Reparative acts: Redress and the politics of queer undoing in contemporary Asian/America

This dissertation examines the relationship between queer representation and reparative performances that seek to undo traumatic violence, focusing on specific geo-political traumas inflicted upon marginalized subjects within Asian America, the Philippines, and Korea. Research for this project began with a question: In moments of crisis, ones that also effect calls for redress, how do Asian/American diasporic cultural productions use queerness to enrich definitions of what reparation---psychic, political, monetary, and bodily---might mean? My study moves from discussing the compensatory feelings of melancholia and queer envy in Asian American Literature (exhibited in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's ), to examining the ways in which queer relationships constitute calls for the undoing of Manila's cleansing during the Marcos Regime (most resonant in the Philippine New Cinema and Jessica Hagedorns' Dogeaters), to studying the deployment of queerness as a critique of testimony, victimhood, and symbolic reparation through the "comfort woman figure" and the Korean American historical re-memory (in Gil Portes's Markova: Comfort Gay and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE), to interrogating demands for queer bodily reparation within HIV/AIDS activism (in Chay Yew's A Language of Their Own and Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS prevention strategies). I suggest that in all of these cultural sites, the various modalities of queerness---lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender identity, camped performativity, and non-heterosexual forms of kinship---become key methodologies for analyzing the possibilities and failures of reparative actions. Following the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, I assert that queerness' potential to destabilize and challenge dominant ways of understanding identity formation also make it a crucial space for examining acts that express demands for compensation and retribution. Making a needed intervention to this earlier queer work, I specifically study queerness outside of the ways it has been circulated in the United States. Contributing to David Eng, Gayatri Gopinath and Martin Manalansan's research on queer diasporas, I broaden the current archive and include queer subjects from the Global South who also seek redress.