Dissertation In progress:

Ancestral Fabulation: Fierce Femme Spiritual Placemaking and Performance across Asian America

How do contemporary Asian North American artists mythologize and fabulate their diasporic lineage, ancestral spirits, and intimacies with place? How do performance and rituals afford queer diasporic artists to embody ancestral return and place-making? This dissertation project offers and defines “ancestral fabulation” as an embodied ritual practice of mythologizing one’s diasporic ancestry interwoven with femme, queer, land, and water intimacies. It situates one’s ancestry entangled with legacies of colonial violence while simultaneously imagining otherwise. By attending to Asian/American spiritual and ancestral performance, this project does the following:

1) takes seriously ancestral and spiritual knowledge as an embodied way of knowing,

2) address how unruly racial and gendered intimacies are engendered and disciplined from diaspora, migration, and displacement,

3) re-orients diasporic belonging from politics of Asian American inclusion and representation towards grounded relations with flesh, place, and ecologies.