Constellating Home - (Intersectional Rhetorics) by V Jo Hsu (Paperback)

About the Book

Examines counterstories where queer, trans, and disabled Asian Americans recover and reimagine shared histories, connecting individual experiences into grounds for solidarity and disruptions of dominant narratives.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2024 RSA Book Award
Winner of the 2024 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award
Winner of the 2023 NCA Diamond Anniversary Book Award
Winner of the Innovations in Community Writing Book Award from the Conference on Community Writing

Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics explores how race, migration, gender, and disability entwine in conceptions of deserving citizens. V. Jo Hsu explores three archives of trans and queer Asian American (QTAPI) rhetorics, considering a range of texts including oral histories, photography, personal essays, and performance showcases. To demonstrate how QTAPI use personal narrative to critique and revise the conditions of their exclusion, Hsu forwards a critical approach to storytelling, homing, which deliberately engages sites of alienation and belonging. Through a practice of diasporic listening, Hsu tracks confluences among seemingly divergent journeys and locates trans and queer Asian American experiences within broader US and global politics.

The stories at the heart of Constellating Home center the voices of trans and nonbinary people, disabled people, and others often overlooked in conceptions of US citizenry. Hsu's analyses demonstrate the inextricability of Asian American activism from queer politics, disability activism, and racial justice, and they consider how stories network individual experiences with resonant histories and struggles. Finding unlikely intimacies among individual and communal histories, Constellating Home provides tools for fostering mutual care, revealing harmful social patterns, and orienting shared values and politics.

Review Quotes

"[Hsu] note[s] the love, resilience, and ancestry that are present within the LGBTQ+ Asian American and Pacific Islander community, and they hope further studies build on the work that they have begun within this book. Indeed, Constellating Home offers readers an initial glimpse into such work, but Hsu leaves gaps for further study that are highlighted in the diversity of narratives (and genres/formats) that they study here." --Megan Simmermeyer, Constellations

"As a rhetorical studies project, Hsu's work is nuanced and exciting. As an in-depth study of divergent queer and trans Asian American narratives, Hsu thoughtfully develops significant rhetorical constellations of networked relationality, care, and survival within and among these communities ... the promise of these findings is valuable for all minority communities." --Sara Baugh-Harris, Journal of Asian Studies

"This book adds a new dimension to the field of rhetorics, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies ... I find a place of restoration in this book in an otherwise home of (un)belonging in white America." --Sumaiya Sarker Sharmin, Peitho

"Constellating Home will be incredibly useful for any of the many academic fields that are trying to make sense of marginalized communities but struggle to describe and honor the diversity and heterogeneity of individual experiences." --Lori Kido Lopez, author of Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship

"For those interested in rhetoric studies, trans and queer studies, and Asian American studies, this book offers a case study in queer, trans, and disabled Asian and Pacific islander historiography and storytelling, depicting how these individuals have always forged, and will continue to forge, ways of being 'at home' in their bodies and the spaces they occupy." --Stacey Park, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association

"Hsu's position as a participant-activist-scholar facilitates immersive, in-depth and reflexive narrative accounts that capture the messiness of everyday struggle ... This is a book I wholeheartedly recommend to disability, race and gender scholars, as well as cultural ethnographers and auto/ethnographers, as it cogently and compellingly makes the case for intersectional and inclusive theory and praxis." --Viji Kuppan, Disability & Society

"This book is a must-read not only for researchers looking to research marginalized communities, but also for those who are also hoping to provide some form of redress for them. Constellating Home may specifically focus on trans and queer Asian American rhetoric, but there is a lesson for all to take home from it." --Aarron Booker, Women, Gender, and Families of Color

"Hsu's exploration of sense-making processes, modes of relationality, and worldmaking possibilities produces a rich and particular narrative of resistance and refusal. Constellating Home is compelling, theoretically rich, and beautifully written." --Gust Yep, author of Queer Theory and Communication: From Disciplining Queers to Queering the Discipline(s)

About the Author

V. Jo Hsu (they/them) is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. They are the winner of the 2023 Fellows' Early Career Award from the Rhetoric Society of America.