Afterword: Disciplinary (Trans)formations: Queering and Trans-ing Asian American Rhetorics

V. Jo Hsu, University of Arkansas

(Published December 18, 2018)

Trans Rhetoric(s)

In 2017, as U.S. media debated about the causes and effects of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, New York Magazine’s Andrew Sullivan pointed to Asian Americans as proof that racism has lost its sway:

Today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?

Echoing the well-worn (yet thriving) “model minority” myth, Sullivan invokes the Asian American stereotype that has proliferated mainstream representation. He hits all the familiar notes: education, industriousness, family. In 2012, the Pew Research Center’s “The Rise of Asian Americans” likewise linked Asian American success to an emphasis on “marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success,” and three years later The New York Times identified “strong two-parent families” and a “long Confucian emphasis on education” as “The Asian Advantage” (Kristof).

Since the mid-1900s, this has been the controlling narrative of Asian Americans: we excel in school, build solid nuclear families, value tradition and hard work, and prove that this is the land of equal opportunity. Of Asian America’s many border-crossings, the shift from depraved foreigner (e.g. “yellow peril”) to model citizen merits particular attention in this cultural moment.[1] Without discounting the deeply entangled histories that Asian Americans share with other communities of color, we must also grapple with the fact that our stories are disproportionately distorted to fortify the enduring legacies—and ongoing violences—of racism in this country. To quote Jeff Chang: “What does it mean to be the evidence that racism is not real?” (144).

Individually, each of the essays in this issue offer a possible response, chronicling a wide range of experiences within Asian American history. Collectively, however, they are even more powerful. In concert, these analyses collapse categorical distinctions of time, location, and nationality to disrupt the linear progress narrative so often imposed on Asian America. As what Rachel Jackson describes as “transrhetoric,” these essays “link locations and meanings across difference” (305) to chronicle an Asian America of bold dissenters, robust countercultures, and transnational figurations of community. To build on this developing narrative, I argue for the importance of queer and trans voices within any forward-looking (trans)formation of Asian American identity.

Although the relative invisibility of queer and trans Asian Americans is often blamed on Asian conservatism, this reductive explanation overlooks the influence of “American” ideology. [2] The model minority trope is a North American fable. In many ways, it is the “American” story—the story of how the United States became the (post-racial) leader of the free world. Within this narrative where minorities succeed by studying hard, getting married, and becoming good consumers and producers in the national economy, queer configurations of intimacy and gender are necessarily erased. The lives of queer and trans Asian Americans, then—our experiences of survival and defiance—become sites of counterhegemonic practice.

In rhetorical studies more broadly, trans scholars have begun connecting trans experiences and theories with rhetoric and composition. K.J. Rawson’s work on transgender archiving and G. Patterson’s application of queer and trans knowledge to pedagogical practice offer important theoretical provocations as well as material resources for expanding the breadth and depth of our field.[3] The voices of trans communities, however, remain relatively obscure—despite all the emergent scholarship on transnationalism (Dingo et al.; Dingo; Wang; M. Young), translanguaging (Horner, Lu, et al.; Canagarajah; Leonard and Nowacek; Lee), and transmodalities (Horner, Selfe, et al.; Shipka). This silence is particularly notable in Asian American rhetorics, which has relied heavily on the prefix “trans.”

In fact, “trans” is arguably one of the keywords of Asian American rhetorical studies. In the foreword to Representations, Lu and Horner describe Asian American rhetorics as foregrounding “processes of translation and transformation . . . and our need to treat the Others of transcultural communication as agents of knowledge making rather than the objects of ‘study’ and domination” (vii). In the book’s introduction, Mao and Young describe the emergence and the identity of Asian American rhetoric as “very much tied to our present-day social-cultural, transnational tendencies marked in part by various forms of cultural and linguistic intertextuality” (5). More recently, Morris Young’s 2016 “Across Time and Space: The Transnational Movement of Asian American Rhetoric” asks what it means “to reframe the rhetorical work of Asian Americans as a transnational process and practice” (131), and the contributors to this issue take that question through the unstable, combinatorial formations of “Asian/America.” These studies have channeled the idea of “trans” into dynamic theorizations of language, culture, and identity. Until now, however, Asian American rhetoric has lacked discussions of transgender identities, which offer critical insights into the material consequences of—and resistive approaches to—social and institutional transgressions.

