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Kong Pheng Pha, "Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality" (U Washington Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode of the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host, Donna Doan Anderson. Today I have the pleasure of conversing with my friend and colleague Dr. Kong Peng Pa about his recently published book Querying the Hmong Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025. Queering the Hmong Diaspora dismantles narratives that frame Hmong communities as sexually deviant and reveals how legal cases, media represent and legislative efforts have constructed Hmong Americans as hyper, heterosexual and ungovernable subjects. This critical examination of how Hmong Americans are positioned within racial, gendered and sexual discourses of liberalism further explores the lived experiences of queer Hmong Americans whose existence and activism challenge mainstream and ethno nationalist constructions of subjectivity. Addressing Hmong American gender and sexual politics through feminist, queer and social justice lenses, PA offers a critical framework for understanding how race and sexuality intersect in shaping the lives of minoritized refugee communities in the United States and beyond. Kongpeng Pa is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator whose academic research, writing and public scholarship explores the histories and politics of refugee migration, radical queer, feminist and anti racist social movements, activism and community organizing. Legacies of U.S. warren Empire minoritized student experiences in the modern university and Asian American racial, gender, sexuality, and queer formations, with a particular attention on Hmong and Southeast Asian communities in the United States. He currently is an assistant professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Hi, Kong, thank you so much for joining me in conversation today. I'm really excited to talk about Queering the Hmong Diaspora. It was a fantastic book. Highly recommend everyone to read it. And before we get into talking about the content itself, you had mentioned in the acknowledgments of the book that it took you 10 years to write and publish. Would you share what inspired you to start this project and what sustained you as you worked through the past decade?
- [03:15]
C
Hi, Donna, it's so great to be here with you, and thank you so much for having me on to talk about my new book and super excited about your question. How did it start? When did it start? So I think that's a great place for us to take through the book. So I would say that like many of us who research in the field of ethnic studies, right, Asian American studies and also in gender women's studies, like myself, I was prompted by some of my early curiosities and desires to really understand the social and political and historical forces, really, that really shaped my experiences and the experiences of my community, particularly among refugee communities. So, you know, as a kid growing up poor, right. Queer. And as a refugee kid in the Midwest, I grew up mostly in Wisconsin, but I actually lived the majority of my life in the Minneapolis St. Paul metro area, where I went to elementary, middle, high school, college, grad school, right? I really saw how dynamics such as financial capital and racialization really impacted my schooling experience, what kinds of topics I was able to learn in classes, for example, and also what kinds of opportunities and employment opportunities my parents received. So I was really trying to understand, like, how did it all come to be, you know, as a kid, I was fairly perceptive, I would say, and I was always questioning things. And I was also a really emotional kid growing up, a really emotional child. And especially when my parents talked about how difficult life was when you are poor, right. Or when they talked about how much they needed to work. And as refugees in this country, it always made me feel really emotional, right. Even as a real as a really young kid. And also gender, I would say, was really paramount to my socialization growing up, especially dominant scripts around masculinity and sexuality. And so as a queer kid who was also becoming a teenager right back in the day, I was really curious, but also really hungry to Try to make sense of my social world. And so in the very early days of the Internet, you know, we can imagine, right, I began to search online about like Hmong stories or like queer stories or queer coming out stories. I mean, these are very basic searches that I was conducting in those early days. But, you know, as we could imagine, all I could find were stories of tragedy especially, you know, around like queer coming outs. And so as I matured into a college student, it was actually my Asian American Studies courses that really helped me understand and historicize and contextualize my experiences. And my professors and my mentors within mostly Asian American studies also saw that I had this curiosity that could really only be fulfilled by me actually writing these stories and these histories myself. So. So I think that's really where it all began and how the seeds of the book were planted.
- [07:15]
B
Wow, that's really incredible to think about. Like one, I love that you noted yourself and described yourself as an emotional kid, because I feel like that at least speaks to me in a sense of what motivates me to do the work that I do and to be able to see the passions and emotions that you're carrying, the trajectories across the book as well. And I can almost see that, that growth narrative happening as you start the book thinking about these instances that cause a lot of tragedy, emotion within the communities. And then there's almost a kind of rethinking and a reformulation of how we can think about ourselves. You know, that shifts towards the end of the book. Before I give too much away to our listeners, we'll kind of break it down chapter by chapter here in a second. But yeah, I think that it. I can see how all the things that you were just talking about, about what inspired you to do this work and how you got to this project is really reflective of the words that we read on the page. And so before we get into, say, like a breakdown of the book or the book structure itself, I was hoping you could take us through the definition of hyper heterosexuality. This is kind of a grounding framework for the entire text, and it also frames your critique of culture that you present throughout the book. So could you explain to our listeners how you define hyperheterosexuality? And how does hyperheterosexuality imply heightened gender inequality among Hmong and undergird conceptions of Hmong in legal and cultural discourse throughout the United States?
