Closer to Home // Dream as Dissent: A Dialogue on Asian American Feminist Refusal, Healing, and Possibility
by
Sheila Shankar and Soo Young Leei
This collaborative dialogue was borne out of our engagement with #WeToo: A Reader, a special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies whose namesake “invokes the now mainstreamed global #MeToo movement, though refuses those bourgeois white carceral feminist politics” (Ninh and Roshanravan 2021, 3). Instead, #WeToo is rooted in Tarana Burke’s Black feminist politics and the history of transnational and Women of Color feminist movement-building; it brings together a diverse array of Asian American feminists to push back against “model minority” narratives and give language to lived experiences of sexual violence. The editors of the #WeToo project invoke Cherrie Moraga’s (1983) “theory in the flesh” (23) as a methodological frame that “foregrounds the epistemic excess of lived experience of meaning uncontained by the racial and gender scripts imposed on Asian American bodies” (Ninh and Roshanravan 2021, 3). We similarly utilize and build upon Moraga’s embodied, generative methodology to make sense of the contradictions in our flesh and blood experiences: choosing what in our familial, academic, and political lineages we reject and refuse to perpetuate while visioning toward the future. Below is an excerpt from a dialogue between us, two Asian American social work doctoral students—one queer cisgender Indian American woman from a mixed caste background, and one transnational Korean cisgender woman—reflecting on our experiences with/in the Asian American feminist movement against sexual and gender-based violence. This project is guided by our mutual commitments to transformative and healing justice as Asian American feminist social workers, while attending to our different lived experiences at the intersections of sexuality, ethnicity, nation, migration, and class. We aim to provide language—a “theory in the flesh” —for our own experiences of violence. We articulate a politics of refusal and suggest visions for healing and possibility.
Sheila:
How can we look to the past with care and critique while also dreaming about the future? How do we bring that spirit into our praxis for healing and liberation?
Soo Young:
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) reminds us that healing does not have to mean feeling “over” the harm: “We are moving from a model that gasps at our scars to one that wants to learn as much from them as possible” (234). We do not have to conform to ableist ideas that healing is being fixed, is disappeared scars, is no longer tracing trauma on our bodies. Instead, we can hold an idea about healing where we learn from survivorhood, from the margins, from those who have been most impacted by systems of harm, and can unearth possibilities for how to transform them—“a Mad, crip idea of healing” (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018, 234).
The history of Asian American racialization is largely characterized by exclusion and its intersections with US state interests of empire, nation-building, and capitalism. At the same time, Asian Americans have been triangulated in the racial hierarchy of the United States as “model minorities,” giving rise to alignments with forms of supremacist power both in the United States and globally (Kim 2023). This history and the tension between exclusion from and assimilation to power is made plain in the present-day realities of Asian American life at the start of the second Trump presidency. As we have learned together, the impact of sexual violence on Asian American women and queer and trans folks is critically shaped by these historical legacies. And, Asian America is so much richer, more vivid, and more complex than exclusion, assimilation, and complicity.
As social workers, we always return to praxis. We return to how we can engage what we learn in our work with people. We refuse to stay siloed in theory but rather braid theory with embodied engagement – shaped by theory shaped by embodied engagement shaped by… In my own research with Asian American women, which engages issues of race, gender, and political formations, I choose to identify sites of possibility within our stories. I choose to uncover what sharing stories with each other can do to build community and desire, facilitate learning and reflection, and foster care for ourselves and each other while interrogating the conditions that shape why certain people are not cared for. Amidst histories of exclusion, assimilation, and complicity, I ask: what histories of togetherness, creativity, desire, and resistance have emerged?
Sheila:
I’m lingering on the phrase “sites of possibility” – thinking of our lives as shaped by the past yet not defined by it, not fixed but dynamic. I appreciate you bringing in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s emphasis on circularity and non-linear time as we think about violence and grief. Theirs is a refusal to engage in progress narratives and clean endings, an embrace of the past and the future in its messiness and simultaneity. It could be easy to get stuck looking at the past for the damage that it’s caused and falling into deep despair, or unable to look and yet haunted by its horrors. The types of stories we tell ourselves about the past matter. How can we care for ourselves by looking to the past and look to the past with care?
This is the tension of looking at violence clearly while honoring the lineages we belong to, paying close attention to the braid of creative resilience and intimate harm we are a/part of. Cherrie Moraga captures this tension. “Closer to home,” she writes, “we are still trying to separate the fibers of experience we have had as daughters of a struggling people. Daily, we feel the pull and tug of having to choose which parts of our mothers’ heritages we want to claim and wear and which parts have served to cloak us from the knowledge of ourselves” (Moraga 1983, 23). Choice, for Moraga, is a process of discernment, of choosing what from our lineages serves us and what we refuse. Discernment enables dissent: the capacity to look or feel differently, to refuse to be bound by what is contrary to my own judgment (“Dissent,” n.d.). I choose to honor the pain my grandmother endured, her struggles and strength in navigating this country and creating conditions for new life to flourish, while also acknowledging the harm she perpetuated and continues to cause. So much of the work I do is because of her, for us, my family. What kind of life would she have lived if she could have? What kind of life does she want? What kind of life do I want, and how is my life made (im)possible because of her?
Soo Young:
Yes, we come from lineages “of creative resilience and intimate harm,” and we continue to work to unravel this braid. This unbraiding, this simultaneous act of knowing our histories, of honoring parts of our lineage while letting go of those that have stymied intimate and beautiful parts of ourselves—it can feel so lonely. How do we disrupt isolation as we think about accountability, abolition, and care? Why is this so critical to our work as Asian American women and scholars engaging with issues of transformative justice, healing, identity, and political consciousness?
