V. Jo Hsu and Jennifer Lin LeMesurier in Conversation

In this edition of Rhetoric in Review, V. Jo Hsu and Jennifer Lin LeMesurier discuss their recent books, Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics (Ohio State University Press, 2022) and Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption (Ohio State University Press, 2023). Placing their work in conversation and considering how they mutually speak to rhetorical studies, the authors address several questions, including: Taken together, how do the books illuminate the varied and contradictory rhetorical practices that shape power relations in public life? In what ways do the books, independently and collectively, function in relation to rhetoric's shifting conceptual and disciplinary boundaries? In what ways do these works collectively advance conversations in the field regarding bodies and materiality?JENNIFER: I was in Toronto last weekend, and we saw a couple protestors yelling at cars while waving the Canadian flag. Very aggressive. My husband and I got into a conversation about the difference between activism and whatever that was, or I guess how to define activism. I think your book tackles that question directly through your work with the various collectives and artists you analyze, and the choices seem (a) really meaningful in how they're engaging lived experience and (b) get at exactly this question of how activism is really contradictory and rhetorically complex. In terms of my work, I feel like I am looking at public life a step removed from direct activist work, more at the attitudes and affects that inflect what eventually becomes activism or coalition work. But also, both of our work goes beyond ‘bodies in streets’ because the attitudes are so deeply personal and felt. There's shades of “pre-activism” that run across both works, even if the linear idea of time isn't quite right.JO: Ha, I appreciate that reading of my book. I do feel like one of the central problems I'm grappling with is that messy expanse between the presumed poles of “resistance” and domination. Even in our two books, readers can (hopefully) see the sprawling heterogeneity—and often incohesion—of “Asian America.” Western rhetorics reduce an entire continent and people with such varied lineages and histories of colonization, war, and conflict into one homogenous group. So, in short—yes. I don't even know that I would use the phrase pre-activism so much as to say that a lot of the relational work—how we learn to be together, to show up for one another across difference—is the necessary foundation of collective action.JENNIFER: YES.JO: And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I see a connection between our books in that we're confronting how much of U.S. racial and gender injustice is actually enabled by those limited vocabularies around domination/resistance—and the ways they've rendered Asian American racialization particularly illegible.JENNIFER: Fully agree, and how that racialization isn't just an external oppressive force but changes on a nerve level how it is possible to exist as an Asian American.JO: Yes, totally! I was going to mention this later, but it connects here—I think your attention to embodiment is particularly important. The way you attend to “gut-level feelings” as rhetorical is really illuminating. You show how such feelings are integral to how we move/are moved through the world—and the cost of not being able to identify those feelings.JENNIFER: Thank you for that. I see that in your analysis too. I was really struck in the “Love in Constellation” chapter by your discussion of how “wordlessness” was actually a key part of how to navigate expressing love for queer kin. So, despite the “lack of a shared vocabulary for queerness,” the interviewee, Dao, “found a way to move with that silence” and forge ways of communication with his mother about his identity.1JO: I think that's perhaps a better characterization of that throughline between our books that I'm grasping at—we're reaching for vocabularies that can make legible the very powerful and intricate ways that domination and resistance flow through people and communities.JENNIFER: Aha! And how it's that reaching that is the work in and of itself, or it can be. I didn't realize that until now.JO: Actually, that reminds me of a question that my dissertation director (helpfully) asked while I was working on a (totally different) project. I guess I've been circulating this and related questions for a while: What is the value of work that captures a moment-in-progress rather than a definitive argument? And I think that's a question I continue asking—how do we honor the knowledge that is always-imperfectly made in trying to grasp at the experiences that will always in some way evade capture?JENNIFER: Especially in academic writing! But yes, I think part of what you're getting at is the embedded whiteness in our common genres. So how, working within these genres, how do we make room to talk about lives that are seen as deviant, queer (pejoratively), dis-colored, etcetera . . . I really found your point about archival work as necessary because it helps us “map the myriad consequences of Asian Americans’ trajectories in the United States—a textured and prismatic history often elided in official accounts of the nation's past.”2 That directly engages with what is lost if we ignore these deeply personal stories.JO: Totally. Something I believe many marginalized scholars/students grapple with, especially as we're learning to engage and enter conversations—it took me so long to realize that I was “failing” these genres because I was trying to use a language actually designed to occlude the experiences that I'm discussing.JENNIFER: Right. Also though, and I think this gets to the question of how our work is challenging or undermining intellectual orthodoxies, you brought a scholarly, analytical eye, even as you played with form and phrasing. I came away from reading your work with a sense that you wrote the book in the same manner that you describe the process of forming queer kinships— “assembl[ing] alliances and actions from social categories that carry no guarantee of commonality.”3 I can see someone advising you at the start that taking such an approach might result in a ‘disorganized’ book, but it actually illustrates your point for the reader, in a lovely way!JO: Oh, damn. That's a really beautiful response and I'm going to cherish those words, thank you. I jokingly describe my writing process as “chaotic good.” It is very much about, well, constellating relations that are perhaps . . . felt associations that regularly go unnoticed. But I appreciate how your observation takes us to the question of method—something I think that many of us receive little instruction in, especially when approaching “nontraditional” topics and theories. It strikes me that it's very possible to read your book (by which I mean, it reads to me) as one guided by gut orientations—perhaps driven by phenomena, feelings, ideas that directed you toward and away from particular “texts” (broadly defined)?JENNIFER: That's so interesting. I hadn't actually thought of it that way before, but yes, that describes to a T how I tend to develop my writing ideas and find case studies. It's like an itch (often one that has me screaming at someone online) that I have to keep thinking about and that eventually leads to writing.JO: . . . which goes back to the point that I think something we're both trying to do is honor the knowledge that those feelings register, and to move toward them rather than away as we're so often taught. While we're discussing feeling, though, I'd love to hear more about that process of research for you. I've dwelt with some of the very same documents. I'm thinking specifically of the “Meat Vs. Rice” document with which you open, but in general, we spent a lot of time in anti-Asian archives past and present and that's an . . . embodied experience that's elided in academic training and in how we discuss scholarship. What was that like for you?JENNIFER: Ha, I forgot that the itch often also leads to screaming in archives! I'll tip my hat to my advisor Candice Rai, who always tried to make room for those feelings in our qualitative research seminar. And the “Meat Vs. Rice” document in particular. I guess I haven't really questioned that part, just gone with the feeling of anger it inspired. But I have gotten pushback from outside readers, on other projects particularly. “Are you sure that author was intending to be racist? Aren't you reading too much into that?” I was definitely not trained in how to respond to those sorts of questions, and that was a learning curve.JO: Oh, good lord, I hate that question. Lamiyah Bahrainwala writes really brilliantly on that topic—and how whiteness itself grants the privilege of “pure” intent. When someone asks, “did they intend harm?” they're most often talking about white and white-adjacent people, whereas people of color are frequently presumed to be acting out of malice. In that context, white fragility becomes “the intention to protect oneself at the willful expense of another.” In other words, “unintentional” racism—while someone is trying to call attention to that racism, as you're doing in your writing—is intentional harm. Learning to engage those conversations tactfully and in a way that makes what you're doing legible to standards that have often minimized the knowledges you're drawing from, though, is definitely a learning curve.JENNIFER: Well, and this is something that I wanted to ask you about directly, both for my own edification and to the question of what our books are doing in the field. Did you have imposter syndrome while writing about the Asian American experience, especially in relation to the idea of “is this violent enough to be concerned about?” or some version of that question? I definitely did.JO: That's such an interesting way to phrase the question. I think I'll respond to it in parts, though the connection really fascinates me. In terms of “imposter syndrome”—I mean, I think most of us are haunted by that, especially with how our experiences are minimized. But the question, “is this violent enough?” feels especially . . . distinct in the context of Asian American racialization and history. First, the blanket label of “Asian American” occludes huge socioeconomic disparities in ways that often are violent—that deprive undocumented, poor, non-English-speaking, and otherwise marginalized Asian Americans of vital resources. But also, the way that many Asian Americans fit into the structure of U.S. racism is distinct and cannot be told through the same terms we use for anti-Blackness or anti-Indigeneity.I think that's part of what made me so motivated to find a vocabulary for “constellating” connections across/among different experiences of power and domination. Asian American history is so integral to how racial, gender, and other corporeal norms were established and are enforced in the United States. The story of U.S. colonization and racism is incomplete without it—but I wanted to be careful about articulating anti-Asian racism as a part of the overall structure of anti-Blackness and coloniality rather than discussing it as a separate or synonymous experience. Plenty of Asian Americanists have been working toward this—Claire Jean Kim, Nayan Shah, Lisa Lowe, Iyko Day, to name a few.4 Mainstream conversations about Asian Americans, though, still often regard our experiences as if they're entirely outside U.S. history and politics—as if Chinese and Indian laborers did not lay the tracks that carried white settlers into the West, as if Afro-Asian people did not exist, and as if Alaskan Natives were not refused Indigenous status based on presumed Asian ancestry.5So, I don't know that the struggle was an “imposter” syndrome per se so much as a fear that I wouldn't find the right words/right story that could honor how we're interrelated and interdependent without conflating distinct experiences.. . . and this might be a tangent that we cut out later. The second response I have to that question is another thread of writing on Asian Americans in contexts that have historically minimized our experiences as unremarkable or flattened them as only-remarkable-in-service-of-whiteness: I had a lot of fear about writing a book centered on Asian Americans in that I knew, when I put it out into the world, I was giving that world a chance to say—again, directly to me now—“We still don't care about this. We don't care about you or your communities.” And I don't know that that feeling is “imposter”-ish either, but it feels adjacent. It feels like I've been told that what I experience and feel, and the people and things I care about have no impact, and I'm anticipating the reinforcement of that message. I don't know if that makes any sense.JENNIFER: Yes, that does, and I think you're articulating much more clearly what I was trying to get at. It's that weird mindfuck where I know the history, where I see the violence as violence, but as I was writing it, trying to wrestle all of these cases into one cohesive frame that there aren't a lot of models for already, the difference between what I was trying to communicate and the existing models for what racial violence is supposed to look like felt very stark at times. There's maybe a parallel with what you discuss in Chapter 4 related to the idea of visibility and resistance still needing a lot more nuance. Also, just content wise, since I was writing about gut feelings and food, I felt fear that what I see as very real issues with how we are taught to consume/eat the other wouldn't come across as weighty enough for rhetorical consideration.JO: But that's what I think is so crucial about the book. Many of the most insidious ways that power operates is by burying itself in our everyday so that it no longer looks like violence—and that mundanity conditions us to accept all the minor and major decisions that lead to the acute catastrophes that mainstream media will recognize as violence. We can't get away from food or gut feelings, so the ways they orient us are . . . pervasive. I don't know that you need to hear it from me, but it's important precisely because we're conditioned to believe that it's not.JENNIFER: Thank you for saying that, honestly. I'll turn a corner here and say that I appreciate you tackling the misogyny in some of the Asian American literature and how the instinct to look to the “founding fathers” of AsAm Lit ends up replicating gender hierarchies that erase queer and trans Asian voices. Because there are so many issues with Western views of Asian masculinity in particular, it can be hard to push back against some of the views that, as you point out, just reaffirm white heteronormativity as the gold standard.JO: I also really appreciated the multifaceted ways you looked at Asian American gendering. The historic (and contemporary) derogation of Asian American masculinity is inextricably bound to queer—and transphobia and ableism6—in ways I'm still working to fully parse. Any attempt to address it along a single axis inevitably reinforces the others. What kind of Asian American masculinity can directly confront the mythologies through which femininity—and by association, homosexuality and transgender identity—are designated as inferior or pathological? It's difficult to wrap our words around by design—because the argumentative and linguistic structures we've been given were shaped by whiteness (and cis/heteronormativity and abled supremacy).JENNIFER: It's funny. I was actually frustrated the other day because we don't have a word that captures the always-entangled mess of race, gender, sexuality, etcetera . . . An “anti-intersectionality,” if you will. But as we're untangling all of this, and specifically thinking about your section on wordlessness, it strikes me that finding the Ur-vocab word really misses the point. We need to parse through all those entanglements to show how entwined they still are, even though it is beyond frustrating that we still have to point these things out!JO: You know, it strikes me maybe that's why there's so much storytelling in both our books . . . You observe how affect accrues over time. Story can take us through that journey. It can teach us to dwell and show us how to grow, and we lose much of that when we're trying to capture any phenomenon in a word or phrase. So, I guess going back to how we're trying to expand the bounds of rhetoric and I we're around the of what we're to capture when we a and and even that word of is about being and through and the things and we're trying to which gets us to a I I think in my world, it us to ask different questions us toward different and we think about our work as and those and at some . . . that's a very different of research than your research I to a book about what we . . . There's a lot what we by and by is right.JO: So, is there we haven't on that like to make sure we I think the question that's on my is what our books the field see or how we might think of rhetorical with as I think what I continue to with, and what I'd love to think with more on is how we those race, and gender are always any story of experience (and most of and so often we these topics to people who particular we're all in these and their And even when we do address of it's too often through these and that don't grapple with what it to have a move through the world in that with all the ways it's and and all the ways it might also in others. that's because part of doing this work is better so little of this makes room for and from So, I how do we the of all these of and how do we the genres, and that the difficult conversations that from Yes, of what I was trying to do in my working out of is how is just one embedded in these of what we are taught to see and and what gets So, it's about have and you and more about if you a particular you aren't able to fully grasp how your embodied to the world and the of what you see as even rhetorically I really love the of It makes me think about how we're in and the that we're of and those And, I like that it captures There's no one where I've it in, the ways we and are bound to one we're always and for doing so in ways that recognize how we come into with the lives around And I think if we can take that up as a or that is really what helps us find for and And that is what will us move past the to in ways that are so on what is rather than thinking about of that recognize of

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