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In this much-anticipated new book, Stephen Hong Sohn invites us to contemplate, on a continental scale, the thematic and formal innovations of literatures that center LGBTQI storytellers. Invoking the enduring racial trope of Oriental inscrutability, “inscrutable belongings” gestures toward the historical, legal, sociopolitical, and cultural discourses across North America that deem Asian-raced bodies and their intimacies perverse, deviant, and nonnormative in order to rationalize various forms of exclusion, regulation, and containment. Accordingly, as both a noun and an adjective, Sohn’s “queer Asian North American” signals not so much a category that asserts empirical certitude, but rather a figuration and provocation for apprehending the points of resonance in (negotiating) the critical confluences between processes of sexualization and Asian racialization across the United States and Canada. This transnational figuration thus highlights corresponding material contexts that shape the difficulties experienced by queer Asian North American communities as well as the activist legacies and survival strategies developed to navigate and challenge these obstacles. Notably, Sohn elucidates the forms of “material violence” (4) and “social eccentricity” (27) that structure continual modes of precarity and vulnerability for these communities. Sohn means for us to grapple with the persistent realities of legal discrimination and differential political exclusion, along with palpable risks of violence and death that radically trouble celebratory accounts of queer progress that herald achievements in inclusion and rights.
Queer Asian North Americans, their socialities, and their desires cannot be fully incorporated into, are unsupported by, and therefore are potentially antagonistic toward several prominent configurations of reproductive futurity among dominant accounts by mainstream LGBT and Asian North American discourses:...