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C
That is a great question. So the term hyper heterosexuality is actually found in Patricia Hill Collins's book, Black Feminist Thought a Groundbreaking book in feminist studies and black feminism, and certainly a very foundational book for me as a scholar. So in the book, Hill Collins examines how black sexuality, both masculinity and femininity, or black women's sexuality are racialized, right? As extremes in comparison to white heterosexuality or white sexuality. Or actually, Collins calls it normalized sexuality. So hyper heterosexuality positions black men, for example, as possessing violent sexualities, which we see that shoring up in pop culture and within visual media, right? As sexual assailants, right? Who. Who prey upon women and particularly toward white women. Black women, on the other hand, are also racialized, right? As sexually deviant, as their sexualities are represented in dominant discourse and pop culture, in public policy, for example, as being out of control and also excessive. But either way, Collins sees black sexuality as, quote, unquote, hyper heterosexual, right? Which distorts and deforms heterosexuality, which is supposed to be seen as normal and the respectable form of human sexuality, right? But black sexuality even contaminates heterosexuality. So when hyper heterosexuality is understood in that context and when it is applied to Hmong, it really made sense in my mind how Hmong sexuality is also racialized as deviant in contrast to normalized sexuality. In that sense, though, I would say that my interpretation of hyper heterosexuality and my usage of the concept understands heterosexuality as a power relation between cisgender men and women. So what I mean by that is that the differences and also the meanings that we assign to gender, right, are most polarizing and asymmetrical within heterosexuality as a power relation and as a social and sexual relation. So while we are actually led to believe, right, that gender differences, such as the different roles that we play, or that the different roles and meanings that we assign to people as either men or women are supposed to be normal within heterosexuality as a part of relation. However, this notion that hyper actually denotes that even such differences between the asymmetrical power relations within heterosexuality are mutual, mutated to the extreme, in which heterosexuality itself has become abnormal and even dangerous and violent, as we can see in the case, say, for the representation of black sexuality, or in my case, Hmong sexuality, gender and sexuality. So normalized sexuality sort of says that white heterosexuality is normal, whereas Hmong and black people are the deviant heterosexuals. And, of course, this to me, has many implications throughout the book, particularly for legal understandings of gender and sexual violence and also the organization of marriage and kinship system. So among Hmong Americans that I explore.
- [13:11]
B
In the book, that's fascinating and the way you break it down makes it so clear and easy to kind of think about the ways in which hyper. I love that you said hyper kind of denotes these mutations of our understandings of heterosexuality and the ways in which it further implicates Hmong communities in very specific kind of gendered dynamics that play out in legal conversations. And so that kind of leads us into thinking about the first chapter, which I thought was brilliantly titled Stories of Commotion. And you're thinking about sex acts, and sex acts include sexual violence in reinforcing the marginalization of Hmong through the examination of Hmong communities, interactions and engagements, say with legal discourse through two Minnesota court cases, the State v. Nu Chu Chu her and the State v. King Lee. So how do these two court cases exemplify this critique of culture that you're presenting? Through an analysis of hyper heterosexuality, particularly in the way that the current system does not enable justice for survivors of sexual violence and perpetuates understandings of hyper heterosexuality and its use within US Legal frameworks.
- [14:34]
C
Yeah, thank you for that. I really appreciate your admiration of the title of Chapter one.
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B
I love a title. I love a great title.
