Queering Asian Canada: Troubling Family, Generation, and Community

This article argues that a queer perspective on Asian Canadian studies can open new inquiries and simultaneously trouble the centrality of family, generation, and community in documenting and examining racialized minority and diasporic groups. By rethinking these analytical concepts through queer possibilities and interventions, research into Asian Canada can become more inclusive and transgressive, and can foreground alternative queer kinships which exceed heteropatriarchal bloodlines, filial relations, and co-ethnic singularities. Putting forth counter-histories of racialized and diasporic sexualities, this article builds upon and complements archival research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Asian Canadians, and turns to artists and cultural workers who offer rich historical and contemporary representations of queer Asian Canada. In particular, it examines the 2015 film It Runs in the Family by Joella Cabalu, the 2016 film Re:Orientations by Richard Fung, and the 2016 exhibition Not a Place on a Map: The Desh Pardesh Project curated by Anna Malla.