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

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring for academic work

[Kayleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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