- [14:43]
C
So, yeah, so I would say the two cases that I present in Chapter one are really fascinating to me because, you know, as I researched and read more about them, we see that both the prosecution and the defense in the Lee and her cases really relied among people's cultural and racial differences to explain why both of these defendants and both of these men should be found guilty or innocent. Right. And I would also say that there are sort of two contradictory understandings of Hmong and their supposed gender and sexual politics that are at play, that are actually both not helpful at all in determining Lee's or her's guilt or innocence when it comes to the crimes that they had committed, which in this case were criminal sexual assault against some Hmong refugee women. You know, but more importantly, I argue that it actually doesn't help at all in delivering justice to the survivors. Right. Of Li's and her crimes. So it seems to me that Hmong people cannot be understood outside the framework of cultural and racial difference in the legal context, which also translates to not being able to fulfill the ideals of what the judiciary is actually supposed to be about, which is justice. And Hmong's cultural beliefs and practices of gender and sexuality, and especially by and through heterosexuality as a social relation, are seen as deviant in comparison to normalized sexuality. Normalized heterosexuality, as I had just explained, which is supposedly also rooted in differences that supposedly exist between the two dominant gender categories, which is male and female, but it is somehow not understood as violent, right. So seen as normal. That's why it's normalized heterosexuality. So when the judiciary approaches these two cases through this framework and through this frame in which Hmong are already pre racialized through a cultural difference concept in relation to their gender and sexual politics, then we sort of see what happens and unravels within the two cases, which is that it actually only produces more racism that is casted act among people in order to criminalize their communities, and actually is really not about achieving sexual justice for the survivors of sexual violence. And it's interesting that at every twist and turn in the both cases, the prosecution and the defense tried to introduce cultural evidence to either prove their guilt or innocence, but in the end, both sides ended up reproducing the same thing, which is racial stigmatization of Hmong. And so I would also make the point that we see that survivors actually don't receive much justice at all, period, within American culture. Right. That we know that Mao, as evidenced by what the MeToo movement, for example, has taught us about the silencing and intimidation and backlash against survivors who speak up about these issues. And so these two cases really actually amplifies hyper heterosexual sexuality and adds another dimension to that, which is that Hmong women and girls are actually powerless within the social relation of heterosexuality, whereas Hmong men and their masculinities are legally defined through the judiciary as dangerous and aberrant, and also comes to define the entirety of the Hmong community. In my case in Minnesota, yeah, I was one.
- [19:10]
B
I really enjoyed this chapter, particularly because as a historian, and I just finished teaching a US History course that was focused on race and gender and US legal history right throughout. And so just to think about how you were framing both aspects of the interrogations between these cases, not just in, like the crime itself, right, the com. The. The crime of the sexual violence that was enacted, but then also how the women really don't have any types of, kind of sense of, of justice within those kind of narrative frameworks was something that I felt was really challenging to me as someone who had just spent like a whole semester teaching undergraduates about legal systems, how they interrogate and interact with marginalized and minoritized communities. And so I really enjoyed that chapter and particularly how it bridges and extends into the second chapter, which is a more direct, I would say, conversation on the limitations of sexual liberalism in US legal systems. So in the second chapter, you're examining a series of Hmong marriage bills that were brought to Minnesota state legislature throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s. And you had mentioned that legal recognition of marriage invites state involvement in intimate relations and often serves as a process of assimilation, belonging, and citizenship for minoritized communities. So how do the two sides of the debate, those who supported the introduction and implementation of these marriage bills and those who opposed them, illustrate how culture is, and this is a quote from your text, a highly unstable concept that does not serve Hmong Americans interests in the legal domain. End quote. And how Hmong become, another quote from your text, legally ungovernable subjects within the context of gender and sexual liberalism and kinship regulation in the United States. That was a lot. Sorry, I'm just throwing those out of the back at you.
- [21:14]
C
So, no, those are really great prerogative questions about that second chapter. So we know now, through many feminist and queer critiques of marriage and the ways in which marriage is intimately attached to capital. Right. That there are a lot of implications there for how different polities navigate their relationships to marriage. So, you know, when material rewards are attached to marriage, of course, you know, Hmong and any other people are going to say that, yes, give us those rewards for our marriages as they are respectable within the context of neoliberal multiculturalism.
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B
Right.
