What Comes after #StopAsianHate? Asian American Feminist Speculation

Abstract

Abstract: Growing Asian American abolition feminisms is a practice not only of politics, organizing, and struggle, but of imagination, and speculative fiction and poetry can work to inspire and sustain such imaginations. Speculative and experimental works also challenge conventions of literary realism in Asian American literature, opening generic and imaginative possibilities for Asian American feminist politics. Responding to the threats of police violence and of racialized violence against Asian North American women, Franny Choi’s queer feminist cyborg poetics open space beyond the violences of the human, and Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir bends space and time to join trans women’s community together in ease and safety. Vandana Singh’s utopias of the third kind locate utopic thinking in the struggles of oppressed and racialized people to build and sustain community through slowness and connection. Together, these speculations consider Asian American feminist futurities and what ways of being-otherwise we can share in the present and future, shaped by connection, community, and care, rather than urgency, scarcity, and fear. Analyzing how these works respond to violence and crisis, this article describes abolitionist possibilities for Asian American feminisms that respond to anti-Asian and state violence by seeking other genres of human life and rejecting linear notions of progress. Instead, these texts cultivate connection and community in the present as a project of shaping Asian American utopic visions, rethinking utopia not as a vision of future perfection, but an ethic of embracing and negotiating change, difference, and multiplicity.