Asian American History and Racialized Compulsory Deviance

Abstract

I am deeply honored to participate in this retrospective on Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Approximately fifteen years ago, I enrolled in an undergraduate course entitled "Women and Difference: Marginality, Art, and Politics." Co-taught by Adrienne Rich and Michelle Cliff, the class transformed me intellectually, politically, and personally. The education that I received in this setting differed dramatically from the curriculum of my first year in college. Instead of the universalizing humanistic discourse of western civilization, a canon dominated by the great white and male thinkers of western culture, my feminist studies course focused on women "perceived as 'different' (spinsters, lesbians, women of color, Jewish women, women with disabilities, women without children)." 1 Specifically, the class examined how these women used their marginality as inspiration for political critique as well as artistic and intellectual creativity. Through the readings and lectures, I learned about the lives and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, Agnes Smedley, and Virginia Woolf, almost all of them previously unknown to me. The class laid two crucial foundations for my subsequent intellectual development: 1) It opened my eyes to the ways in which university curricula, that is, the construction and presentation of knowledge, can mask the diversity of human experience, and 2) I realized the importance of intersectionality for understanding the social dynamics of power and the multi-faceted nature of identities. These insights provide the basis of my reflections on the impact and relevance of Rich's 1980 groundbreaking essay on my present field of expertise, Asian American history.