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C
The state of Minnesota claims to want to honor unique cultures of its various citizens. And so that was how this bill came about in the 90s and were revived in the early 2000s. So we see some Hmong Americans making these types of claims to access belonging and citizenship, and particularly the material rewards that accompany marriage as the process of assimilation, belonging and citizenship, and especially those who might have an investment in heterosexual marriage in Hmong American society more specifically. Right. But what I'm really arguing is that what they don't understand, maybe at first, is that the state doesn't operate in that way at all, and that in fact, legal marriage is a process, a biopolitical process even. Right. That controls and manages intimacy and distributes rights and rewards based on the perceived normalcy of such intimate relations. And, you know, since Hmong kinship systems are already deemed hyper heterosexual, as I established early on in the introduction, but also in chapter one, that doesn't really align with normalized sexuality or normalized heterosexual marriage in the US at the time, of course, you know, engaging with the state or, you know, dancing with the state, the legal state really only invites the state to look closer at your communities. And throughout my research process, I see that Hmong Americans then started to understand that that's actually what was happening. And then in the chapter, I also write about testimonies and hearings that the Minnesota legislature was implementing in regards to these series of marriage bills where Hmong American women, and maybe some of them even identify as feminists who were concerned with gender inequality within Hmong American heterosexual marriages, came to testify to the state about the sexual abnormalities of their own communities, such as polygamy and such as, quote, unquote, underage marriage, which involves young girls being coerced into marriages by their parents, for example. And so these Hmong American women and feminists testify to the state that these were also inherent abnormalities within their own native culture, which to me, really only intensified the myth of hyper heterosexuality. And so even though I understand that these are legitimate grievances of gender inequality that they have witnessed among Americans, obviously the legislative hearing within the state framework is actually not a neutral legal space. To bring up these grievances would be my argument. But either way, Hmong Americans are trapped right through neoliberal multiculturalism and sexual liberalism, both as two sort of discourses, because racism, for me, is really still structures how people of color engage and interact with the state. And so we can't really ignore that for the sake of neoliberal multiculturalism for Hmong. So really, within the life of the marriage bills, and really at every twist and turn of the committee hearings and when certain bills were introduced, Hmong people's cultural and racial differences are highlighted in ways that make them trembling for the state to manage and govern. And so the specter, I would say, of Hmong people's supposed practices of polygamy that are apparently rampant, or that all of these young girls in the community are being forced into marriages that also were supposedly rampant, as claimed by social workers and other state workers, right, Made Hmong people a source of trouble for the state. So they're always a problem for the state, even as the state wants to enact those ideals of neoliberal multiculturalism and sexual liberalism, of inclusion and of giving diverse people rights. And so, in the end, the failure of the marriage bills only reveals to me that neoliberal multiculturalism of wanting to include diverse people in the frameworks of rights and sexual liberalism of respecting various marriage systems actually does not work and only bolsters Hmong people's ungovernable status as problematic refugees and as a problematic Asian American population.
- [27:40]
B
Yeah, that makes me think a lot, the kind of final statement that you're making about how this doesn't work right within the kind of current understandings of neoliberalism under the current understandings of sexual liberalism within a neoliberal state. Right. And I think that really helps the readers, and it helps me, at least while I was reading the text, transition into the second half of the book, where you're starting to think about these kind of alternative modes of being. How do we then achieve and address the gaps in which we understand our communities and our cultures within these kind of frameworks of existence under, say, the state? Right. So those two chapters kind of shifting in our conversation, right. Thinking about these alternative modes of being to critically reimagine Hmong culture, marriage and kinship through interrogations of spirituality and cosmology. This is the focus of chapter three, which thinks about queering spirituality. And I particularly appreciated how your engagement with notions of lost or living in perpetual lost exists as a multi generational phenomenon that connects both kind of the refugee and queer conditions. So rather than like arguing for reticence, as other scholars do, you're offering a distinct Hmong configuration of spirituality and cosmology that enables empowerment to critically imagine the intersections of gender, gender, sexuality and subjectivity. So would you be able to take listeners through this critical imagination and how you use queer of color critique to center queer among Americans lived realities?
