Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics

Who are we writing for? While many cishet white scholars are only recently reckoning with this question, it has undergirded the work of historically minoritized academics and writers for decades. For many scholars of color, this question is not a theoretical, ethical exercise; it is an embodied accounting of ourselves and our communities and the ways in which we (may never) belong. The answer also informs how we create community in places designed to exclude us. Finding these communities can determine our very survival, both in the academy and in the world writ large.In these instances, and for scholars like V. Jo Hsu, writing is an essential search for home, for community, for belonging. In Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics, Hsu writes for diasporic queer and trans Asian American communities: to engage in the messiness of their disparate histories, lived experiences, and shared dreams and traumas; to imagine infinite possibilities for futures not shaped by hegemonic mythologies; to build alliances outside of rigid colonial taxonomies of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and nationality. Ultimately, Hsu skillfully, vulnerably writes “home” into existence.To accomplish this, Hsu draws from their rhetorical studies background to develop a rhetorical constellation of stories from three distinct trans and queer Asian American and Pacific Islander (QTAPI) archives. Identifying stories as “conduits of power” (6), Hsu weaves together multiple stories from multimedia projects to resist the powerful model minority “stock” story that encumbers Asian Americans in the United States. Hsu writes that their goal “is not to tell a single story of resistance but to listen for, connect, and amplify a range of diverse counternarratives and to build a critical mass of (gender) queer possibilities that can resist the gravitational pull of the model minority” (8). Hsu locates resistive possibility in what they define as “homing.”One of this project's most significant contributions to rhetorical studies, “homing” invites readers to understand constellated narratives as incongruous sites of personal experience. Hsu claims these experiences can simultaneously allow for “social analysis, collective politics, and mobile sites of belonging” (4). It is in the discomfort of engaging contrasting narratives that Hsu sees the greatest possibility. Using diaspora as a framework to establish home, Hsu argues approaching identity as a relational process allowing Asian Americans to “place their individual experience in dialogue with communal histories, politics, and courses of action, repurposing diaspora as a transitional space where social identities and conditions of belonging can be continually revised” (4). As Hsu illustrates throughout their archival and personal narrative chapters, home is a collaborative, contradictory process rather than a traditional, fixed site. Thus, diaspora is central in homing because it helps us to understand home is never stable; rather, Hsu argues, home is a discursive space that consists of “a constellation of stories that determine with whom, where, and how we belong” (9). Hsu sees homing as an expansive space, where multiple communities are possible and where care for those most vulnerable to displacement is paramount (9). Indeed, in examining the ways in which QTAPI communities have developed resistive ideas of home, Hsu highlights that homing is a process wherein “home” requires constant, collaborative, and contradictory “practices of re-placement, reimagining, and relating across distance and difference” (9).Hsu's choice of QTAPI archival sites and corresponding themes is integral in understanding homing as relational, collaborative process. Moving from an introduction that soundly establishes their theoretical approach and historically contextualizes the Asian American model minority myth, Hsu uses each of their first three chapters to explore their chosen archives by reappropriating a rhetorical topos, or commonplace, found in the model minority myth. These narrative commonplaces are love (as constellated from the Dragon Fruit Project), resilience (as constellated from the Visibility Project), and ancestry (as constellated from the Queer Ancestors Project). Always highly self-reflexive, Hsu acknowledges the discursive chasm that often exists between community organizers, creators, and artists, on one side, and academics who wield text-based theory as an excuse to turn a discursive chasm into an epistemic one, on the other side. Thus, Hsu's choice of archives, along with their willingness to write their own narratives into each constellation, provides a model of relationality for rhetoricians and other scholars who might silo theory away from lived experience. Building from these three commonplaces into their own narrative of “home” in the fourth chapter, Hsu also renders disability visible in ways that are important for understanding QTAPI futures. Modeling relationality in this way significantly contributes to answering not only how we might better understand home as a discursive, fluid process for QTAPI communities but also how we, as scholars who write of our own migrant histories, might engage our communities in ways that allow for simultaneous divergent stories, to engage them “through dialogue, through resonant traumas and aspirations, and through a willingness to work through discordant needs and desires” (25). It is here that Hsu lays the foundation for truly coalitional projects.As a rhetorical studies project, Hsu's work is nuanced and exciting. As an in-depth study of divergent queer and trans Asian American narratives, Hsu thoughtfully develops significant rhetorical constellations of networked relationality, care, and survival within and among these communities (184). Hsu provides valuable insights into the ways in which we can build alliances when there may be no commonality to connect us. While Hsu largely looks at QTAPI communities, the promise of these findings is valuable for all minority communities, to not only build alliances within but to bridge our coalitions together. In engaging archives that themselves disrupt binary, dichotomous categorizations, Hsu uses queer diaspora and crip logics of futurity to welcome us into new ways of knowing and coalition building. Hsu concludes by reminding us that in a postpandemic world, we are more interdependent than ever, noting that “our fates are bound, awaiting the story that will bring us together” (194). By showing us ways that we can organize and communicate across divides, outside of neat, singular narratives, Hsu is writing for all of us.