Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics

by V. Jo Hsu

Constellating Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics explores how race, migration, gender, and disability entwine in conceptions of deserving citizens. V. Jo Hsu explores three archives of trans and queer Asian American (QTAPI) rhetorics, considering a range of texts including oral histories, photography, personal essays, and performance showcases. To demonstrate how QTAPI use personal narrative to critique and revise the conditions of their exclusion, Hsu forwards a critical approach to storytelling, homing , which deliberately engages sites of alienation and belonging. Through a practice of diasporic listening , Hsu tracks confluences among seemingly divergent journeys and locates trans and queer Asian American experiences within broader US and global politics. The stories at the heart of Constellating Home center the voices of trans and nonbinary people, disabled people, and others often overlooked in conceptions of US citizenry. Hsu’s analyses demonstrate the inextricability of Asian American activism from queer politics, disability activism, and racial justice, and they consider how stories network individual experiences with resonant histories and struggles. Finding unlikely intimacies among individual and communal histories, Constellating Home provides tools for fostering mutual care, revealing harmful social patterns, and orienting shared values and politics.

Genres: Nonfiction

226 pages, Hardcover

Published August 24, 2022

Reviews

[Brett Glasscock]

goated thesis advisor

[Maria]

Inspiring for academic work

[September]

Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics by V. Jo Hsu is a thoughtful, deeply engaging, and intellectually rich exploration of identity, belonging, and resistance. Through the examination of trans and queer Asian American narratives, Hsu offers a powerful framework for understanding how personal stories illuminate broader questions of citizenship, migration, disability, race, and community.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its focus on storytelling as a form of both critique and world-building. Rather than treating personal narratives as isolated experiences, Hsu demonstrates how they reveal larger social structures that shape inclusion and exclusion. The concept of homing is particularly compelling, providing a lens through which readers can understand the ongoing process of navigating alienation while creating spaces of belonging and connection.

The book’s interdisciplinary approach further enriches its impact. Drawing from oral histories, photography, essays, and performance showcases, Hsu assembles a diverse archive that highlights the complexity and diversity of trans and queer Asian American experiences. These narratives challenge narrow understandings of identity while foregrounding voices that have too often been marginalized or overlooked.

What stands out most is the book’s emphasis on interconnected struggles and collective care. Through the practice of diasporic listening, Hsu traces meaningful connections across different experiences and histories, demonstrating how movements for racial justice, disability rights, queer liberation, and immigrant advocacy are deeply intertwined. This approach encourages readers to think beyond individual stories and toward broader networks of solidarity and mutual support.

At its core, Constellating Home is both an academic contribution and a profoundly human exploration of what it means to create belonging in a world shaped by exclusion. Hsu offers valuable tools for understanding how stories can foster empathy, reveal structural inequities, and inspire more inclusive futures.

Insightful, compassionate, and timely, Constellating Home is an important contribution to Asian American studies, queer studies, disability studies, rhetoric, and contemporary conversations about identity and social justice.

[Kayleigh]

Constellating Home is a book about resilience— not in the resilience of the individual, but the interdependent resilience of community and storytelling. I’m deeply moved by the ways in which Hsu explores “commonplaces” of love, resilience, and ancestry and how they can be (re)defined to include a contradiction of many stories, from all backgrounds, all worthy of care and attention. The stories and narratives of QTAPI folx that fill these pages are more valuable than my privileged lens can put into words. I am deeply grateful to have come across this book in Seattle. Thank you, V. Jo Hsu, for the wonderful work you do.

[Kelly Sauskojus]

Incredible, transformative, liberatory. I'm in my "reading a monograph a week" as I'm trying to get mentally ready to think about a book proposal for the fall and so far I've read a BUNCH of bangers but this one was so smart and theoretically productive and also it fucking made me cry

[Eli]

For an academic book... This is pretty great.