“Trans-” as A Method: Queer Kinship and Mobility in Louisa Wei’s <i>Golden Gate Girls</i> (2012) and <i>Havana Divas</i> (2018)

Abstract This article argues that Louisa Wei’s Golden Gate Girl s and Havana Divas articulate a transpacific method grounded in queer kinship to rethink the frameworks of world cinema. Drawing on feminist film historiography, the article shows how Wei’s films expose the limits of transnational and transborder models that remain shaped by Euro-American epistemologies. Instead, the mobility traced in both documentaries activates a transpacific critique, one that foregrounds the geohistorical conditions linking Chinese American and Chinese Cuban communities across the Pacific. Central to this method is queer kinship, a heterogeneous relationality that exceeds bloodlines and normative genealogies. Golden Gate Girls reconstructs the life of Esther Eng, whose androgynous gender expression and lesbian relationships intersected with anti-colonial cultural work, while Havana Divas documents the homosocial stage sisterhood formed through Cantonese opera’s gender-crossing conventions. Wei also spatializes queer kinship by navigating sites of absence and deterioration, Bo Bo Restaurant in New York and the Golden Eagle Theater in Havana, where multiple temporalities converge. Finally, the serendipity embedded in Wei’s documentary encounters extends queer kinship beyond sexuality, revealing overlooked histories and reframing Asian American film genealogy, as exemplified when Bruce Lee emerges as an incidental footnote within Eng’s cinematic legacy.