Dissertation In progress:

Ancestral Fabulation: Queer Returns of Asian/American Ritual Performances

One’s ancestry is usually taken as an ontological fact. However, queer and trans diasporic people don’t always have the luxury of seeing their genders, desires, and ways of life reflected in their lineage. This project draws on the tools of performance studies to rethink ancestry as a doing that affords diasporic subjects means of reclaiming feminine and queer ancestral lineages.

Through analyzing works of contemporary Asian/American ritual performances, I theorize how aesthetic practices such as invocation, disenchantment, remembrance, and fabulation allow minoritarian artists to connect with their ancestry and to invent a grammar of gender and sexuality within their diasporic histories and place-based knowledge. This not only expands Western epistemologies of theatre and gallery to consider relations to place and ecology, but also intervenes in performance art’s long history of appropriation of non-Western spiritual rituals.

The work challenges patrilineality, cultural nationalism, and cultural tourism within dominant modes of “ancestral return,” by situating one’s ancestry entangled with legacies of indenture, imperial war, settler colonialism, and global neoliberalism. This project articulates a capacious field of Asian American studies that accounts for intersubjective relation between body and land, as well as intimacies with Blackness and Indigeneity in the global Asias.