Rethinking Gendered Citizenship
Intimacy, Sovereignty, and Empire
Guest Editors: Genevieve Clutario (Wellesley College) and Rana Jaleel (University of California, Davis)
Publication Date: Planned for Fall 2020
Submission Requirements: 5,000-6,000 words (not including endnotes), due November 1, 2019
With the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States fast approaching in 2020, scholars are organizing celebrations, symposia, and exhibits around the issues of voting, citizenship, and enfranchisement. How should we understand this memorialization and celebration of voting rights as scholars of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies who investigate the racialized denial and access to citizenship, forced incorporation into the U.S. settler state, and modes of belonging that enhance or surpass juridical forms of state-based citizenship? How might the anniversary of women’s suffrage provide an opportunity to reframe how gender, intimacy, and sexuality redefine political activism, and figure in the historically embedded and contemporary crises of belonging?
Recent scholarship on queer and trans migration as well as works attentive to engagements between migrants, indigenous people, and colonized subjects theorize new intimacies and relationalities that complicate the meaning and primacy of citizenship in its many forms. Queer and trans scholars and activists have, for example, documented how assumptions about sexuality and gender identity structure asylum and citizenship claims, creating vulnerabilities and intimacies that traverse and challenge more static accounts of borders and belonging. How might such work on gender, sexuality, and intimacy provide a new vantage from which to consider the racialization of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, as well as the relationships between migrant, colonized, and indigenous peoples? How might we better understand the contradictions and possibilities in the sometimes linked and sometimes disconnected struggles towards freedom, belonging, decolonization, sovereignty, rights, and citizenship?
This special issue seeks research-based essays and nontraditional or creative works that use gender, intimacy, indigeneity, and/or sexuality to rethink Asian and Pacific Islander racialization and notions of belonging and activism. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged. Essays might address:
• The trans and queer diaspora or how sexual, gender, indigenous and/or national identities transform as they traverse literal and figurative borders and boundaries;
• How social and historical agents strategically frame gender and sexuality to create modes of belonging (consider, for example, Nayan Shah’s concept of sexual citizenship);
• How frameworks of gender, sexuality, and indigeneity attend to how activism can foster connections and collaborations, but also sideline and silence important differences in relationships to state and other forms of power;
• How approaches to gender and sexuality call attention to cross-community tensions and conflicts in the racialization of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (e.g., how these analytics might illustrate the limits and utility of categories like “APIA”);
• How arrangements of land and other property claims are foreclosed or enabled through notions of rights and kinship;
• How frameworks of gender and sexuality can be used to concede and/or disrupt settler frameworks of assimilation and inclusion, illuminating, for example, the often unclear and uncertain positions between formal assignation of rights and rightlessness (e.g., seeking refuge, sanctuary, and asylum);
• Ways of making claims to power, past or present, that exceed static designations of rights and rightlessness (e.g., authority and leadership as well as resistance against such authority and institutions of power);
• How action and movements that foreground gender and/or sexuality also question and reimagine what constitutes the United States, borders, colonies, and territories within the context of settler and imperial power formations such as land seizures, displacement, exclusion, violence, and the consolidation of land and territories.
Submission Guidelines and Review Process
Please submit your paper at: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ramj/default.aspx. There, you can find author instructions for uploading your submission, which requires a user account.
The guest editors, in consultation with the Amerasia Journal editorial staff and peer reviewers, make decisions on the final essays:
• Initial review of submitted papers by guest editors and Amerasia Journal editorial staff
• Papers approved by editors will undergo blind peer review
• Revision of accepted peer-reviewed papers and final submission
Please contact Arnold Pan, Associate Editor, with any questions regarding your submission: arnoldpan@ucla.edu.
PDF version of CFP: Amerasia Journal CFP, Rethinking Gendered Citizenship (Fall 2020)
The historical and political intersections uniting Arab America and Asian America go back to the early twentieth century—immigrants from Ottoman Syria sought entry into the United States by defining their racial identities in response to immigration law restricting Chinese labor. Yet as with the case of Asian immigrants, such attempts by Syrians and Lebanese to shape their identities were confronted by nationalistic concepts of race. As the guest editors explain, “The shift from self-identification with whiteness to affiliation with ethnic minorities and people of color in the United States is evident in recent scholarship on Arab Americans.”
The new issue of Amerasia Journal examines how arts and culture can inspire resistance movements and new ways of knowing for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Tiara R. Na‘puti and Sylvia Frain show how the quadrennial 12th Festival of Pacific Arts “has served formally as a public platform and area to share and exhibit cultural and political resistance.” The festival was held in Guam in 2016 where Pacific nations and territories exchanged culture and knowledge. New Zealand education specialists Rose Penn, Mere Kēpa, and Linitā Manu’atu describe “the diasporic contexts and challenges that migrants from Pacific Island nations face in order to retain…the languages that reconnect us to our own values and knowledge.” Their hands-on efforts working with Pasifika students at the university level is discussed.
The special issue tracks how visual narratives have represented Asian and Asian American identities across a range of historical and geographical contexts. Articles by J. Lorenzo Perillo and Marie Lo address how and to what purposes stereotypes of Filipinos were circulated at the beginning of the twentieth century, be it in dance textbooks or at world’s fairs. Similarly, Leslie Woodhouse elaborates on how the Thai royal court of the late nineteenth century used photography to project a sense of how “civilized” it was. In a more contemporary case, Laura Kwak details the media strategies through which the Conservative Party of Canada appealed to Chinese and South Asian communities in the 2011 elections.
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