- [29:22]
C
Yes, definitely. And I maybe I should first mention that these last two chapters, as you've mentioned, really turn to the material conditions and realities of queer Hmong Americans. And I conducted a lot of interviews with young people in particular to really understand how they are navigating these discourses and these racialized scripts about culture and gender and sexuality. And I really wanted to understand how queer Hmong Americans are challenging or imagining ways of life and modes of living that resist or push back against hyper heterosexuality. And hyper heterosexuality in these last two chapters also understands it to be a form of queer liberalism where Hmong culture is branded as hyper homophobic, even more homophobic than US dominant culture. And how do queermong Americans navigate that? Right. And so these last two chapters show how modes of being that have not yet come to material fruition are nonetheless already being enacted in the imagination, or if we want to understand it more precisely through a Hmong centered epistemology, for example, that these modes of subjectivity are already being invented within cosmology. So what I'm trying to say essentially, right, is that I wanted to undertake a mode of queer cosmological and also spiritual subject formation, which I would say I have not really seen within queer and feminist studies. So to two theorists were really influential to my thinking. Right. I drew from two Queer Latinx studies scholars Gloria and Zaldua and Jose Estabar Munoz, you know, whose work really centers queer world making, which is also rooted in spirituality, imagination and theorizing beyond the material world, or at least the immediate material world as we understand it. So for me, I really see queer Hmong Americans enacting a similar labor of imagination that is already theorized by Azaldua and Munoz. So, you know, a queer Hmong epistemology, or a Hmong epistemology of queerness, of gender and the formation of the subject itself, right, really sees cosmology and spirituality as lived reality that also has material consequences. So the term and concept, critical imaginations really to me signifies how Hmong life and queer life and queer Hmong life should and ought to be lived. Right? And how queer Hmong living amplifies queer color critique. Not just as a critique, I would say, but also a body of knowledge that also elevates Hmong modes of living. So mere color critique for me is really crucial and generative in the sense that it is imaginative and speculative. So it allows for us to theorize cosmological subject formations, which then in turn also allows us to see how these formations also enable critiques of hyper heterosexuality. So, you know, if we think about Munoz, he's already challenging us to see life in future oriented ways. You know, his text has been influential in queer color critique for many years now. And queer Hmong American critical imaginations response to that vision and to that call and to those theories by saying that we are living already now and we will continue to live in the future. And the interviewees and the interlocutors and participants that I talked to and had conversations with make this clear, that they're already imagining spirituality and their souls and the relationship between death and birth and life and how it structures the ways they interact with their parents and communities are already speculative and are future oriented. And so they will continue to cultivate these modes of life in ways that I argue are actually not conceivable yet to the dominant modes of power that actually structures this racialized discourse of hyper heterosexuality.
- [34:38]
B
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- [34:57]
C
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- [35:31]
B
Ask your doctor about evglis and visit evglis.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979. Absolutely. And I I will say, like when I read that chapter initially, I 1 loved the engagement with the interviews and how you were analyzing, you know, words from your interlocutors and how they were positioning themselves within this critique. But like you said, I think the challenge here is that there are ways in which it is not yet while simultaneously existing, right? And so to think about that kind of push and pull in and within a Hmong centered epistemology, I think was a wonderful kind of contribution to the ways in which we think about how one our fields intersect. Like, I loved that you were kind of talking about, you know, Latinx studies and how, you know, some of these authors are also influencing the work. But then and how that kind of relates to an Asian American or more specifically kind of Hmong queer Hmong experience. And so I think that helps us think about now right? Or I guess the relative now as we're witnessing these challenges one in the state of Minnesota. But then also you're kind of taking us back about a decade thinking about your activism and with the Midwest Solidarity Movement and other like activists in how to communicate justice for Hmong communities. And so this final chapter where you're talking about vernacular activism takes us through the debate surrounding Amendment 1 in Minnesota and efforts by community organizations such as the Midwest Solidarity Movement activists and like yourself, how they communicated these discussions to Hmong communities. So especially in consideration of the first two chapters of the book, which kind of ties together the questions and critiques around Amendment 1 in Minnesota to the discourse around sexuality within among Communities and also within our understandings, legal understandings of marriage. Right. How does this moment and your involvement in it illustrate the gaps between Western liberal ideals of marriage and equality and Hmong American perspectives? And more directly, how does vernacular activism enable empowerment and afford flexibility for minoritized and marginalized groups without taking antagonistic positions?