To explore those insights, I use trans theory to examine the roles of Asian Americans and rhetorical studies more broadly within a world of escalating violence against racial, gender, and sexual minorities. Moving between narrative and analysis, I undertake a networked[4] reading of a recent controversy within our discipline: the decision to hold the 2018 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Kansas City, Missouri following the state’s recent onslaught of racist attacks. Critical trans theory enables me to connect mechanisms of racial and gendered violence with narratives of Asian American identities as well as concerns about how scholars and teachers of rhetoric respond to material injustices in the worlds within and outside our universities.

This essay in part takes up the inquiries initiated by queer Asian American intellectuals and activists in the 1990s, which insisted that race, gender, and sexuality “share a constitutive and dynamic relationship . . . whose dialectic combination often yields unrecognized, unacknowledged, and understudied configurations” (Eng and Hom 12).[5] Two decades after these articulations of queer Asian America, its presence in critical discussions remains “sporadic and divided” (6). To move beyond the domains in which we so often isolate race from gender and from sexuality—to write a language that might encompass the interrelations of our many divergent histories—I need to traverse a few boundaries. To respond to the many questions that followed from CCCC 2018—questions about how the field enacts its ethical commitments; about how scholars and teachers of language fit into struggles over global inequity; about the impact of our physical, cultural, and intellectual movements—I require an essay in-transition. This is an exercise in transgression. This is a journey compelled by the dynamism of that prefix: “trans-.” Allow me this space to explore “trans” as method.[6] As a transnational, translanguaging, transitioning body, I ask: what knowledge does passing through the limits of our linguistic and cultural vocabularies afford, and what might be done with that knowledge?

Such inquiry is a method (and conviction) that trans scholars derive from intersectional feminism: exploring the personal as actionable. Individual stories have political significance not only as affect, and not as a means through which to consume the pain of the “other,” but as acute, felt insight into the violence and oversights of our institutions. Although discussions so often compartmentalize elements of our identities, we don’t live single-issue lives. So, I will begin with experience. I begin with the messy ways that race, gender, and sex converge in individual bodies, and I will follow these narrative threads to the cultural and institutional forces that condition our shared worlds.

Transliteracy

A note on definitions. At the core of this essay—and a lot of work in trans (-lingual/national/gender) studies—is the understanding that taxonomies are dynamic, imperfect, and permeable. Definitions are powerful (and often necessary) because the act of naming renders people, concepts, and things legible within social and institutional structures. Those who cannot be named – to borrow from Mae M. Ngai—become “impossible subjects.” A transliterate orientation to these terms, however, recognizes that definitions are relational and that the language used here is applied strategically to circumscribe particular histories, communities, and ideas in order to analyze and respond to our cultural moment. Others may use these terms differently in their own lives and/or in their cultural contributions.

My own usage of “queer” aligns with Eng and Hom’s “political practice based on transgressions of the normal and normativity” (1). Because I define “trans” as any whose identifications deviate from their birth-assigned gender and because cultural norms in the United States currently marginalize such gender expressions, this is a trans-inclusive definition of queer. I want to note, however, that not all trans individuals identify as queer and, obviously, vice versa. “LGBTQ” communities and politics have also historically underrepresented the concerns and needs of trans folk—much as casual usages of “Asian American” have at times ignored communities outside of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese American experiences. In response to those histories, I focus my attentions on queer Asian American communities that (1) center trans voices and leadership while addressing the interrelated concerns of gender and sexual minorities and (2) consistently elevate the voices of Asian Americans from South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.

Transit

“The NAACP Travel Advisory for the state of Missouri, effective through August 28^th, 2017, calls for African American travelers, visitors and Missourians to pay special attention and exercise extreme caution when traveling throughout the state given the series of questionable, race-based incidents occurring statewide recently, and noted therein.”

            – NAACP, August 2, 2017 

The 2018 CCCC annual convention took place in Kansas City, MO, seven months after the NAACP issued a travel advisory for the state. The Missouri Attorney General’s Office had just reported that Black drivers were 75% more likely to be stopped and searched by police officers than white drivers (Sanderson); the state had passed a bill that facilitates housing and employment discrimination; and Missouri in general had been in the national spotlight for hate crimes, police violence, and other incidents of overt racism (Sanchez). In the months following the travel advisory, the members of CCCC scrambled to find the “right” response—whether and how to organize a conference “committed to supporting the agency, power, and potential of diverse communicators” (“About CCCC”) in an environment that had been so publicly identified as hostile to “diverse” bodies.

