Whither Asian American Lesbian Feminist Thought?

How might the inscrutability of Asian diasporic queer and feminist work offer an alternative entry point to conversations on citational practice? Consider the following three scenes:

1. In the introduction to their 1998 anthology Q&A: Queer in Asian America, David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom begin with the scene of a public restroom where a white woman mistakes an Asian American butch lesbian for a foreign Asian man. The co-editors write that "in this compounded misreading of both sexual and racial difference—in this restroom as a public site where dominant images of emasculated Asian American men and hyperheterosexualized Asian American women collide—the Asian American lesbian disappears."¹ Even where the body seems most spectacular, as in a bathroom, the material presence of the Asian American lesbian cannot be seen.

2. In my 2019 upper-level undergraduate seminar "Feeling Queer & Asian," I asked students the following question: Prior to our class assignments, how many of you had read something written by an Asian or Asian American lesbian? Only one student raised their hand in a room of nineteen students who had self-selected into an Asian American sexuality studies course, the majority of whom were Asian American. Later I wondered if "lesbian" as an authorial filter had occasioned uncertainty in a group of Gen Z students, perhaps even more than "Asian" and "Asian American."

3. During a recent lunch meeting, a colleague asked me to name a single-author monograph on Asian American queer femininities. I shared my tentative responses as well as my frustrations, pointing to the formal prejudices of the question. I gestured to anthologies, roundtables, chapbooks, articles, letters, mail art, newspapers, and zines. My colleague and I discussed how Asian American queer feminist work might bump up against the single-author monograph as academia's privileged unit of knowledge production.

Thought together, these three scenes make glimpsable not only the fleshy invisibility of Asian American queer women in plain sight, but also the obfuscation of their work—even to people looking for it. One might narrate these scenes as a failure of Asian American lesbian feminists to appear through dominant optics and epistemes. Rather than attributing the failure to Asian American lesbian feminists, however, might we not ask about the everyday exclusions of conventional citational practice, and the contradictions...