- [38:01]
C
Yeah. So I should mention, right, that during the marriage equality period of US history, which I feel like people have seemed to have forgotten about, even though it happened mostly intensely from 2010 to 2015, you know, I teach about LGBTQ history in my courses. I teach Intro to LGBTQ Studies. And some of my students thought that same sex marriage was legalized in the US in the 1970s. And I tell them, no, only 2015. Right? So it's interesting to sort of see how that's played out. But as I've mentioned earlier, right, that we've seen queer and feminist scholars and activists making critiques about marriage and same sex marriage in particular, and how it entrenches inequality even more, right? White supremacy and racial capitalism, you know, while simultaneously attempting to legalize and normalize LGBTQ people, mostly gay and lesbian, you know, folks. And so what same sex marriage did was insert queer people into these state sanctioned marriages that normalized, or excuse me, that. That mirrored normalized heterosexual marriages, which actually in turn also intensifies the stigmatization of abnormal intimate relations, which are those that are found within Hmong's supposed hyper heterosexuality, such as polygamy or plural marriages, or marriages that do not align with legal age, or marriages that were conducted in liminal spaces, for example, like refugee camps or before Hmong people migrated to the west, for example, the marriages that occurred in the mountains, for example, are they legitimate? Right. And so all of these different intimate relations are denied legibility through the legal system and particularly through the legalization of same sex marriage. So, you know, in this chapter, I look at how queer Hmong American activists within the organization, or the collective, rather Midwest solidarity movement, and how they fought for same sex marriage and how they understood the notion of queer freedom and how they strategically disidentified with such structures. And again, you know, Jose Munoz has sort of done this work to show how racially minoritized queer subjects have used the scripts of the dominant class against them by drawing on its language and deploying it in ways that are beneficial to them. So, you know, we can see that maybe in the long run, it could even undermine the dominant power structure through this process of disidentification and by playing with these dominant structures of power. So Activists in mwsm, Midwest Solidarity Movement, and other Southeast Asian American activists. There were also Vietnamese and Cambodian and Lao American activists and youth who are part of MWSM as well. How these particular subjects performed, right? This concept that I came up with, vernacular activism, which incorporates Hmong language, epistemologies about kinship and intimacy, that does not stigmatize polygamy, for example, right? While also helping voters understand that there are larger stakes at play in this moment of fighting for marriage equality or fighting for the legalization of same sex marriage. So for me, vernacular activism is about using the democratic arena, right? Participating in the electoral arena, the various systems that we understand as campaigning or door knocking or phone banking or voting, that this is the stage to experiment with vernacular activism, to see how far Hmong Americans can go to sort of insert their own political claims. And so I see that, again, as speculative, experimental, as using this democratic and electoral arena to test out different methods of freedom making. So for me, vernacular, as I understand it, is a sort of minority mode of knowledge, but it's also a Hmong mode of doing and relating to others as voters, as organizers and as community members, but ultimately also as family, right? When we were phone banking, we were drawing in voters as aunties and grandmas and grandpas, right? To create familiarity and intimacy within the democratic arena for Hmong Americans to become politically engaged so that they could implement their political claims and transform the state of Minnesota through this fight for marriage equality.
- [43:48]
B
I love that we kind of note how you interpret vernacular and vernacular activism and your framing of that. I thought the example that you provided in that chapter of how you were using the script that was provided by Midwest Solidarity Movement, and then realizing after making certain calls, that that script was falling short in certain ways, and how you transitioned that and how that learned experience then kind of enables you to make these critiques and to think about how Hmong language relates to these kind of legal spheres of understanding of same sex marriage and marriage equality. And so that leads us to the epilogue then, where you're closing the book with this rumination of Suna's artistic production, no word for queer. And I thought that is like a brilliant tie in to think about vernacular and language and how we use that in activist spaces to this artistic production that highlights and centralizes queer Hmong American youth. So how does this project illustrate how queer Hmong Americans are articulating their subjecthood? And what lessons can we take, or what lessons would you like us to take from their reflections and from your project more broadly?
