It would have been scarcely conceivable until recent times that a book with the title Constellating home: trans and queer Asian American rhetorics could have been written. After all, a publication centring the experiences of LGBTQIA + Asian Americans, and including disabled people, is still rare in the overwhelming Whiteness of queer, trans and disability studies. What is also rare, is V. Jo Hsu’s ability to blend deeply personal narratives and reflections (their own and marginalised others), with scholarly erudition and insight. The latter point is amplified by their alignment with a range of critical thinkers who transgress disciplinary boundaries, and who quickly help anchor the reader in the author’s intersectional orientation. An approach which also enfolds transnational and Black feminism, critical race, disability, queer and trans studies into its’ theoretical framework. This bricolage, or, what Hsu calls their ‘mongrel tongue’ (p. 6), allows them to evocatively write and vividly portray the imbricated experiences of those who disturb the supposedly settled borders of race, gender and disability.
As a queer, trans, non-binary and disabled Asian American themself, Hsu writes from similar structures of feeling, that shape their community’s experiences. However, whilst Hsu’s story is important, it is not made pre-eminent, and they take time to articulate a set of stories that whilst showing commonalities, also reflect the complexities, differences and polyvocality of Asian American lives. Hsu is an attentive, caring and interested interlocutor who foregrounds diasporic listening and storytelling as their primary methodological approach; their engagement with three distinct, but related projects and participants, centre QTAPI (Queer and Trans Asian American and Pacific Islanders), who may also be disabled. The Dragon Fruit Project is involved with oral history; the Visibility Project with photographic images and video interviews; the Queer Ancestors Project uses creative writing and arts based practices to explore queer non-Western histories and lineages. What connects each project is their focus on memory and imagination, in which the challenges for QTAPI people of constellating, finding, and making a home in the world are presented, and discussed. Hsu’s position as a participant-activist-scholar facilitates immersive, in-depth and reflexive narrative accounts that capture the messiness of everyday struggle, linking creative dialogical practices with political processes and theoretical arguments.
Hsu interrogates the significance of crossing borders and boundaries, of hidden histories, and how they contribute to alienation, disavowal and erasure for diverse populations of colour. They show how these discourses are spatially, temporally, culturally and structurally invoked, and crucially, how they are inscribed on the subaltern’s body-mind. Yet it also stories, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways, how belonging and settlement are forged and connection and community are found, thus, revealing the possibilities for desire, enjoyment, friendship, love, pleasure and sensuality in QTAPI lives. With this latter focus it complements and connects to other intersectional books on race, gender and disability, such Avtar Brah’s latest monograph, Decolonial imaginings: intersectional conversations and contestations. I also found similarities with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care work: dreaming disability justice, but, whereas Piepzna-Samarasinha’s speaks profoundly from an activist perspective, Hsu adds to this praxis with conceptual and theoretical layering.
This book definitely digs deep, and delivers what it says it is going to do, examining the complicated entanglement of identities and intersections of power for racialised, queer and trans communities. However, the ‘linking’ of disability to other social categories (p. 12) is inconsistent, appearing, and disappearing from view. I suggest that trans and queer Asian American identities are foregrounded much more strongly than intersections with illness and disability. That disablement is not the primary analytical focus of Hsu’s thesis, will be problematic for some readers in the field of disability studies, as will the prominence given to issues of racism, ethnicity, nationhood, gender and sexuality. The perceived diminution of disability was also a criticism levelled against Jasbir Puar’s, The right to maim: debility, capacity and disability, yet for this reviewer her book powerfully illuminated the elided racialised dimensions of the multiply minoritised subject’s lived realities. Hsu cannot just discuss disability, because it is only one of several compounded cultural and social burdens that they and their participants experience. Instead, I want to praise Hsu for creating an intersectional space to bring disability into serious, often simultaneous, conversation with complex understandings of personhood, such as race, queerness and transness. Given the scepticism and criticisms of narrative approaches to research in numerous academic disciplines (p. 4), particularly evident, I would add, within British materialist disability studies, Hsu should be applauded for demonstrating, not only the affective and political possibilities of storytelling, but also revealing its’ analytical depth and sophistication.
The tenderness and poetry of Hsu’s writing will long remain with me, as will the upset of reading about the physical and psychic damage left by racism, homophobia, transphobia, cissexism and disablism. This book then, is an invitation to sit in the fires of discomfort, but also experience affectivities of hope; as a disabled, Asian, Brown Briton, I feel a visceral connection to Hsu and the Othered Asian Americans in their book. Yet my masculine, cis-gendered, hetero-normative social positioning gives me privileges that Hsu and many of the rhetors presented in this book, do not share. Hsu discloses the difficulties of being and becoming queer, trans and disabled Asian American, but also stories moments of resistance and reciprocity, caring and connection, pleasure and possibility. We are given sensitive sociological drawings of subjects, that offer textured and telling human portraiture. Hsu takes us on a journey that ‘find[s] family in unlikely figures’ (p. 29), in so doing they expose, engage and extend what it means to be disabled as well as queer and trans Asian American. As they beautifully elucidate: ‘[t]hese stories (re)make home in the interstices of diaspora – in stolen spaces of refuge, in plot lines that tether personal histories to their geopolitical contexts, and in the promise of open conversation about submerged and difficult truths’ (p.50). This is a book I wholeheartedly recommend to disability, race and gender scholars, as well as cultural ethnographers and auto/ethnographers, as it cogently and compellingly makes the case for intersectional and inclusive theory and praxis.
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