The problems were myriad. Funds had already been committed. The president of the St. Louis County NAACP opposed the travel advisory and worried that “the people hurt by the travel advisory are the members of the NAACP community who work across our state in hospitality industry jobs” (Montgomery). Many members of CCCC also observed that racist, heterosexist, and xenophobic violence and legislation pervade this country such that a location that would be equally “safe” for everyone was (and is) literally impossible. And finally, the question remained: What would moving the conference accomplish—for the organization, for the people of Missouri, or for our presently volatile national and global politics?

I was not privy to the executive committee’s conversations or decision-making processes, and I do not envy those on whose shoulders this decision fell. My intent in this essay is not to critique the choices made or the events of the actual conference. Rather, I ask how we arrived at such a position in the first place and consider what might be learned from our conflict. Here is what I do know about the deliberation surrounding CCCC 2018. I know that the Latinx, American Indian, Asian/Asian American, Queer, and Disability Studies Caucuses issued a joint statement urging the Executive Committee to relocate the convention (Sano-Franchini et al.).[7] I know that the program chair, Asao Inoue, has a staunch record of advocating for more equitable practices in our teaching and our overall profession. As in his 2018 CFP, Inoue regularly uses his platforms to provide space for marginal language practices and their practitioners. It would be difficult to refute that he pursues justice as practice, and the same could be said of many of composition’s scholar-teachers. Undeniably, there is both substantive will and work behind this field’s stated commitments to ethical scholarship and teaching. Amid all our hand-wringing about how to express and actually live our commitment to the vulnerable communities of Missouri, then, I wondered: What is the effect of our empathy? What are the limits of our care? How do we transcend those boundaries?

Transportation

Choosing your life

and how that made you into someone

who now often finds it easy

to explain your gender by saying

you are happiest on the road

when you're not here or there

but in between.

That yellow line running down the center of it all

like a goddamn sunbeam.

 

– Andrea Gibson, “Your Life”

The drive to Kansas City was a straight shot of open road—three hours of undisturbed sunshine, asphalt, and audiobooks. When I arrived, I went immediately to conference registration. It was in the Ballroom Foyer of the Marriott Downtown, one floor above the “Colonial Ballroom” and the “Imperial Ballroom.” Within the first ten minutes, I was addressed as “sir,” referred to as “he,” and mistaken for a graduate student twice. Another hotel guest asked about the conference and assumed I taught ESL. By the time I reached the hotel elevator, I was texting a friend about being misgendered while also wondering if that was even possible in a moment of gender ambiguity.

Allow me to revise. Pronoun ambiguity. My pronouns were in flux. My gender felt as stable as it had ever been—a goddamn sunbeam extending beyond the bounded territories into which we have divided gender. In Mandarin, my first language, spoken pronouns are inherently gender-neutral—surprising, perhaps, because Mandarin also has at least four different terms for “Aunt” depending on whether said aunt is on your mother’s side or your father’s side and whether she is older or younger than your parent. When you refer to her in third person, however, you use the same pronoun you would for your uncle, or for your parent’s nonbinary sibling for that matter. This is a fact I cling to—that there are some ways in which Chinese still feels closer to home.

For much of Chinese history, even the written language had only one word for the third-person singular: 他 (tā). Although a female-specific 她 (tā) was introduced in the nineteenth century to facilitate the translation of Western texts (Cheng 102), more recent efforts towards gender-inclusivity have used the Romanized “ta” as a translingual, transcultural, and gender-neutral pronoun (Mair). Spoken aloud, tā is and has always been gender-indifferent. I hear this in my parents’ English when they switch between “he” and “she” mid-sentence. Tā is a pronoun in which your personhood is assumed and your gender is circumstantial—elaborated upon only if it is relevant to the topic at hand. Within the English s/he binary, however, there is no way to reference someone in third person without specifying a gender—as if that were the defining trait of their personhood.

Trans(formation)

“I want to be witnessed in present tense . . . But everything I am today is profoundly shaped by my past—five decades navigating a racially non-conforming, gender-transgressive, disabled body, sculpted by the legacy of Asian female subjugation, transphobia, homophobia, and racism that has impacted my life since the womb.”

– Willy Wilkinson (He/Him), Born on the Edge of Race and Gender

Allow me to rewind. In August 2017, when the NAACP issued the travel advisory, I had just begun my first year on the tenure track. That summer, I moved my queer Asian American self to the American South. I relocated my scant belongings to a duplex I found on Craigslist, and my neighbors across the street promptly erected a Confederate flag. That same August—while CCCC deliberated about Kansas City, while I started my new job, while my neighbors lobbed literal garbage into my yard, while black and brown bodies continued to be targeted by, subjected to, and destroyed by hatred and violence every single day in Missouri, across the country, and around the world—I began volunteering for API Equality – Northern California (APIENC).

APIENC is a San Francisco-based organization that works on recovering, archiving, and mobilizing queer and trans Asian American histories. I contributed in ways I could over Google Hangouts, Google Docs, and email. Every time I met someone else from APIENC, we exchanged pronouns. By the third time someone asked for my pronouns, I was at a loss: I was twenty-nine-years old, an assistant professor of English, and struggling with pronouns. I had started dating women 15 years ago. I was forcefully outed at school 12 years ago. I was harassed and detained by Phoenix policemen 11 years ago. I was dragged from a woman’s bathroom 10 years ago. These were things that happened to me; these were things I experienced in the first person—in a pronoun that has no need for gender specificity.

Like many, I was initially resistant to adopting singular “they.” I had heard the argument that gender-neutral “they” is already a part of our everyday lexicon. For instance, a teacher might ask, “Who hasn’t submitted their homework?” This example has innumerable iterations: “Someone has lost their umbrella” or “A guest forgot their jacket.”[8] What this argument doesn’t address is that, in these instances, “they” belongs to the unknown. Gender-ambiguous “they,” for many, can only reference a distant and foreign them. For most of my life, this was the only version of nonbinary “they” available to me.[9]

APIENC, however, invited me into an intimate world of gender transgressions. In collaboration with other volunteers, I listened to, worked on, and immersed myself in archives of queer and trans Asian American oral histories. I began with APIENC’s Dragon Fruit Project (DFP), which trains queer and trans Asian/Americans/Pacific Islanders (QTAPI)[10] to conduct, transcribe, and disseminate interviews about QTAPI experience and activism from the 1960s to the present (“Dragon Fruit Project”). Through the DFP, I discovered a world where diverse expressions of gender and sexuality were assumed and affirmed—through which I inherited a legacy of radical relationalities and identities. This archive enabled me to argue for the historical, cultural, and intellectual impact of queer and trans Asian Americans at the 2018 CCCC sponsored session on Asian American rhetorics.

In Kansas City, I quoted from Alice Y. Hom’s interview of Kitty Tsui, the first Chinese American woman to come out as a lesbian in print:

Thank you for writing that book. And, you know, thank god it was published and that there were women’s bookstores around to carry the book. There’s just something around—how do we have access to this information and how do we have access to knowing who we are? And it was very much through people performing or people writing that we had a sense there was something bigger than us.

Hom’s “we” enacts a queer temporality. It envisions a community of queer Asian Americans that stretches from Tsui’s 1983 “coming out” to her conversation with Hom in 2016. During the interview, Tsui says she felt “like I was the only Asian lesbian in the world.” Hom describes a similar isolation, relieved in part by finding Tsui’s autobiography in a New Haven bookstore: “Wow, now I could see that there were other Asian American lesbians. That resonated with me. Because obviously, we don’t—you can’t read about it often anywhere” (Tsui, “Interview”). This sense of unbelonging resonates powerfully across so many of the stories told by both DFP interviewees and their interviewers.

The queer Asian American “we” that emerges from this archive is a constitutive act. It gathers Tsui’s and Hom’s parallel experiences of alienation and rearticulates them as togetherness. This visionary “we” resounds as a constant throughout the DFP’s archive of queer and trans Asian American activism. Spanning the 1960s through the present, “we” move through decades of marginality, collecting these disparate stories of isolation and fusing them into an alloyed cord of struggle and perseverance—a lifeline of Asian American history.

In Kansas City, when I tried to story queers and trans folk back into the developmental arc of Asian American rhetoric, I drew upon that inventive, transtemporal “we.” This is who we are. We are the beneficiaries of queer and trans activisms that opened up broader ways of doing race and gender—for cis and straight folks as well. I invoked that “we” again a month later, in San Francisco, when queer Asian Americans asked me how and why I stay in the South, or in academia. We, I said; we who destabilize the bounds of gender, race, and sexuality have always occupied—and helped transform—these spaces. Our presence may have been ignored by histories that privilege whiteness and heterosexuality, but queers have been at the core of nearly every liberationist movement, driven by our need to imagine radically different ways of being in the world. [11] Efforts to expunge our presence not only constrain the scope of history but also the range of possible worlds we might inhabit.