- [45:05]
C
Definitely. So in some ways, right, Suna's project no Word for Queer picks up the theorizations that I've sort of implemented and enacted in chapter three and four, Critical Imaginations, for example, and Vernacular Activism. And this was a project that really inspired me when I first heard it and studied it. And SUNA is also a really powerful spoken word artist, performance artist in the Twin Cities that I've admired for quite some time. And, you know, I was also recently asked at a talk that I gave on the book what queer freedom looks like, right, for Monkey Pool. And. And that was a question that actually some undergraduate students had asked me, and I responded to them that it looks like no word for queer, and that it is a process of community building that is embedded in the project, that SUNA has solicitated ideas from the communities and then used these ideas that were generated on forums and social media as the lyrics of some of the songs within this project. So for me, this project is freedom dreaming, right? That queer people get to imagine their subjecthood, as you've mentioned, and in this case, for me, I see the project as queer Hmong Americans coming together to generate ideas about what it means to be Hmong, to be queer, to be queer Hmong, and to live in this life here and now and in the future, and to see yourself as something larger, something cosmological even, right? And, you know, through this project, we see that qumong Americans even imagine themselves as an energy, right? As an asset that, you know, gets. Gets generated through rainbows, for example, right? And so, you know, when I think about queer liberalism, you know, queer liberalism tells us that representation and visibility are sort of the best avenues for political legibility, right? And especially articulating the queer subject as a cohesive and knowable subject. But I actually argue otherwise in this epilogue, right? That queer freedom does not align with that formation of the queer subject in the ways of which we understand rights as freedom and visibility and representation and as freedom, right? That my book, I would say it really shows that the ways Hmong Americans are interpolated, right? Within law, within media, and even within cultural narratives about legible personhood does not align with how they imagine and envision freedom for themselves. And this project and this artistic project for me, shows that. And so ultimately, my takeaway, I suppose, for the book is that I wanted to show that queer Hmong Americans are envisioning freedom in this way, and that this is my way of showing that we can enact justice for Hmong Americans.
- [48:42]
B
What a powerful takeaway, really. Like, I think. I mean, it's so present in each one of the chapters that you present. And so I thank you for writing Queering the Hmong Diaspora. I know that projects like this take a lot of time, and so I hope you take opportunities to really sit with this massive accomplishment and the ways in which it will transform how we think about one queer Asian American studies, how we think about Hmong Americans, how we think about Southeast Asians in the United States, how we think about Asian Americans in the Midwest. Like, there's so many ways in which I see this work impacting how we think about our current works. Right. How we think about our scholarship. So on that kind of note of congratulations, I thought it would be really lovely to kind of end our conversation thinking about what is inspiring you now. Right. So thinking about, for people who love this book, for people who want to know more. Right. Are there projects, ideas, inspirations that you're holding on to? Is there anything that folks can look forward to in the future from you?
- [49:50]
C
Definitely. So I love to keep myself busy despite the fact that I just published this book. So currently I am writing two books. And so one book that hopefully will be done soon is a book of essays about Hmong people's place in a revolutionary America. And it also draws a lot from memoir and personal narratives as well, and family histories. And this book, for me, was inspired by a lot of the tumultuous moments that I've witnessed, you know, as a. As a community member, as a scholar over the last two decades, all the different social movements and revolutions that we've seen come and go, and some that are ongoing. And this book really came together during the COVID 19 pandemic, when, of course, we couldn't go anywhere but stay home. And so I had a lot of time to think about what does that moment mean for Hmong Americans and how is it connected to other revolutionary moments, other social moments? So I write about a lot of different things in the book, including, for example, some of the activism that I've done for fighting for refugee human rights. For example, fighting for ethnic studies and Hmong studies in the state of Wisconsin, fighting for cultural spaces on America's college campuses, gender and sexual justice in the fight for marriage equality in the MeToo movement. I write about racial justice and abolition as seen through Hmong people's participation in Black Lives Matter, and also the push to address gun violence, which is, of course, plaguing American society. Right. So I bring all of those different moments of rupture together to figure out where Hmong people can see themselves in this revolutionary America. So, you know, that's one project. I really hope that the book will bring inspiration to those people who are seeking to understand, you know, a small group of refugee Americans. Right. And how they are a very engaged group of Americans today. And then, you know, the second book that maybe I should mention is that I'm now writing a visual history of Hmong from the early 20th century to the present. So in this particular book, I'm asking questions like, you know, what forms of visuality are oppressive and what forms are empowering for Hmong people? You know, a historically stateless group of Americans, how have community members and artists and queer and feminist photographers, for example, how are they creating Hmong visual politics that also sheds light on justice to the histories of displacement and invisibility and racism that Hmong people have experienced, and colonialism, for example. So I really hope that people will be able to follow and read these works that I will be producing in the future.
- [53:25]
B
Both sound incredible and really exciting and very much in line with the things I know you to do and the thing and the person I know you to be. So thank you so much, Kong, for joining me in conversation today. I had a great time chatting about your book, and I really look forward to what you're producing in the future.
- [53:42]
C
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Dana.