Beyond Refusal: Queer Transpacific Feminism During the Vietnam War

Abstract

This article illuminates the fugitive queer of colour history of the Indochinese Women’s Conferences in Canada in 1971, particularly the Southeast Asian delegates’ impromptu protest against white lesbian inquiries and the subsequent removal of lesbian workshops at the conference. Rather than assimilating this moment into a homonationalist historiography of perversely homophobic Asians, this article traces how the lesbian and gay liberation movements in the white Global North monopolized the political meanings of queerness and freedom in the 1970s. The Southeast Asian delegates’ decision to disengage from the topics forwarded by white lesbians suggests not their homophobia, but a contradiction within the meaning of queerness that emerges in the chaos of a race war. This article navigates through these logics, which critically make queer Asian women’s desires impossible. I employ the concept of refusal to discuss a specific site of queer Asian feminism, one that responds to the sexualized trauma of war and peace, as well as to the white Global North gay and lesbian activism that emerged in the same moment. Indeed, while refusal may imply replacing information with absence, the delegates’ refusal critically communicated the exploitative nature of white lesbian feminism and its unexpected affinities with heteropatriarchal Cold War militarism. Seriously considering the delegates’ insights into their multiple marginalizations within a transpacific economy, and the way they actively shaped how others should understand these experiences of violence, this article argues that this moment ushered in a prescient and innovative critique of queer Asian feminist formations in Canada.