I'm an unnatural
disaster, I make no (common) sense. Lucky for me, I'm a dystopian
girl and I don't mind: I like it when things fall apart.
After all,
a Minnesotan-raised, refugee-tomboy with queer tendencies has
got to make meaning of it all somehow. At fifteen, my first attempt:
I went the way of the Punk Rock because I had a burning desire
to be an aggressive spectacle, to compound upon my Other-ness.
How else (I thought) to counter the ways in which big-H History
had thus far operated (war, dislocation, racism) on my small-h
history but by becoming a different kind of alien? But listen:
in Little Saigon I was a novelty and some people whispered, beneath
cupped hands, that I was "white," while there's a punk
song that wants to violate me, designated there in the liner
notes as "a swingin' Saigon Siren."
And later I
was an activist operating under the sign of "woman of color"
but I had to remind myself all the time just what I meant. Later
still I grew frustrated because I couldn't deal with the imperative
to forge coherency and "identity" according to those
deemed necessary revolutionary imperatives, and the specter of
a unified "community" popped up again as our excuse
to issue such imperatives. I wondered if our masses were only
masses because we made them so, and I worried that my radical
vision, engendered by "my oppression," wasn't good
enough.
My life was
saved when poststructuralist (and postcolonial) feminist theory
first introduced me to deconstruction and (the unpacking of)
binary oppositions, problematizing the supposedly universal,
modern subject of Western discourses, humanist, feminist, or
otherwise "liberatory." Cultural studies gave me a
way to talk about the vexed politics of pleasure and representation.
And when power became not a possession but an exercise, and the
individual investment in "identity" became troubled,
critical queer theory jumped in the fray. Pushing for transgressions
of normativity, queer theory offered what seemed to me to be
a strategy. The fiction of authenticity falls by the wayside
where I think it belongs, and the logic of non-contradiction
also gets the boot. In their place, a notion of performativity.
Queer theory
gave me a framework for articulating my dis-ease with identity
politics, no matter how strategic. These open me up to regulation,
force me to invoke "community" (when and if I do) with
quotation marks already intact. (What do I have to look like,
be like in order to be allowed into the inner circle?) Among
other things, I'm told (by some) that I should be ashamed of
myself; I'm a terrible example. That, of course, suits me just
fine. For instance, the assumed but unspoken subject of "Asian
American" doesn't feel like me because I'm not an American
born heterosexual male, and besides, I'm bored with cultural
nationalist frameworks, they offer me nothing (critical) and
certainly offer me no love. Dependent upon a heteronormative
logic to perpetuate "community," I transgress. (A women's
bathroom wall once demanded, "Sisters! Drop your white boyfriends!
Have you tried an Asian brother?") The question becomes:
do I want to somehow force my inclusion, or do I want to trouble
the construction of an "Asian America" in the first
place? Can I do both? (I replied in red marker, "No, but
I have tried an Asian sister - does that count?") Can I
critically queer this? (I really wanna.)
Queer gets
to be strategic, then. Gayatri Spivak suggests there are times
we must mobilize the necessary error of identity while simultaneously
attending to the exclusions any identity politics actively creates.
Thus "queer" -invoking non-normative sexuality, an
antiassimilationist stance, a radically theatrical politics,
a mode of critical inquiry, and, for some (and sometimes me),
a problematically (so far) white episteme- gets around.
But again,
I don't mind the instability, that gap of disidentification,
and I like to make queer theory work for me. Such that I came
here a refugee and had to be "naturalized," there is
something incomplete about my interpellation as "U.S. citizen,"
suggesting the impossibility of fully belonging to the nation
as well as the impossibility of totally disidentifying with it.
(It is, after all, through the disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms
of the U.S. nation-state that I am here.) Moreover, it seems
I make a bad (diasporic) daughter as well; "unnatural"
because of my bi-queerness, my penchant for loud punk music and
supposedly "Western" feminist politics. The notion
of performativity makes all the difference. In suggesting that
there is no "essence" to the self, only acts whose
repetition constitute an identity to be duly attached, queer
theory's given me the tools to examine the violence of these
other kinds of normativity that concern me. For example: those
that define both nations and diasporas as given communities tied
by het concepts of "blood" and "kinship;"
and how patriotisms and claims to citizenship (to any nation,
queer, diasporic or otherwise backed by state apparatus) are
always repetitive performative acts that, as such, consolidate
the logic (and law) of nationalism.
And while the
so-far universal subject of queer epistemes is whiter, richer
and, uh, more male than I might like, I'd like to queer that
particular norm. (I'm a different kind of queer.) It's impossible,
after all, to imagine that "queer" only skews gender
and sexuality, and not race or class or nation, as if we might
line up our social categories like cans in a cupboard, as if
they weren't just intersecting but mutually constituitive. To
hark back to my p-rock days when a lipstick-smudged Kathleen
Hanna clambered on stage, "We've got to show them we're
worse than queer."