Sheila:
When I think of isolation, I think not only of aloneness but also of disconnection. Disconnection from the self and others – made somehow to feel as if an experience of violence is ours alone, or perhaps so ashamed that we disavow it (and therefore a part of our selves). In what ways are we isolated from our own experience, distanced, dissociated from the fullness and complexity of our humanity? Like Cherrie Moraga asks, what of our inheritance keeps us from self-knowledge? When language has deliberately been used as a weapon, or we have been trained not to trust our own tongues? In addressing sexual violence, how can we speak what we do not yet have words for?
In the introduction to #WeToo: A Reader, erin Khuê Ninh and Shireen Roshanravan (2021) describe the impossible, imaginative, necessary task of writers naming what we do not have words for: “cast[ing] courage like sonar, to find the shapes of structures of feeling in the dark” (4). The courage to take our pain and our longings seriously, to understand what keeps us suffering and isolated, and to believe fundamentally that a different life/world is possible. This is a courage that unites Women of Color feminists, Asian Americans who have experienced sexual violence across time and space. bell hooks (1994) writes of coming to theory “desperate, wanting to comprehend – to grasp what was happening around and within [her]… to make the hurt go away” (59). So many feminist writers reflect on what brought them to doing / writing feminist theory: pain and the search for healing through understanding and imagination (hooks 1994; Moraga 1983; Miller 2019).
Recently, I wrote to myself: I don’t have to be any different from how I am. I feel freedom in reading, listening to other Asian American queer and feminist writers struggle to articulate their thoughts, express a full range of emotions from rage to hope to grief, name and connect their daily lived experience to larger historical phenomena and questions about justice and transformation. These writers offer an extended hand to us. They demand to be seen. But they also open a portal into another way of being, feeling, relating. And in doing so, they build a bridge and offer an invitation into (the creation of) another world. They say: “See me.” But also, “I see you. Join us.”
Dissent is creating–and holding onto–life-affirming spaces where we can recognize, celebrate, and take solace in each other. As we face a second Trump presidency and the increasing attacks on DEI initiatives, trans, reproductive, Muslim, and immigrant rights, these spaces are increasingly vital. Space to muddle through together, to question and trouble taken-for-granted norms, to unpack what Grace Cho (2021) calls “the knot” between family, culture, mental health, ideology, and violence. Dissent is sharing our experiences of violence and imagining a counterforce as potent in its healing power as the violence was in its destruction. Dissent is receiving care from a chorus of people who say, “me too,” “we too.” It is naming and claiming ourselves as whole people and refusing silence and complicity (Lorde 1984). It is opening a space for connection and healing where there has been disjuncture and isolation.
Soo Young:
You write of naming and articulating as a practice of disrupting isolation. When we don’t have words to speak what we feel, how can we begin with intimating what our bodies know that our tongues yet do not? erin Khuê Ninh (2018) asks us to imagine beyond what we have language for, to consider how we feel rather than what we can vocalize that we want. The model minority woman is expected to think before they speak, and when (or if) they do, speak perfectly. Let us refuse to have the perfect words. Let us have clumsy conversation—in the moment articulations stumbling and spilling together in search of earnest meaning and connection. Let us wrestle with and chew up perfect articulation with questions that lack perfect answers, with “How do we navigate academic life with ‘survivorhood?’” (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018) and “How do we live and desire differently from our parents” (Moraga 1983)? “I don’t have to be any different from how I am.” Yes. Your refusal wraps me in the fullness of ourselves.
In their poem “An affirmation: for the Asian women in my life, may we one day be free,” Christian Aldana (2021) writes: “our hurricane spirits tear down pedestals / and build altars to ourselves, we hallow / our own bones and together break curse / upon curse we begin anew.” In honoring our grandmothers, we also “build altars to ourselves.” My grandmother spent her entire life laboring for a husband who took her care for granted and never appreciated her gentleness, in a world where men shouldered the gravitas of family name and opportunity. We honor our grandmothers by breaking their curses. We carry them with us as we bloom anew. We engage in a praxis of care inspired by the complexities of our grandmothers’ lives, by Women of Color and Asian American feminist movements grounded in a collective embodied politics of liberation. We work to “separate the fibers of experience we have had as daughters of a struggling people” (Moraga 1983, 23), allowing the leaves of our heritage that refuse our fullness to fall away. We build a world in which we can imagine our grandmothers’ lives anew, a world that perhaps they dreamed of, too.
References
Aldana, Christian. 2021. “An affirmation: for the Asian women in my life, may we one day be free.”, https://mariasatsampaguitas.wixsite.com/marias/post/poetry-by-christian-aldana-1.
Cho, Grace M. 2021. Tastes like War: A MemoirThe Feminist Press.
“Dissent.” n.d. In Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=dissent.
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
Kim, Claire Jean. 2023. Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World. Cambridge University Press.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In Sister Outsider. Crossing Press.
Miller, Chanel. 2019. Know My Name: A Memoir. Penguin.
Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1983. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press.
Ninh, erin Khuê. 2018. “Without Enhancements: Sexual Violence in the Everyday Lives of Asian American Women.” In Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, edited by Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan. University of Washington Press.
______, and Shireen Roshanravan. 2021. “# WeToo: A Convening.” ournal of Asian American Studies 24 (1): 1–8.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.
iJoint first authors