Stanford Humanities Center
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?
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Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being discussed in the West outside the terms of Western liberalism and notions of the “universal.”
Lee examines examines the music, video, performances, and social media presence of singer-songwriter Mitski, and poet and writer Ocean Vuong, to consider how the act of staying in, rather than going (or coming) out, gives shape to Asian American asociality. Lee responds to the idea of “Asian American asociality” which speaks to how Asian Americans have been racially figured as a problem for and of sociality, as assimilated, yet socially isolated, unrelatable subjects.
Two US-based South Asian drag queens, Faluda Islam and LaWhore Vagistan, discuss the aesthetics of their practices: pastiche as a mode of re-making the world; death as well as conviviality as strategies in drag; camp theory in relation to race and ethnicity; and “queer Muslim futures.” This talk was curated and moderated by Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.
Charting incomplete U.S. archives from the Cold War made secret through redacted U.S. State documents, Vang shows how Hmong refugees tell their stories in ways that exist separately from narratives of U.S. empire and that cannot be traditionally archived. In so doing, Vang outlines a methodology for writing histories that foreground refugee epistemologies despite systematic attempts to silence those histories.
Through an analysis of two Asian North American pieces (text and video documentary) meditating on Chinese labor employed in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Iyko Day reflects on gendered and sexual temporalities of race, labor, and capitalism in the construction of the transcontinental railroads in Canada and the United States. Day pushes back on a temporal logic of equivalence imposed on alien labor put to work in an industrial, capitalist temporality.
Analyzing a performance art piece by Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano titled "Rope Piece," Vivian Huang reflects on Asian American sociality and life. Using the performance piece, Huang explains documentation as a process that both divulges but also withholds information; she also critiques the idea of Asian inscrutability as a modality of inquiry into Asian and alien sociality in the US.
Mel Y. Chen considers "toxicity" and "animacy" in the racializing and queering of bodies and sociality. Through a look at national panic in the US surrounding lead in Chinese-manufactured toys, an auto-ethnographic exploration of body, sociality and immunity, and other varied discussions, Chen probes social and object relationships amid material and bodily assemblages.
Artist and curator Việt Lê delivers a powerful performance lecture on trauma, religion and Asian identity in the panel on gender and sexuality in Asian American art at IMU UR2 in 2022. On October 28–29, 2022, Stanford University hosted IMU UR2: Art, Aesthetics, and Asian America, bringing together artists, curators, and scholars to rethink and reimagine the histories and futures of artists of Asian descent.
