresses the citizenship(s) that are implicated in the process of transnationalism, which evokes gender and sexuality as crucial modes of analysis. I will be looking specifically at Asian models of diaspora and alternative models of diaspora, which are informed by sexuality and gender as much as they are by nationhood. One of the major terms of analysis in this article is the notion of hybridity as it is used by cultural critics writing on second-- and third-generation immigration experiences and the counterhegemonic cultural practices that arise from those experiences. However, this term can be interpreted in various ways, some of which incorporate queerness as a challenge to heteronormativity. Previously, I have used hybridity as a term to designate the multiplicity and/or intersection of various identities, particularly postcolonial and sexual identities. In this article, I will explore the dangers and difficulties in conceptualizing hybridity in ter ms of queer diaspora due to the unequal power relationships existing between members of the same diaspora, some of whom are located in more economically privileged sites. Given these asymmetries, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to use one starting point (i.e., sexuality, race, gender, class, or nationhood) in writing about queer diaspora. Citizenship and dual citizenship acquire new meanings depending on the shifting global positionalities of transnational subjects. Experiences of privilege and diaspora are informed by race, class, gender, nationality, and/or sexuality. For instance, although a transnational Mexican migrant may enjoy citizenship in his/her country of origin, the border is the point at which rights associated with U.S. citizenship cease; however, a transnational capitalist, or a Third World elite, may enjoy benefits approximating those of dual citizenship to a larger degree due to his/her economic status. A First World queer transnational, on the other hand, may not enjoy many of the rights of citizenship or dual citizenship in various locations of a diaspora in which heterosexism is the norm; hence, the dialectic relationship between privilege and diaspora makes the notion of power relative to specific locations. In the process of strategizing for transnational organizing, it is necessary to explore the relationship between d iasporic and/or transnational experiences of immigrant and second or third generation postcolonial queers in the context of their shifting global positionalities. By transnationalism and diaspora, I refer to concepts that have been used to destabilize traditional models of migration in which the transition from the old country to the new country was assumed to involve assimilation to a new order in which ethnicity dropped out. Transnationalism is a process whereby social links between the country of origin and the host country may be maintained to resist this supposed homogenization of assimilation. Roger Rouse (1991) describes this process in the context of the economic and cultural practices of Mexican migrants who develop transnational migrant circuits in response to the internationalization of transnational corporations. He depicts their experience as an act of border crossing in which the juxtaposition of two worlds does not necessarily produce assimilation. Due to the intersecting sites of transnational circuits of capital, labor, and communication of Mexican migrants, Rouse argues that it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a monolithic national identity (Ibid.). Seen in this light, transnationalism and ethnic identification can be a way of historicizing the deracialization of previously racialized subjects (Omi and Winant, 1994: 9--48). In this sense, transnationalism becomes a function of diaspora in the sense that within any diaspora, multiple nationalisms can exist that resist monolithic national identities. …