#queer diaspora

[deadassdiaspore]

[mypronounsarenothome]

how do u measure urself

some pain doesn’t want to be relived, does not consent to documentation, to visibility. what wld it mean for me to be invisible, incomprehensible to u. what wld it mean to disappear from ur map and reappear/recreate one of my own.

[hereforwords-blog]

1.30

i’ve felt my feet rip off and soak away into this black and queer Atlantic drown themselves under this ocean of forgotten blood mapped by mati filled trade boats leading to the earth they once called home. maps now lost under the weight of 600 paged textbooks. call it history. call it lost. call it fetish. call it unnatural.

now i drag myself with tattered hands for feet on the streets of Lahore with the rest of my body lost inside an airplane resting on an Atlantic who’s grown hunched with a burden of body parts

[violentwaveforms]

By “queering” a discussion of South Asian popular music in the diaspora, I work against the tendency toward patrilineality, biology, and blood-based affiliation that lies embedded within the term “diaspora” and that is enacted by some South Asian diasporic popular music cultures and the cultural criticism about these cultures. In other words, queering the soundscapes of the South Asian diaspora means highlighting those feminist and queer diasporic cultural practices that give us a way of imagining and hearing diaspora differently, outside heteronormative paradigms of biological inheritance, oedipality, and blood-based affiliation.

-Gayatri Gopinath. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures

[queerakinship]

Post 2: Scholarly Analysis

Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas

David Eng positions adoption and queer diaspora within the realm of queer liberalism and global economics. With this lens, Eng complicates transnational adoption and family structures. Eng positions adoption within economic terms like mail order brides and overseas nannies. The children, Eng describes, are subjects of exploitation in the sense that they are commodities used by their adoptive families to gain global and social capital (11). Eng continues to discuss queer diasporas with the notion of ‘two mothers’ and how adoptees have in a sense two mothers, their adoptive mother and biological mother. This queering of adoption may be seen as bit of a stretch, but it does help in creating a background to how adoption is queer beyond a child being adopted by a gay, lesbian, or queer couple. In addition, the notion of adoption as being inherently queer puts into perspective of how migration and immigration and families are queer. Eng continues to present the notion of how adoption and transnational adoption is a tool used by people to fit into traditional, heterosexual framework of family (9). Having a child, producing offspring is a social marker of success. Therefore, adoption is in essence a mechanism for people who cannot produce biological offspring to obtain social and cultural acceptance and success (12). This Eng mentions is why adoption needs to be complicated within the lens of queer theory.

               One thing that Eng mentions that is interesting is the notion of psychic diasporas. This is the sense of how the mind embodies the physical displacement and sometimes this can happen through children (Eng 16) . Eng uses an example of a mother and daughter. The mother was interned during World War II yet reports having no memory of that experience while the daughter is plagued by nightmares (30).  This, Eng supposes, is the psychic effects of trauma creating a diaspora of memory, of experiences (29). In addition, Eng proposes this notion to the psyche of an LGBTQ person who has to remain closeted, their queer identity must be placed somewhere else in their mind, a diaspora of a sort (31). This notion is revealing in the ways of how the mind not only embodies physical diaspora but a mental one as well to survive.

               David Eng’s piece does a lot to inform and present new ways of examining queer diaspora and adoption. However, Eng proposes many ideals that are only half way explored. With the notion of ‘two mothers’ Eng does not present the idea of ‘two fathers’ or even the idea that a child could have three or more parental figures. The absence of mentioning fatherhood reinforces the idea that children are intrinsically connected to mothers and that fatherhood is less valuable. I mention this only to showcase how fatherhood is often left out of parental conversations as well as to state that parenting should also be de-gendered. Parenting is restricted to this sense of ‘motherhood’ and ‘fatherhood’ and that is just not applicable to the dynamic kinship structures that exist. Parenting takes all different types of forms, in a professor checking in with a student, in a friend making sure their friend eats enough, even in a classmate checking in on a peer. Parenting is not just producing and raising a child, is the mentoring, the caring of a person.

               While reinforcing notions of gendered parenting, Eng does introduce an interesting notion in psychic diasporas. This notion of how the mind responds and embodies certain forms of displacement highlights the impact of diaspora and mental health. The extension of a mental diaspora to queer identity of being closeted really hones in one the notion that diaspora is a much more nuanced concept than just physical displacement. This idea I felt could have been extended to adoptees as well. There are psychological effects of being adopted and that could also be classified under psychic diaspora. Why Eng didn’t bring adoptees into this notion, I am not sure but it is one that is definitely worth exploring.

Eng, David L. "Transnational adoption and queer diasporas." Social Text 21.3                   (2003): 1-37.5

[theislandsiveneverknown-blog]

this is happening

[astromachinations]

The concept of the Queer Diaspora is really hurting my brain. I'm reading up on it and it makes no sense to me whatsoever. If anyone can clarify what exactly the queer diaspora is please let me know

[processedlives]

From Toward a Queer Korean American Diasporic History by JeeYeun Lee in Q & A: Queer in Asian America edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom