The Homeless Diaspora of Queer Asian Americans
Sonia Otalvaro-Hormillosa

Introduction

This article explores possibilities for conceptualizing queer diaspora as a critical practice in cross-border organizing. It also addresses the citizenship(s) that are implicated in the process of transnationalism, which evokes gender and sexuality as crucial modes of analysis. I will be looking specifically at Asian models of diaspora and alternative models of diaspora, which are informed by sexuality and gender as much as they are by nationhood. One of the major terms of analysis in this article is the notion of hybridity as it is used by cultural critics writing on second- and third-generation immigration experiences and the counterhegemonic cultural practices that arise from those experiences. However, this term can be interpreted in various ways, some of which incorporate queerness as a challenge to heteronormativity. Previously, I have used hybridity as a term to designate the multiplicity and/or intersection of various identities, particularly postcolonial and sexual identities. In this article, I will explore the dangers and difficulties in conceptualizing hybridity in terms of queer diaspora due to the unequal power relationships existing between members of the same diaspora, some of whom are located in more economically privileged sites. Given these asymmetries, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to use one starting point (i.e., sexuality, race, gender, class, or nationhood) in writing about queer diaspora.

Citizenship and dual citizenship acquire new meanings depending on the shifting global positionalities of transnational subjects. Experiences of privilege and diaspora are informed by race, class, gender, nationality, and/or sexuality. For instance, although a transnational Mexican migrant may enjoy citizenship in his/her country of origin, the border is the point at which rights associated with U.S. citizenship cease; however, a transnational capitalist, or a Third World elite, may enjoy benefits approximating those of dual citizenship to a larger degree due to his/her economic status. A First World queer transnational, on the other hand, may not enjoy many of the rights of citizenship or dual citizenship in various locations of a diaspora in which heterosexism is the norm; hence, the dialectic relationship between privilege and diaspora makes the notion of power relative to specific locations. In the process of strategizing for transnational organizing, it is necessary to explore the relationship between diasporic and/or transnational experiences of immigrant and second or third generation postcolonial queers in the context of their shifting global positionalities.

By transnationalism and diaspora, I refer to concepts that have been used to destabilize traditional models of migration in which the transition from the old country to the new country was assumed to involve assimilation to a new order in which ethnicity dropped out. Transnationalism is a process whereby social links between the country of origin and the host country may be maintained to resist this supposed homogenization of assimilation. Roger Rouse (1991) describes this process in the context of the economic and cultural practices of Mexican migrants who develop transnational migrant circuits in response to the internationalization of transnational corporations. He depicts their experience as an act of border crossing in which the juxtaposition of two worlds does not necessarily produce assimilation. Due to the intersecting sites of transnational circuits of capital, labor, and communication of Mexican migrants, Rouse argues that it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a monolithic national identity (Ibid.). Seen in this light, transnationalism and ethnic identification can be a way of historicizing the de-racialization of previously racialized subjects (Omi and Winant, 1994: 9-48). In this sense, transnationalism becomes a function of diaspora in the sense that within any diaspora, multiple nationalisms can exist that resist monolithic national identities.

Traditional definitions of diaspora have been limited to the idea that the group that has migrated does not have the choice to return to the homeland. William Safran (1991: 83-84) defines diaspora as a group of ethnic expatriates who share the following characteristics:

(1) they or their ancestors have been dispersed from a specific original "center" to two or more "peripheral," or foreign, regions; (2) they retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their homeland; (3) they believe they are not fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel alienated and insulated from it; (4) they regard their ancestral homeland as their true ideal home and as a place to which they or their descendants would eventually return when conditions are appropriate; (5) they believe that they should be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their homeland; (6) they continue to relate personally or vicariously to that homeland and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship.

According to Safran, the Jewish Diaspora is the "ideal type" that conforms to these requirements; nonetheless, he also acknowledges that other types of diaspora exist, such as those based on religious, ideological, or economic beliefs. Safran's requirements for an ideal diaspora would not account for alternative ways to "imagine communities," to borrow a term from Benedict Anderson. By Safran's standards, Filipino Americans would not constitute a diaspora since a large number of them do not have the intention of returning to the Philippines; however, Jonathan Okamura provides a model of a Filipino American diaspora based on the sites of space, time, and ethnicity, which I will explore further in this article in relationship to queer diaspora as a more ideologically based diaspora.

Alternative ways of viewing diaspora can lead to a critical transnationalism, which resists the reproduction of existing hierarchies. Ien Ang and John Stratton (1996) call for a critical transnationalism that must be enunciated from particular contexts to avoid the dominant forms of transnationalism that are promoted by global capitalism. In response to this argument, Kuan-Hsing Chen (1996) cautions against Ang and Stratton's model because he believes that their focus on nation-states as the ultimate context for pursuing a transnational cultural studies is an example of one way in which this field runs the risk of becoming the vanguard of global capitalism. He argues that the nation-state must be contested in order to explore the ways in which globalization, the infiltration of economy, politics, and culture, reproduce nation-state boundaries and reflect the global division of economic and political power (Ibid.: 40). One way of contesting the nation-state as an object of analysis for transnational cultural studies is by looking at the differences and antagonisms between diasporic "Anglo-American" theorists and critics and "Third World" intellectuals in both the Third and First Worlds. Chen (Ibid.: 51-52) argues that the latter have:

postcolonized themselves in a complexly hybrid way, looking at the world partially through "the imperialist eye," forgetting that their productivity has everything to do with their "home cultures" - being partially outside of the dominant "western" cultural formation and thus able (partially) to see things which cannot be seen by the "local" (western) critical theorist.

Rather than rely on the nation-state as the axis around which to organize an international cultural studies, Chen considers it more progressive to conceive of post-national terms that are grounded in the intersections of subject positions and groups. He is skeptical about the poststructuralist trend of cultural studies that has abandoned identity politics, because it is precisely the notion of identity that provides the foundation for political alliance in the Third World context (Ibid.: 41). His model of a politicized internationalist cultural studies would insist on its connections to Marxism, feminism, anti-racism, and anti-homophobia rather than maintaining divisions within nation-states (in relation to race, class, gender, and sexuality), as well as among nation-states that locate First, Second, and Third Worlds at the margins or at the center of the global economy. Chen's model of politicized internationalist cultural studies would require questioning the meaning of decolonization and challenging "nativist" returns to a "purified" origin and postcolonial celebrations of hybridity (Ibid.: 63).

Chen's criticisms of transnational cultural studies will be useful in my exploration of the possibilities for conceptualizing a Filipino Queer diaspora in which various struggles can be articulated from the politics of dislocation. My own privileged position as a Third World subject with (relative) First World intellectual privilege will inform my analysis and the limits of transnationalism that I will encounter as a result of the (dis)location from which I enunciate. Stuart Hall's (1992: 220) notion of enunciation suggests that "though we speak, so to say 'in our own name,' of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless, who speaks and the subject who is spoken of are never exactly in the same place." I intend to use Chen's criticisms and questions around issues of decolonization, nativism, and hybridity as a starting point to engage with various models of diaspora in different contexts. Throughout this process, I will question the extent to which the boundaries of specific diasporas are mutable and capable of overlapping with other diasporas in order to arrive at the notion of a multiple, but homeless, diasporic consciousness. The ways in which transnationalism and diaspora interact with each other around issues of citizenship(s) will highlight possibilities for the negotiation of identities as they cross borders, both imaginatively and concretely; however, it is important to keep in mind the privileged sites of hybridity that allow these negotiations to occur, and to be aware, as Chen suggests, of our own process of "postcolonizing" ourselves.

Asianing Diasporas

In Allan DeSouza's (1997) comparison between Asian diasporic art practices that occur in the country of origin and those that occur in various locations throughout the diaspora, he conceives of diaspora as a model that offers transnational expansiveness and challenges meanings behind hyphenated identities that put into question notions of cultural citizenship. He also reiterates Chen's point regarding the privileged sites in which cultural studies, in this case diaspora studies, take place: "Diaspora studies take place within a social space of relative security.... [A]s a politics of decolonisation, it has not accounted for its own privilege" (Ibid.: 66). While recognizing the emphasis of diaspora as a means to expand identity, he also recognizes the possible dangers of this emphasis because it has the potential to lead to a depoliticization of "minority" struggles and alliances within U.S. borders.

As feminist critics have pointed out, the politicization of these struggles has often been articulated from a masculinist perspective on nationalism, which has not accounted for gender. Lisa Lowe (1996: 60-83) has written about the conflicts between cultural nationalism and assimilation in Asian American discourse. She argues that essentialized notions of cultural identity lead to a conception of difference based on a binary opposition between Asian American nationalism and feminism, the latter of which is equated with assimilation. Lowe (Ibid.: 74) quotes other feminists of color who resist such categorization precisely because they are based on colonialist divide-and-conquer strategies that pit anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles against each other. Furthermore, attempts at essentializing Asian American cultural identity reproduce hierarchical practices that are used by the dominant culture to marginalize Asian Americans and that preclude cross-race alliances among women.

Lowe calls for a new approach to conceptualizing difference based on notions of nonequivalence that are implicit in her concepts of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and hybridity. Heterogeneity is used to describe the differences within the category of Asian America, such as national origin, class, gender, and generational relation to immigration exclusion laws. By multiplicity, she designates the contradictory ways in which subjects are determined by multiple axes of power such as patriarchy, capitalism, and race relations. Rather than celebrating the postmodern uses of hybridity, her definition of hybridity is grounded in a materialist concept that conveys the histories of forced labor migration, economic displacement, racial segregation, and internment; furthermore, "these hybridities are always in the process of, on the one hand, being appropriated and commodified by the dominant culture and, on the other, of being rearticulated for the creation of oppositional 'resistance cultures'" (Lowe, 1996: 82). Hybridization in this sense is not a free negotiation; rather, it reflects the asymmetrical power relations and violence that immigrants face in the United States and the survival strategies that are shaped by the invention and reproduction of cultural alternatives. As an example, Lowe (Ibid.: 67) uses the racial and linguistic mixing of Filipinos in the Philippines and in the U.S., which include traces of Spanish colonialism, U.S. colonization, and neocolonialism to expose the survival strategies of immigrants, as opposed to their supposed assimilation to dominant cultural forms. It is also important to note the irony of the historical fact that until the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, which proposed eventual independence for the Philippines but simultaneously restricted Filipino immigration, Filipinos were exempt from exclusionary immigration legislation due to their status as American "nationals" who carried U.S. passports, but were not granted full citizenship rights (Friday, 1994: 145).

The contradictions that have resulted from the multiple forces of colonization in the Philippines and in the U.S. allow for the possibility of the Filipino diaspora to overlap with other diasporas, particularly those of Latin America, due to a shared colonial Spanish heritage. Furthermore, the absence of a consistent patriarchy grounded in a homogenous view of nationhood, as a result of these multiple colonizing forces, could potentially pave the way to various modes of performing citizenship in different locations throughout the diaspora in such a way that cannot privilege nationalism over feminism, precisely because these terms are put into question. Historically, critical modes of performing citizenship have been evident in the arena of cultural production, such as in subversive artistic practices. For instance, Vicente Rafael has written about seditious theatrical performances that took place at the end of the 19th century in the Philippines, at a time when the recent birth of a nation, which was made possible by the defeat of Spanish colonial forces, was aborted by U.S. colonial forces (Rafael, 1993). In these performances, the category of gender was questioned from what, today, we might call a feminist perspective, due to the fluctuating moment in which an unstable nationalism had not yet taken a masculinist form.

The Filipino American diaspora in itself is a challenge to traditional models of diaspora and to the category of Asian America. Jonathan Okamura (1995: 387-400) writes about the Filipino American diaspora as being consistent with studies on international migration and their focus on transnationalism as a process whereby immigrants build social links between their country of origin and country of settlement. Okamura's (Ibid.: 388) understanding of the Filipino American diaspora (which constitutes the largest overseas Filipino community) and the emergence of this population in the United States locates its centrality in the Filipino diaspora (Ibid.). According to Okamura, despite the long history of Filipino migration to the U.S. and their status as the second-largest Asian American group, Filipinos are economically and politically disadvantaged in comparison to other Asian American groups, which partly has to do with the sense of a lost Filipino history. Amy Kaplan (Kaplan and Pease, 1993) suggests that the invisibility of the Philippines in American history has everything to do with the invisibility of American imperialism to itself. American colonization of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii is not articulated as such in mainstream academia, nor is it taught at the elementary or high school levels from a critical anti-imperialist perspective. At most, the mention of U.S. history in relation to these islands often consists of no more than a paragraph in a typical history book.

Time, space, and ethnicity are the three main factors that Okamura uses to designate the Filipino American diaspora, although he recognizes other significant sites in which this designation could occur, such as class, gender, and power. In terms of space, Okamura takes into account the relationships between Filipino American and other diasporic communities, such as those in Canada, Japan, Australia, Europe, and Southeast Asia; these social ties are most evident in the sociocultural transfers to the Philippines of "balikbayan (return to nation) boxes," which include monetary remittances and desired consumer goods (Okamura, 1995: 388). Time is a historical site in which various migration processes have led to the emergence of a Filipino American diaspora, specifically, those that occurred pre- and post-World War II and those that occurred after 1965, during the liberalization of U.S. immigration laws. Okamura also utilizes time and space in relation to each other to provide a vision of diaspora that is informed by "'spatio-temporal paradigms of interculture' to emphasize their [Filipino Americans] historical processes of intercultural crossing at regional, national, and global levels" (Ibid.: 390), as distinct from more specifically defined diasporas in which ethnic groups are assumed to have the intention of returning to the country of origin.
Time-space compression is evident in the establishment of U.S. branches of on-line remittance services, as well as other services that cater to Filipino Americans, such as long distance telephone companies that facilitate communication across the ocean. He describes this as an example of the commodification of the diaspora experience that goes beyond the use of Filipino immigrant labor. This also refers to Lowe's materialist concept of hybridity, which runs the risk of being appropriated by the dominant culture.

Filipino ethnicity is a contradictory site in which relations to other ethnic groups, including other Asian Americans, highlight the subordinate status of Filipino Americans despite their high level of education in comparison to other ethnic groups and whites in the U.S. (Ibid.: 396). According to Okamura, Filipinos are an example of the marginalized status of Asian Americans, which challenges the Asian "model minority" myth in U.S. society. Okamura acknowledges Lowe's emphasis on "heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity" in terms of class, gender, culture, generation, and history, but he claims that it is more necessary to examine differences of power and status. One way to do this will be to de-center the Asian American paradigm from its focus on Chinese and Japanese Americans to other Asian American groups such as Filipino, South Asian, and Vietnamese Americans. This de-centering will prevent the replication of larger structures of domination, which privilege certain groups over others due to race, class, gender, or sexuality.

Okamura's treatment of ethnicity is particularly significant in relation to Filipinos because it points to the relative autonomy of concepts of race and ethnicity. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to view Filipinos as a race, considering that the Philippines is made up of a variety of cultures, including the indigenous Malayan people of the archipelago whose ties to Pacific Island people create links to the African diaspora (Root, 1997: xiii), as well as Muslim, Spanish, American, and Indonesian cultures. Indeed, Maria Root (Ibid.: 84) points out that the ambiguous racial makeup of Filipinos led to their exemption from anti-miscegenation laws until 1933 when they were classified as Malays. Filipinos were involved in struggles against anti-miscegenation legislation in various parts of the U.S. during the pre-World War II period, as well as in union organizing, both as an autonomous faction and with Chinese and Japanese workers (Friday, 1994: 145). Root also distinguishes among Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese male immigrant workers, by attributing the higher rate of intermarriage between Filipinos and such groups as Native American, African American, and white women to their (the Filipinos) ease with English as a result of American colonization. Root cites studies that conclude with the observation that from the Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean populations, Filipinos have the highest rate of intermarriage; however, it has also been observed that they intermarry less frequently than those groups with other Asian Americans, and instead intermarry more frequently with Latinos with whom they share cultural similarities, as well as with whites (Root, 1997: 86).

Due to this common tendency of intermarriage among Filipinos, it would be inadequate to apply a monoracial paradigm to this group. Root advocates for alternative approaches to identity that are more consistent with the racial mixing of Filipino history, in order to make up for the racialization processes to which Filipino Americans were subject in the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, some of the more educated and economically privileged Filipino immigrants who arrived after the changes in immigration laws in 1965 advocated for assimilation to American identities as a way to maintain their status, while other Filipino Americans who were involved in the civil rights movements began to define ethnic solidarity based on their resistance to racial homogenization (Ibid.: 83).

Arguably, in the case of Filipino Americans, hybridity in Lowe's materialist terms, as a consequence of colonization, has facilitated the crossing of multiple borders, such as those of race (if one can apply this term to Filipinos) and sexuality. Consequently, the potential exists for cultural hybridity (as a result of the racial and cultural mixing implicit in Filipino history) to lead to sexual hybridity. Resistance to both monoracial paradigms as well as heteronormativity can result in the mutability of cultural and sexual hybridity. The process of conceptualizing these multiple diasporas ultimately leads to the difficult project of creating analogies between anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic struggles, which are often perceived to be incomparable to one another. Historical and contemporary race discourse has primarily been articulated from black/white binary systems of thought, in which essentialized notions of race become the sole factor in determining authenticity and commitment to one's "community." Such discourse has influenced the ways in which queer theorists have attempted to write about the possibilities for creating analogies between various forms of oppression. For instance, in his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, Queer Politics and Social Theory, Michael Warner (1993) justifies his argument concerning the impossibility of a queer diaspora by illustrating the ways in which queer politics differ from race and gender politics in the sense that multiculturalism, despite its postmodern language, relies on notions of authenticity and culture as sources of shared meaning and identities. Working from this premise, Warner (Ibid.: xvii) writes:

Queer culture will not fit this bill. Whatever else it might be, it is not autochthonous. It cannot even be in diaspora, having no locale from which to wander. Thus, while notions of alternative traditions or canons have been very useful for African-American and feminist scholars, because queer politics does not obey the member/nonmember logics of race and gender, alternative canons and traditions cannot always be opposed to the dominant ones in the same way.

Warner's quotation is significant because it reveals the Euro-Americentricity implicit in such an attempt to deny a queer diaspora from the perspective of his own or similar First World privileged location. At the same time, his argument is informed by monoracial models that prioritize the African American experience, as well as by pre-given notions of authenticity. Asian American and Latino models of identity contest the black/white binary nature of mainstream race discourse, despite the masculinist essentialized nationalism on which these instances of identity and community formation are sometimes based. Filipino Americans, many of whom self-identify as members of a mixed heritage, disrupt totalizing and/or monoracialization processes due to their histories of racial mixing. Queer Asian Americans pose further questions to these issues since the "locale(s) from which to wander," in terms of their racial and sexual identities, are constantly in motion [1]. Second- and third-generation Asian Americans in this group may not have the choice or intention to return to the country of origin, but may imagine a diaspora that is informed by Okamura's (1995: 390) "'spatio-temporal paradigms of interculture' [which] emphasize their [Filipino Americans] historical processes of intercultural crossing at regional, national, and global levels." Consequently, they are forced to migrate locally and globally to various (dis)locations.

Accessing New Territories for Pleasure

The (dis)locations from which Queer Asian Americans articulate their subjectivity is described by Karin Aguilar-San Juan (1998) as the multiple meanings that home acquires for this group. She recognizes the importance for queer Asian Americans of the historical search for home as "a place from which Asian Americans are always, already negated, made invisible, excluded." Orienting this discussion toward Queer Studies, Aguilar-San Juan (1994: 2) explores the dynamics of "home" and Asian America for Asian American queers precisely because "home is a place where Asian-ness originates," so that homophobia is often most intense in these situations, as well as in other places designated as "home." She quotes Yoko Yoshikawa, who has written on queer Asian American activism:

We who occupy the interstices - whose very lives contain disparate selves - are, of necessity, at home among various groups that know little of each other.... We have a deep hunger for a place in which we can be, at one and the same time, whole, and part of something larger than ourselves (Yoshikawa, 1994: 20-21).

According to Aguilar-San Juan (1994: 3), references to home by queer Asian Americans often create hierarchies that are informed by relationships between First and Third Worlds in relation to what might be considered a queer utopia; furthermore, issues of authenticity are inherent in pre-given universal truth claims about "home." It is especially crucial for queer Asian America to contest these truth claims in the nascent process of building a collectivity. Aguilar-San Juan (Ibid.: 22) recognizes that "enacting justice in Asian America is a particularly vexing task because, precisely at the moment in which we wish to speak, the problem of authenticity prevents us from doing so." For instance, "authenticity" is often constructed by dominant Asian American cultures, which uphold masculinist nationalist perspectives that are at odds with critical queer and/or feminist perspectives, as well as with perspectives that resist monoracial paradigms of race.

The difficulty in locating "home(s)" for queer Asian Americans provides spaces in which new forms of cultural citizenship take place. Eric Reyes (1995a: 251-257) writes abut this process in terms of the relationship between place and space. Reyes (Ibid.: 254-55) explores the tension between the queer ideal of desire and the Asian ideal of place. This creates contradictory spaces of absence because "in using 'Asian America,' we reference an idea(l) of place - a mentally perceived, imagined, and created space," whereas "queer" designates "an ideal of sex and desire that appropriates a historically stigmatized identity," in which the latter acts as a de-locator of one's place and rootedness of home. Due to their status as multiply marginalized subjects, Asian Pacific Queers move to various places without necessarily having the privilege to occupy each of those particular spaces. Asian Pacific Queers do not make up the dominant culture within mainstream gay white male culture, and they do not make up the dominant culture within heterosexist Asian Pacific culture; rather, they often encounter racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia in both of these spaces. Reyes (1995b: 87) examines the spaces in between, such as those that are created by and for Asian Pacific Queers and/or other queers of color who share similar ideals (e.g., local or transnational organizations, events, dance clubs, and other social networks that cater specifically to these groups). Reyes thus arrives at a notion of traveling citizenship as a way to map spaces in between Asian Pacific contexts, queer contexts, and other domains. For Reyes (Ibid.), Asian Pacific Queers have access to different types of territory beyond the physical territory to which political citizenship is limited, and this deterritorialization leads to opportunities in which Asian Pacific Queers demand different forms of cultural citizenships.

Karin Aguilar-San Juan (1994: 1-15) offers a good example of the ways in which various citizenships inform Asian Pacific Queer experiences in her criticism of how first-class gay U.S. citizenship has been articulated from an imperialist standpoint in that gay activists have placed considerable emphasis on legislation around inclusion of gays in the military. Aguilar-San Juan argues that these politics are inconsistent with anti-imperialist Asian Pacific Queer concerns, which are partly shaped by the history of U.S. imperialism, as evidenced by the presence of U.S. military bases in various parts of Southeast Asia, and particularly in the Philippines, where these bases were seen as "rest and recreation" playgrounds that provided Navy men with drugs and prostitutes (Ibid.: 12). While other queer theorists, such as Michael Warner, have written about citizenship as a common ground for identity politics for queers and ethnic minorities due to the potential for queerness, sexuality, and race to act as an "interference in the disembodying frame of citizenship" (Warner, 1993: xx), Aguilar-San Juan and Reyes remind us that we must be cautious about the implications behind the assumptions of (U.S.) "citizenship" or lack thereof.

Gayatri Gopinath (1995: 120-121) touches on similar topics in her commentary on the trend in Queer Studies to link the nation and queerness in order to combat anti-gay right-wing campaigns; such an approach ultimately takes for granted citizenship as a right to which all queers have access, thus overlooking the experiences of queers of color who must constantly navigate multiple, contingent, national spaces. Gopinath conceptualizes transnational or diasporic queerness as occurring at the interstices of these multiple national spaces, where strategic negotiations can occur. However, at the outset of the article, she acknowledges the difficulties involved in conceptualizing a diasporic or transnational South Asian queer sexuality. Rather than attempting to arrive at conclusions on the matter, her project is to interrogate the frameworks within which such a conceptualization takes place without adhering to totalizing narratives that cannot account for the "radical contingency of queer South Asian subjectivity" (Ibid.: 120). Part of this conceptualization involves the recognition of new articulations of queer desire and pleasure, which are critical in the process of negotiating a space for queer diasporic intimacy (Ibid.: 123). Queer diasporic intimacy occurs in spaces in which members of a diaspora have agency in the multiple citizenships that make up their shifting global positionalities. This conceptualization is similar to Reyes' notion that the tension between the Asian ideal of place and the queer ideal of desire leads to possibilities for these negotiations to occur. Gopinath cites Pratibha Parmar's Khush, a documentary film on queer South Asian identity, which I will analyze below, as an example of the process of negotiating a space for queer diasporic intimacy.

Critical artistic practices, such as film, become spaces where new articulations of citizenship, identity, and desire can occur. Pratibha Parmar is among a group of Black cultural practitioners in Britain ("Black" in Britain is used to designate Africans and Asians) who have been described by Stuart Hall (1992: 235) as embodying a "diaspora aesthetic" with a "subversive hybridizing tendency" to "critically appropriate elements from the master-codes of the dominant culture...disarticulating given signs and re-articulating their symbolic meaning." Richard Fung (1991: 145-168), whose queer diasporic art practices challenge racist representations of Asians in mainstream gay male porn, shares similar concerns with the creation of new spaces in which we can articulate queer Asian desire. Fung's and Parmar's films are reflective of queer Asian diasporic consciousness as a process of a collective decolonization of sexuality. Gopinath (1995: 125) describes this as a "translated geography of pleasure where new sites of deterritorialized desire are always being reproduced."

Parmar's Khush is a documentary that combines personal testimonies of South Asian gay men and lesbians from the U.K., the U.S., Canada, and various parts of India. The testimonies are combined with artistic footage, including scenes of India, archival footage of imagery of Indian women, and an androgynous, red colored, culturally hybrid-looking figure who appears at various points throughout the film to do what appears to be an absurd comic relief dance. The film starts out with a Canadian South Asian lesbian saying, "the best thing about being a lesbian is total erotic satisfaction and endless possibilities," followed by a club scene in which South Asian queers and queers of other colors are dancing. Club scenes appear at various points throughout the film. They serve a similar function to that of the red-colored dancing figure, in the sense that they provide the viewer with pleasure in the midst of a documentary film addressing critical issues about race, sexuality, and diaspora. There is another scene in which two South Asian women express female-to-female desire, which also contributes to this effect of pleasure intervention. At times such scenes occur with a background of the archival footage of images of Indian women, which I interpreted to be an expression of the postcolonial condition of being in a dialectical relationship to the past, present, and future.

These scenes provide a contrast to some of the testimonies, which reveal the difficulty and pain that are involved in the process of coming out to one's ethnic community or being an ethnic or racial minority in a primarily white queer politicized space. For instance, one of the women spoke about her experiences with racism when she was younger; another woman spoke about being objectified as an "Oriental to bed with," while another spoke about the fact that queer white women did not care about her ethnic background. One of the women who had gone to college in the U.S. spoke about being taken in by the lesbian separatist movement since, upon her arrival to the States, she did not initially see herself as an object of racism. One of the men speaking from India said that the most important things for him were "sex, solidarity, brotherhood, and sisterhood." Another man spoke in silhouette about the dangers of being manhandled while cruising in areas of Delhi. Others commented on the detrimental and popular myth that queer sexuality is a "white phenomenon."

The variety of experiences represented in this film clearly evoked a sense of contradictions in terms of dealing with the pleasures and difficulties of embodying multiple subjectivities, yet this (dis)embodiment can function as a space in which to organize across borders. The experience of living a fragmented identity allows for the transformation of spaces that would otherwise exclude postcolonial minorities, such as queer transnationals who might be ethnic minorities in First World queer space, or sexual minorities in Third World heterosexist space. I do not intend to essentialize or attribute queerness to the First World or heterosexism to the Third World. It should be clear that heterosexism and homophobia permeate all cultures; furthermore, men of color have historically been sexually exploited by white patriarchy. I offer these as examples in which activists who occupy multiple subjectivities destabilize the notion of what is queer and authentic (in racial and/or ethnic terms), and by doing so, transform those spaces in their process of organizing across borders.

The presence of club scenes in which bhangra music was playing was significant because it provided a concrete example of the reappropriation of signs in a space where South Asian queer desire was being positively affirmed. It also functions as a reminder of the significance of bars in the gay and lesbian subculture as a space in which activism can originate [2]. Bhangra is the product of the transformation of Punjabi folk music, fused with house, reggae, rap, and other Black diasporic musical forms that reflect the often forced historical migration process of South Asians to East and South Africa, the Caribbean, the U.K., the U.S., and Canada. Gopinath (1995) has written about the importance of bhangra music in the South Asian queer diaspora due to the significance of the rearticulation of what has already been constituted as a transnational popular cultural form. However, Gopinath (Ibid.: 121) makes a comparison between the masculinist basis of bhangra and current articulations of diaspora that replicate conventional ideologies of gender and sexuality, which render queers and women invisible. She suggests that:

Perhaps the strategic appropriation of bhangra or Hindi film music by queer South Asians in the West - where both have become staples at parties and parades as a way of signifying South Asian-ness to a mainstream (white) gay community, as well as to other queer people of color - offers a glimpse into what a queered South Asian diaspora could look (and sound) like (Gopinath, 1995: 123).

Furthermore, she adds that this kind of strategic appropriation becomes a parodic performativity in which conventions of gender are disrupted, such as in cross-dressing performances by men and women. In Khush, the club scenes are effective in conveying a sense of empowerment that queers of color experience in reclaiming ethnic signifiers that have traditionally excluded them.

The use of traditional Hindi music and the footage of sacred temples in India points to the importance of symbolically reclaiming a precolonial past. Some of the interviewees in the film spoke about the current trend in which research is being done to uncover a history of homoerotic sexuality in the scriptures and in temples, which were destroyed when British colonial forces transported Western patriarchal morals of sexuality. Pratibha Parmar, the film's creator, and other feminists of color have commented on the ways in which the arrival of Western patriarchy signaled the destruction of precolonial indigenous systems that had not been as oppressive to women (Carby, 1982; Parmar, 1982). One woman in the film described this return to precolonial indigenous systems as part of a larger process of actively re-creating a vision of sexuality as a continuum from a lesbian feminist point of view. It was noteworthy that the term "lesbian" was used by some women in the film and rejected by others; for instance, one of the interviewees was very resistant to using the term because it is rooted in Western tradition (i.e., the Greek island of Lesbos). Throughout the film, I sensed that a mutual understanding was at work across various locations in the diaspora. Some of the queers in India discussed the importance of the network of South Asian queer organizations in the West and the role these organizations could play in helping queers in India. An Indian woman who attended school in the U.S., another woman who had lived in the U.S. and had returned to India, and a Canadian woman who encouraged queers to come together and reach beyond themselves to fight against imperialism, homophobia, sexism, and classism all expressed similar desires and understandings that exist through space and across borders. The film also touches on issues of class, an important factor in conceptualizing a queer diaspora, since class often determines the extent to which one has access to gay and lesbian resources. A gay man living in India talked about the need to break down the caste system in order to bring together the 80 million queers in India (a figure surpassing the population of the U.K.), while another man emphasized the differences in erotic sensibilities across class.

This leads to the difficult question regarding the viability of sexuality as a starting point to conceptualize a racialized queer diaspora. Since class hierarchies often determine the extent to which queers have access to organizations or other resources that facilitate communication among queers, it is important to consider the obstacles that prevent economically disadvantaged queers from accessing these opportunities. Furthermore, when dealing with the West and the rest, Gopinath (1995: 122) urges us not to forget that same-sex eroticism exists and signifies differently in each site of the diaspora. She argues that one of the dangers encountered in comparing the West to the non-West is a culturally imperialist approach that reduces non-Western consumption to mimicry. Gopinath (Ibid.: 124) argues that it is important to:

realize that such forms of transnational popular practice mean radically different things in different contexts, that it is not about a one-way flow of commodities, identities, or models of being; rather, it is about multiple and non-hierarchical sites of exchange, where queerness and ethnicity are being contested and made anew every step of the way.

These transnational popular practices take the form of music, dance, style, and spaces where these forms are present, such as in social networks (nightclubs, parades, festivals, organizations, etc.).

Gopinath's and Parmar's models of queer South Asian diaspora are useful in my own project of writing on Filipino Queer diaspora. Although I did not understand all of the religious iconography referenced in Khush, I was able to share the "third space" discussed earlier with regard to my use of "Asian American queers" and "Filipino American queers." The issue of reappropriating bhangra can also apply to the reappropriation of equally oppressive cultural forms (in terms of the strict designation and portrayal of gender roles), such as hip-hop or salsa by queers of the African and Latino diasporas. I have experienced all three and can testify to the shared sense of empowerment that results from such practices of reappropriation. It is as if one is able to merge what Reyes refers to as the Asian ideal of place and the queer ideal of desire into one space. These models of queer diaspora can be applied to my project of conceptualizing a Filipino Queer diaspora. They raise constantly relevant concerns, such as recognizing non-Western agency of desire (as in Gopinath's critique of culturally imperialist approaches that reduce non-Western consumption to mimicry), or the problems in deciding which aspect of identity will be used as a starting point for analysis and activism. Rather than privileging some identities over others, it might be more useful to view them as dialectically related to one another, which leads to an interrogation of status and power within the diaspora and a questioning of whether power structures between the First and Third Worlds are being reproduced.

Karin Aguilar-San Juan's criticism of implicit notions of authenticity in queer Asian American references to "home" is made clear in her example of a "Sapphic twist on the colonial myth," which directly relates to Gopinath's criticism of cultural imperialism in careless approaches to diasporic queerness [3]. Aguilar-San Juan relates an anecdote about the transnational politics that occurred around the Beth and Vangie controversy in the Philippines. "The Beth and Vangie Legal Defense Fund" in San Francisco was organized in response to the firing of two lesbians, Beth and Vangie, from a human rights agency in Manila. Aguilar-San Juan describes her experience at a fund-raising event at which some of the Filipina American lesbians suggested that it might be a good idea to bring Beth and Vangie over to the United States, assuming that the U.S. would be their ideal queer home. This is an example of the implicit dangers in attempting to universalize an idealized notion of "home" that is assumed to be the same for lesbians all over the world. In Aguilar-San Juan's description, the Filipina American lesbians created an image of a culturally repressive Philippines, in contrast to a taken-for-granted universal sense of lesbian freedom that could be found in the ideal queer American home (Aguilar-San Juan, 1998: 4-9). The assumptions made on the part of the Filipina-American lesbians rendered Beth and Vangie silent, as if they occupied a "subaltern" space. By incorporating this anecdote into her analysis, Aguilar-San Juan raises the question that many postcolonial feminists have explored, that is, in Gayatri Spivak's words, "Can the subaltern speak?"

In an article entitled "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Spivak (1988b) explores how the Third World subject is represented by Western intellectual discourse in a context of academic privilege that ultimately relies on Western economic domination. She argues that by presenting itself as transparent (or self-evident), Western intellectual discourse places itself in the "unrecognized contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual, maintained by verbal slippage" and Western academic hegemony (Ibid.: 275). This contradiction is similar to the ways in which the Filipina American lesbians referred to by Aguilar-San Juan revealed their own economically privileged global positionalities in their assumptions about queer America as the ideal home for Beth and Vangie, whose experiences they valorized enough to organize a fund-raiser and other possible strategies. Spivak (Ibid.: 294-295) suggests that it is crucial to explore the relationship between desire, power, and subjectivity; in particular, she posits that European consciousness has constituted the subaltern Other as either marginal or assimilating, and that to resist such "epistemic violence," it is more useful to look at the process whereby the Other is constituted as such, as opposed to invoking "authentic" experiences of the oppressed Other. This argument is similar to Joan Scott's (1993) critique of the evidence of experience, which is intended to give voice to silenced categories of people. Scott advocates an analysis of the process whereby difference is made rather than focusing on the fact of difference. In the Beth and Vangie case, difference was created by way of "authentic" notions of home, which were different in the queer American context than in the racial and ethnic context of the Philippines. As such, "authenticity" is relative to locations within any diaspora and plays a role in the creation of "difference," which influences the ways in which concepts of "home" are created. Furthermore, this creation of difference reveals the relationship between privilege and diaspora, which changes according to the shifting global positionalities of postcolonial queer transnationals.

Applying Spivak's criticism to my project of conceptualizing a Filipino Queer diaspora, I question the historical role of intellectuals who have been involved in a similar process and do not find a substantial history. Assessing the situation is difficult because of the history of displacement of second- and third-generation Asian Americans and Latinos, who have historically been excluded from educational institutions. Ivy League institutions and other U.S. colleges have capitalized on multiculturalism and have encouraged the entry of these historically excluded groups - though these trends may still be reversed by the recent backlash to affirmative action (i.e., the end of affirmative action in the State of California, while Ethnic Studies programs are under consideration for elimination in the University of California system). In other cases, it has become possible to combine postcolonial and/or ethnic studies courses with women's studies courses and/or gay and lesbian studies courses. We must be aware, however, that the process of merging alternative "canons" can potentially reinscribe the imperialist tradition of Western intellectual discourse or lead to new ways of thinking and writing, based on genuine counterhegemonic thought processes, that allow silent voices to emerge. Such thought processes are evident in academic and artistic practices in areas of cultural production that can be used as tools for transnational organizing. Lisa Lowe (1996: 97-127) emphasizes the importance of cultural production since this particular site is where resistant subjectivities emerge. Working from the premise that the American citizen has historically been defined against the Asian immigrant in orientalist economic and cultural terms, she argues that:

if the state suppresses dissent by governing subjects through rights, citizenship, and political representation, it is only through culture that we can conceive and enact new subjects and practices in antagonism to the regulatory locus of the citizen-subject, by way of culture that we can question those modes of government (Ibid.: 22).

The hope would be that, with these new forms of cultural production, subjects who lack rights associated with the state acquire a certain amount of agency, allowing them to assert their subjectivity through cultural networks that define citizenship against those definitions of citizenship from which they are excluded.

Conclusion

The space of cultural production is a crucial site for engaging Asian Americans who consider themselves to be in a dialectical relationship with the past, with respect to histories of colonialism, exclusionary immigration legislation, migration, and displacement - a condition that relates to DeSouza's "temporal hybridity." By considering the potential for conceptualizing temporal hybridity, citizenship acquires new meaning. In the experiences of postcolonial, second and third generation, and/or immigrant queers, the notion of transnational citizenship acquires a hybrid performativity. Since all identities are performative, in the sense that we live in a world of social constructions, hybrid identities that are informed by critical perspectives challenge oppressive and totalizing constructions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationhood. Consequently, hybrid performativity becomes a function of queer diaspora and an essential component of activism and organizing across borders. In an example from Filipino Queer diaspora, a transnational bakla (a Tagalog term that means a man who dresses and acts like a woman) destabilizes these identity categories by way of the transgressive performance of identity constructions, which may occur in activist spaces. For instance, Tita AIDA, a Filipina-American bakla based in San Francisco at the Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center, is an activist who literally performs and challenges identities in the process of doing AIDS education and prevention work in a Filipino-American context, as well as in the Philippines.

