Queer Relationality as Family: Yas Fats! Yas Femmes! Yas Asians!

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we, as queer subjects, share our embodied experiences to rearticulate and reimagine possible and impossible performances of queer relationality as family. We collaboratively pay careful and nuanced attention to our queer performative roles of becoming and being femmes as referring points of this critical queer engagement. To do so, we adapt methodological implications of autoethnography and intersectional reflexivity. Thereby, we take further steps to explore an anti-anti-relational landscape of queerness that works on and against hegemonic, heteronormative, and homonormative paradigms of relating.

KEYWORDS:

• Queerness
• relationality
• family
• performance
• gender
• sexuality
• race
• borderland
• autoethnography
• intersectional reflexivity

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this essay was presented as a Top Paper at Western States Communication Association (WSCA), Performance Studies Division, Santa Clara, February 2018. The authors would like to thank the editor and two intelligent and amazing peer reviewers for their detailed and insightful comments on previous drafts of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.