Trans(*)

Around 2010, the term “Trans*” rose in popularity. It emerges from the Boolean search function, which uses an asterisk to retrieve any terms that branch from the stem. For example, entering “gen*” in a search bar summons results including gender, genus, genre, generation, generate, genotype, and genocide. The asterisk in “trans*” suggests a broadening of the term.[12] For some, it pushes beyond traditionally binaristic conceptions of gender-transitions to include those who identify as genderfluid, agender, and gender nonbinary. In recent years, ample theorization of the asterisk has emerged in academic circles. Hayward and Weinstein, for example, describe how the asterisk “starfishes trans, literally making trans a radiated reach,” adding texture to the “always already” relational nature of transness (198). Halberstam then builds upon their description to argue the asterisk “stands in for what exceeds the politics of naming and recognition . . . [and] signals the insufficiency of current classificatory systems” (50).

Expectedly, when a community involves so many wide-ranging experiences, disagreements arise. In TSER’s (Trans Student Educational Resources) official statement regarding the asterisk, they explain, “The asterisk did well for explicitly noting that being trans is not limited to trans men and trans women (as trans without the asterisk was misinterpreted as meaning) but it subtly began working with this misinterpretation and contributed to the incorrect thought that ‘trans’ by itself only means binary trans people” (“Why”). In other words, the rhetorical maneuver originally used to embrace a wider community eventually buttressed imaginary boundaries, limiting “trans” to only binaristic trans identities. Instead, TSER and other organizations decided to reclaim “trans” as a term that included individuals whose gender expressions span a tremendous range of human experience.

For my own purposes, I join TSER in acknowledging that “trans” and “transgender” already have expansive, divergent histories that can be traced at times to the sorts of collaborative exploration to which “trans*” aspires. As Rawson and Williams explain, the history of “transgender” is an elaborate landscape of its own—one that fissures and sprawls with shifting contexts and evolving leadership. Debates about who might be included or excluded under the term “transgender” have been publicly staged since the 1980s, and only in the 2000s did it settle as a more acceptable term for “anyone who transgressed the boundaries of their birth-assigned gender” (Rawson and Williams). Although I align with Halberstam in exploring the intentional ambiguity of “trans*,” I drop the asterisk to recognize the interrelational origins of trans activism and the “ever-growing complexity” (Rawson and Williams) of transgender history.

Among the many origin stories of trans theory, Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come remains an important example of its coalitional possibilities. In this germinal text, Feinberg traces an expansive history of gender variance that moves from the Crow Nation to the Vietnamese countryside to Brazil and Kenya.[13] Ze[14] explains that “the rise of private property, the male-dominated family and class divisions led to narrowing what was considered acceptable self-expression” of one’s gender (12). Transgender liberation would then affect not only transgender individuals’ self-determination but all those impacted by white, heteropatriarchal, capitalist structures. Transgender Liberation thus called for alliances that would address the interlocking mechanisms of social, political, and economic oppressions. For me, the promise of both trans* and trans theory is this move towards relations rather than identification, and the way they deploy those relations towards transformation rather than merely inclusion, representation, or accommodation.

The manifestations of trans(*) politics are as differentiated as the people who identify with that term, but a strong thread of trans scholarship builds upon and builds with the intersectional theories of other minoritized communities, channeling those energies towards incisive systemic reform. Dean Spade, for example, draws from critical race theorists such as Derek Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Cheryl Harris to expose the limits of “rights-based” activism—specifically, how campaigns for individual rights reduce unequal conditions to a problem of interpersonal discrimination. Instead, Spade’s “critical trans analysis” targets the administrative systems that actually produce and naturalize definitions of gender and the unequal life chances that result from those definitions. In doing so, Spade connects trans communities with “women of color feminism, disability justice politics, prison abolition, and other struggles against colonialism, criminalization, immigration enforcement, and capitalism” (12). He traces the vulnerability of trans lives to administrative bodies ranging from the departments of Health, Corrections, and Education to federal agencies including ICE and the EPA, thereby drawing a wide range of potential collaborators in the advancement of trans liberation.

