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 expands Western epistemologies of performance and the global art market that include non-Western rituals without ecological and ancestral contexts.