We are witnessing a moment of cultural production in which the location of transnational authorship is a starting point for cultural practitioners in various disciplines, such as in Tita AIDA's activism, Pratibha Parmar's films, and in the creation of queer postcolonial academic discourse. In the academic arena, many students of critical race, gender, or sexuality theory link their academic involvement to their activism. Within diaspora studies, and/or studies on transnationalism, the inclusion of sexuality and gender as essential modes of analysis reflects the emergence of subjectivities that arise from their (dis)location in hybridity based on historical and contemporary patterns of migration and in temporal hybridity, to use DeSouza's concept (or, in Jonathan Okamura's terms, in diaspora based on the sites of time, space, and ethnicity). We are witnessing these patterns in the global exchange of labor, where women from the Third World continue to make up a large percentage of cheap labor in the West - what Lisa Lowe describes as the "global feminization of labor," in which parallel patterns of exploitation are faced by Asian and Latina immigrant women in the U.S. and by Asian and Latina workers in multinational corporations located in neocolonial Asia and South America.
The way in which gender and sexuality are capitalized upon is also evident on the Internet's global village, where thousands upon thousands of Southeast Asian women promote themselves as overseas contract workers and/or "mail order brides," for lack of a better term. These are a few examples of the ways in which globalization depends on the gendered division of labor. Given these patterns, it becomes clear that any form of transnational activism and organizing must include gender and sexuality as critical modes of analysis, as well as sites in which multiple subjectivities emerge in various intersecting diasporas, such as those based on ideologies of race, class, nation, gender, and sexuality. It is with an understanding of these multifaceted diasporic locations that we can become better equipped to resist social injustices and all of their complexities in the face of globalization.

NOTES
1. Throughout this article, I will use both queer Asian Americans and Asian American queers to do justice to groups who identify as one or the other, which sometimes reveals the prioritization of one identity over the other. When referring to Queer Asian Americans and Queer Filipino Americans, I do not intend to use these terms interchangeably; however, when commenting on possibilities for queer diaspora, I will use both terms, depending on context, because of a certain "third space" that can be shared for the purposes of what Gayatri Spivak has called "strategic essentialism," in which it is possible to utilize specific signifiers (in this case, racialized ethnicity and sexuality) to contest and disrupt discourses (in this case, both queer and Asian American) that exclude queer Asian Americans. See Gayatri Spivak (1988a).

2. For instance, U.S. gay and lesbian liberation is often immediately equated with the Stonewall rebellion in which queers of color played a significant part. Yet the historical role of queers of color has often been neglected by the gay community and various communities of color. Significantly, during the Civil Rights Movement, African American and Puerto Rican drag queens led Stonewall, the historical moment at which queers rebelled against the customary practice of police raids on gay and lesbian bars that were often accompanied by severe police brutality. Organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis existed; however, they primarily catered to white, economically privileged queers who looked down on bar culture, since it consisted of working-class and queers of color (D'Emilio, 1983). I would argue that activism on the part of queers of color had a great deal to do with the likelihood that they were already involved in anti-racist struggles that served as a catalyst to instigate change in other areas of their lives.

3. Sappho was a Greek literary figure who lived on the island of Lesbos and whose poetry included references to female-to-female desire.

REFERENCES

Aguilar-San Juan, Karin
1998 "Going Home: Enacting Justice in Queer Asian America." David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (eds.), Q & A: Queer in Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
1994 The State of Asian America. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Ang, Ien and Jon Stratton
1996 "Asianing Australia." Cultural Studies Journal 10,1. New York: Routledge.

Carby, Hazel
1982 "White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood." The Empire Strikes Back. Birmingham, England: University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Chen, Kuan-Hsing
1996 "Not Yet the Postcolonial Era: The (Super) Nation-State and the Transnationalism of Cultural Studies: Response to Ang and Stratton." Cultural Studies Journal 10,1. New York: Routledge.

D'Emilio, John
1983 Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

DeSouza, Allan
1997 "The Flight of/from the Primitive." Third Text 38 (Spring).

Friday, Chris
1994 Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870-
1942. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Fung, Richard
1991 "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn." Bad Object-Choices (eds.), How Do I Look? Seattle: Bay Press.

Gopinath, Gayatri
1995 "Funny Boys and Girls: Notes on a Queer South Asian Planet." Russel Leong (ed.), Asian American Sexualities. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart
1992 "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Mbiye Cham (ed.), Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Trenton: African World Press.

Kaplan, Amy and Donald E. Pease (eds.)
1993 Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lowe, Lisa
1996 Immigrant Acts. Durham: Duke University Press.

Okamura, Jonathan
1995 "The Filipino American Diaspora: Sites of Space, Time, and Ethnicity." Marilyn Alquizola et al. (eds.), Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies. Spokane: Washington State University Press.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant
1994 Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge.

Parmar, Pratibha
1991 Khush (film). New York: Women Make Movies.
1982 "Gender, Race, and Class: Asian Women in Resistance." The Empire Strikes Back. Birmingham, England: University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Rafael, Vicente L.
1993 Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule. Durham: Duke University Press.

Reyes, Eric
1995a "Asian Pacific Queer Space." Marilyn Alquizola et al. (eds.), Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies. Spokane: Washington State University Press.
1995b "Strategies for Queer Asian and Pacific Islander Spaces." Russel Leong (ed.), Asian American Sexualities. New York: Routledge.

Root, Maria
1997 Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identities. Escondido, CA: Sage Publications.

Rouse, Roger
1991 "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism." Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Studies 1,1 (Spring).

Safran, William
1991 "Diasporas in Modern Society: Myths of Homeland and Return." Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Studies 1,1 (Spring).

Scott, Joan
1993 "The Evidence of Experience." H. Abelove et al. (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.

Spivak, Gayatri
1988a "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography." Other Worlds. New York: Routledge.
1988b "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Lawrence Grossberg and Larry Nelson (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Warner, Michael
1993 Fear of a Queer Planet, Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Yoshikawa, Yoko
1994 "The Heat Is on Miss Saigon Coalition: Organizing Across Race and Sexuality." Karin Aguilar-San Juan (ed.), State of Asian America. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.