This meticulous attention to taxonomies can be found throughout trans rhetorics—from a growing body of interdisciplinary research to many fiercely active community organizations, as well as the many formal and informal accounts of trans experiences that now pervade print and digital media. The nuanced exploration of how bodies organize around, complicate, repurpose, and reinvent identity categories has resulted in a structural approach to gender that has much to offer rhetorics’ disciplinary fascination with (and many experiences of) border-crossings. Not only do trans notions of gender break open the ostensibly fixed categories of male and female, but also trans activisms envision vastly more supportive and inclusive social structures to fill that space. Instead of tacking on new identities and labels through which to claim individual rights, trans activism asks us to reconsider “the function, the purpose, and the productive force of the architectures we inhabit” (Halberstam 133). That is not to say that trans communities do not also include an ever-expanding list of terms and identities. While social movements that end in mere recognition of these labels are short-sighted, the proliferation of names is inseparable from the newly emergent ways of doing gender. The open-endedness of trans reminds us that all gender, for everyone, is an ongoing performance – that we are all (re)making ourselves in this world of evolving relations, and that at every moment is a new opportunity for (re)invention.

Like the asterisk in trans*, the solidus in Asian/American signals the persistent renegotiation of communal identities. In separating “Asian” from “American,” it acknowledges the ways Asian-born immigrants have been excluded from Asian American politics. In joining “Asian” and “American” it also muddles the distinction between nations. The slash, as a rhetorical gesture, calls much-needed attention to how “Asian American” has sometimes presumed a monolithic, fixed community and culture, and it splits open that term for (re)examination and resignification. As TSER did following their evaluation of the asterisk, however, I drop the punctuation in my own writing to acknowledge that Asian America already has a dynamic history—one replete with boundary-transgressors and transformers long before our stories were appropriated by the American Dream. Queer and trans-inclusive Asian America, made possible by pioneers such as Kitty Tsui, Merle Woo, Willy Wilkinson, Cecilia Chung, and Kris Hayashi, belongs to fierce revolutionaries who dreamt and live new possibilities for race and gender.[15] This is an Asian America that models diverse gender expressions independent from Western ontologies—from the five genders of Bugis culture to the tradition and reclamation of mahu identity in Hawai’i.[16] This Asian America practices “interdependence-in-difference” (Mao) while recognizing that those differences exist within grossly unequal structures of power, and it addresses those structures through dynamic (transcultural, transitory, trans/formational) redistributions of that power.

Towards more liberatory models of Asian American rhetorics, critical trans studies offers two crucial interventions. Critical trans theory—as a method of sense-making and world-(re)making—builds knowledge from the experience of exceeding social, cultural, and institutional classificatory systems. From that knowledge, critical trans politics—through interactional[17] and resistive practices—traces these experiences to the oftentimes invisible systems that regulate how particular bodies move through the world.  Social action informed by trans theory thus often connects disparate communities and social movements by addressing the controlling mechanisms that affect all deviations from the norm, channeling these collective energies towards cultural and structural transformation. Urging Asian American rhetorics beyond a “rhetoric of becoming” and towards material re/forms of regulatory oppression, critical trans politics provide a model that centers governance by those whose bodily transgressions move them past the razor’s edge of sociocultural acceptability. Trans/formational rhetorical practice in this instance—rhetorics that “take into account the larger networks/systems” of global power (Monberg and Young “Beyond Representation”)—must establish space and means for the most marginalized boundary-crossers and norm-transgressors to speak their truths and to compose new networks of belonging.

Transpire

Following the announcement that CCCC would remain in Kansas City,[18] the Asian/Asian American Caucus (A/AAC) debated internally about the possibility of boycotting. They decided not to.[19] The Queer Caucus chose to host their business meeting online both to register their objection and to enable broader access. Individually, members of each caucus made their own decisions about whether or not to attend. A friend told me: “I like the idea of you attending panels when you feel Asian and sitting in your hotel room when you feel gay.” Thirty years after Kimblerlé Crenshaw challenged the many limitations of “single axis” politics (“Demarginalizing” 140), organizational efforts towards inclusion and diversity still too often rely on singular frames, neglecting those whose bodies archive the interrelations of our oppressive mechanisms.

The events that occasioned the NAACP’s announcement should not have been news to any of our members. As a discipline that regularly interrogates systemic inequity, racialized and gendered violence, and barriers to social and physical mobility, how were we caught unawares by the travel advisory? As Ersula Ore reminds us, “Kansas City constitutes no more precarious a space for Black folks than the rest of America.” Rather than simply abandoning a site after it has been identified as precarious, what more should we be doing—what should we have already done—to create genuinely inclusive and protective spaces?

I am not subject to the same dangers that might target Ore in Missouri—or in any of the United States. As a queer, gender nonbinary, generation-1.5 Taiwanese American immigrant who experiences chronic illness, however, I sense deep resonances between my experiences and Ore’s description of navigating both our profession and the world “within a body that is not the somatic norm.” I share, too, the knowledge that my body and experiences are often the “vehicle through which others’ aims are achieved.” I feel the unease of having my pain and precarities, which I wake to and live through every day, selectively invoked only when particular topics make national news. From that bodily knowledge, I ask that we attend to trans as more than a metaphor for movement and boundary-crossing. Rather, with a critical trans ethics that looks to how somatic norms are enforced, I would like to amplify Ore’s query: How do our collective decisions—and subsequent actions—help people survive the precarious conditions in which we and our institutions are complicit? How must we change to transform those conditions?

Translanguage

“What if we think of rhetoric and composition as live, as embodied actions, as behaviors, yes, as performances inside of one pod—our discipline—that lead to the creation of texts, to presentations, that invite mo performances and certainly mo co-performances?”

– Vershawn Ashanti Young, CCCC 2019 Program Chair

(“2019 CCCC Annual Convention Call for Proposals”)

At the 2018 CCCC convention, the call for the following year was announced. True to his own work in cultural competency and antiracist practice, Vershawn Ashanti Young issued a provocation to the field:

What benefit could performance-rhetoric yield for understanding how the body relates to composition practices? How can performance-rhetoric foster a translingual orientation toward language and literacy? How can performance-composition help us to keep on keeping on, keep strutting our stuff, keep us woke bout our responsibilities to antiracism, to practicing class, gender, and social justice?

Young’s call seemed particularly apt as we packed our belongings, book-fair stockpiles, and conference attire back into our bags and as most of us left Missouri. Next year, we will convene in Pittsburgh, a city—like all cities in this country—also struggling with wealth disparities, educational inequality, de facto segregation, and discriminatory criminal justice systems.[20] How and what will we have changed by then? Who, even, will “we” be?

Following Young’s call for papers, a question circulated on the WPA-L listserv: “Are you aware of any CFPs for a major/‘flagship’ conference in our field, broadly speaking, that have used AAVE extensively, besides Vershawn Ashanti Young's CFP for the 2019 CCCC?” The question initiated a vigorous and divisive debate about the appropriateness of the call—about what sorts of research and teaching it promoted, about the place of translanguaging in our work, and about what forms of language we give to our students and how those forms help or hinder them in future endeavors. Demonstrative of our discipline’s commitment to ethical pedagogy, arguments on all sides focused on students: was it better to honor students’ “right to their own language” or to prepare them for the linguistic discrimination that they would encounter? Perhaps what is missing from this conversation, though, is trans insight into the relations among individual transgressions and systemic transformations.

Applying trans thought to Young’s 2019 CFP, we might shift the question away from how certain forms of language fit into extant regimes of power and focus on where and how we replicate those regimes. In other words, if we are truly “committed to supporting the agency, power, and potential of diverse communicators,” we need to be examining the contexts in which we limit diversity by separating discursive variations from “Standard Academic English”—and why. There are of course reasons for teaching students strategic engagement with privileged forms of language, but we may find that those reasons and contexts are fewer than we expect, especially as communicative forms continue to evolve through digitization and globalization. Rather, how often are linguistic boundaries reified by our own reiteration of those boundaries?  

In Susan Stryker’s touchstone account of transgender history, she writes that many people “understand gender to be more like language than biology” (3). What insights might come from seeing language as more like gender? What if moments of translanguaging—like Young’s CFP— were more than isolated performances of language difference but actual calls to do language differently in everyday exchanges? What if every rupture of discursive convention were understood as a site of imaginative possibility? What if we approached all of our disciplinary practices—our conference proceedings, our journal publications, our syllabi and lesson plans—as opportunities to explore those possibilities? Englishes, too, are imitations without an original. What if with every iteration we worked with the disruptive and creative nature of difference?

The Joint Caucus Response to the 2017 travel advisory underscored the 1945 NCTE resolution that “no Council convention would thereafter be held in any place in which any Council member would be discriminated against in any way.” Although that is an admirable goal, much of the subsequent debate stressed that such a city does not presently exist (nor did it in 1945). In the absence of such a possibility, perhaps the members of CCCC should regard last year’s conflict as an overdue disruption—as an opportunity for reinvention. Rather than debating the affordances of existing laws and policies, what would it look like for our field to actually center the voices, needs, and transformative visions of those historically marginalized in our profession? In 1945 we promised to never hold conferences in places where members might experience discrimination, but what would it look like to actually establish such spaces in our classrooms, publications, and disciplinary venues? 

