Chapter 5 - Between the Heteronormative Model Minority and the Homonormative LGBTQ Subject

Summary

This chapter examines contemporary queer Asian American literature’s persistent and pervasive critiques of the Asian American family’s disciplining of nonnormative genders and sexualities, on the one hand, and mainstream LGBTQ formations’ anti-Asian racism, on the other. In tracking these dual modes of critique, the chapter suggests that the queer Asian American subject’s displacement from both model minority heteronormativity and queer liberal homonormativity implies that it cannot be enfolded into and conscripted to serve the ideology of US imperial sexual exceptionalism. In consequence, queer Asian American literature has had to imagine and lay claim to alternative forms of belonging, whether by documenting queer people of color spaces and socialities or by inserting queer presences into conventional Asian/American histories.