Queer Transpacifics

What affinities, tensions, and conceptual convergences emerge between “queer” and “transpacific”? How can we (re)conceptualize queerness both transnationally and translocally? What is queer about the transpacific?

Since the 1990s, the transpacific has gradually come into view as a geo-historically constituted contact zone that encompasses the dwelling, movement, and transactions of various peoples in Asia and the Americas. Over the past decade, “transpacific studies” has also gained academic currency as a transnational, comparative, and archipelagic analytic that has called for new interdisciplinary modes of inquiry. Rooted within and expanding from Asian Americanist critiques of U.S. militarized imperialism in the Pacific, the transpacific is articulated both as a lived, embodied, material site and also as an imagined, performed, and represented space of crossings. As such, a transpacific vantage point is uniquely positioned to deconstruct the ontology of the nation-state and account for multiple, intersecting imperialisms. The liminality of transpacific studies as an interdisciplinary formation produces generative apertures for bringing new kinds of interventions—more-than-human ecologies, oceanic vocabularies, global indigenous epistemologies, transhistorical and translinguistic archives—to bear on established frameworks within ethnic studies and area studies.

Our colloquy situates queer diasporas as integral to transpacific studies. Conceived as both living agents and as an analytical framework, queer diaspora perspectives attest to the radical diversity of libidinous and non-normative desires in the contact zones between Asia and the Americas. As queer relationalities transform and translate across borders, regions, and localities in the Pacific, they become co-constitutive with categories of sexuality and gender that both challenge and redefine hegemonic norms. Likewise, queer theorizations of time, genealogy, and togetherness can help us stagger through the post/colonial could-have-beens, maybe-nevers, and imagined futures—temporalities that are latent in the transpacific as a space sutured by multiple layered and interwoven histories of movement. The affective density of queer relationalities can localize the almost inconceivable scale of the transpacific; the diverse embodied lifeways of queer diaspora can furnish new vocabularies of relation and community. Both in concert with and in tension against one another, “queer” and “transpacific” call for new interdisciplinary methodologies, aesthetic practices, and conceptualizations of connectivity. 

Highlighting recent developments in transpacific studies that point to queer horizons for the field, Queer Transpacifics draws together emergent scholarship in literary studies, art history, performance studies, cultural criticism, film studies, and history. Bridging a vast range of approaches from post/decolonial thought, critical refugee perspectives, queer of colour critique, material histories, and diaspora analytics, our sprawling archive demonstrates both the rich texture and the future potentialities within queer transpacific work. The featured pieces expand the stakes of thinking transpacifically through searching for other solidarities that exist despite and beyond the nation; cultivating inter-regional and intra-diaspora dialogue; recasting the transpacific as variously interwoven and undertheorized archives of desire; and orienting toward alternative horizons of queer meaning-making.