Transcend

While transgender experiences often expose the porosity, changeability, and even ambiguity of gender, they also recognize the material realities of gender. In this way, gender is both a fiction and a fact. The narrow frames that confine how we understand and live gender were fabricated to elevate and sustain white heteropatriarchy, but they have very real—too often fatal—consequences for those who violate their standards. Yet, critical trans politics are not about the end of gender altogether (though I can’t say I would personally mind). Rather, trans politics target systems of control that enforce gender norms through criminalization; healthcare, housing, and educational policies; and legal systems that offer little to no protection for those whose (racialized) gender expressions render them illegible within regulatory structures.

Applying a similar lens to the model minority myth reveals that it is both a fantasy and a very real strategy of racialization in the United States. This trajectory offers a narrow set of acceptable behaviors—forms of education, familial relations, and labor—that merit national belonging. If Asian American rhetorics provide, as Mao and Young say, a means for Asian Americans to “resist social and economic injustice and reassert their discursive agency and authority in the dominant culture” (3), then its study and its practice could benefit from critical trans politics’ focus on how categories of identity and narratives of belonging are regulated by social and political institutions. By grounding our analyses in these regulatory mechanisms, we also expand the reach of Asian American politics and its nodes of connection with other transformative movements.

When the Asian American success story elevated supporters of liberal assimilationism, prowar-patriotism, and “respectable heterosexuality,” other narrators vying to tell the story Asian America included “zoot suiters, sexual deviants, those who renounced citizenship, leftists, Communists, and juvenile delinquents—the various entities who did not subscribe to postwar racial liberalism. . .” (Wu 6). The contributions to this issue offer a glimpse into the diverse rhetorical domains of Asian American resistance—past, present, and potentially future. Although Saum Song Bo may seem a world (and a century) away from Asian American YouTubers, these rhetors act as temporal outlaws. They defy the narrow lifeways offered to Asians in America—the “unquestioningly obedient” (Guo) children who study hard, forge traditional two-parent family structures, and become avid participants in the U.S. economy. In archiving disparate Asian American experiences and engaging them “as both in the present and importantly present” (Mao, “In the Present”), we produce something akin to José Esteban Muñoz’s “utopia in the present” (37)—a dynamic engagement with time that animates history as a means of critiquing the present and of inviting more inclusive futures.

Thinking with and acting upon the experiences of our racialized and gendered border-crossings would align Asian Americans’ critiques of immigration policies with prison abolition campaigns, healthcare and education reform, and—well—critical trans politics. Borrowing from Susanne Luhmann’s “queer pedagogy,” we might engage history as “an interminable question” (151) through which we interrogate what (and whose) experiences have been regarded as actionable knowledge. While recovering the many voices lost in the bid for white, middle-class respectability, we can connect these studies to the purportedly neutral systems of control that make it easier for some to achieve full citizenship (and its attendant privileges) than others. If we are to reclaim the narrative of Asian America so that it is no longer usable as a racial wedge (Chow), we must envision ways of doing Asian American identity that dismantle forms of imprisonment, systems of wealth and poverty, and structures of gendered racialization that subject “deviant” bodies to interpersonal and systemic abuse.

Transparency

This essay has sprawled. The experience of writing it (and, I expect, of reading it) has been messy, circuitous, and at times tremendously frustrating. It has often felt that I could not grasp all the threads—racism, (hetero)(cis)sexism, capitalism, (trans)nationalism, and (trans)rhetorics—all at once. But, these narratives work coterminously in our lives. Our inability to speak of their simultaneity helps universalize white, heterosexual male experience as the standard by which all other things are measured. Our search for a more inclusive vocabulary, and for more participatory social and political processes, will inevitably demand venturing beyond the bounds of our own individual imaginations. I hope that my stumblings, limitations, and oversights invite you to venture with me.

In an interview, Daniel Mallory Ortberg describes the experience of coming out as transgender: “I just feel like I’ve handed you a weapon. And even though you say ‘I love you, I promise I will never use this bow and arrow which has been specifically fashioned to find your heart,’ you’re still holding it. So I felt like I was giving away something that could kill me.” That imagery struck me as beautiful and precise—not just because it captures so perfectly the paralyzing terror I’ve felt in opening my truths to critique but also because it acknowledges that shift in power. You, as someone who has been trusted with my transgressions, have a choice. You are holding a bow and arrow. It may have been specifically fashioned to find my heart, but there are other things it can do. What might we do together?