Trans Pride, Philippine Festival, and Restoried Selves

This past Sunday marked the inaugural Capital Trans Pride celebration. While it was no where near the experiences I’ve had the past two years attending Trans Pride in San Francisco, it was an event I made it a point to be present for.

Sometimes showing up is half the battle.

Getting others to join me for the celebration, and meeting others there certainly went a long way in making the day as successful as it was. Lately, I’ve grown more and more certain about how important community is, and knowing that we’re not alone. In fact, it’s not only important, it has the potential power to make a life or death difference.

Coincidentally, this past Sunday also marked the annual Philippine Festival celebration in Washington DC. While the recognized Philippine Independence Day is June 12, the second weekend of June is traditionally when Capital Pride is celebrated, leaving the first Sunday of June for the Philippine Festival. (You see, the festivals are held on the same stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue.)

Upon learning that Capital Trans Pride and the Philippine Festival were both taking place at the same time in different locations, a Filipina lesbian friend of mine asked me which one I was going to, in an email entitled, “trans or Filipino?”

As if it were a choice between the two!

Okay, so maybe one person can’t physically be present in more than one place at any one time. But, this limitation doesn’t mean that when we are in that one place we ever become just one thing. And, sometimes, being more than just one thing (which we ALL are) means that we find ways to be at more than one place at the same time. Some of us have gotten all too good/used to practicing this kind of magic...

The real miracles happen, though, when we are free NOT to be such magicians...

I felt a little bit of that freedom recently upon reading Restoried Selves: Autobiographies of Queer Asian/Pacific American Activists edited by Kevin R. Kumashiro.

An anthology consisting of seventeen autobiographical essays by queer APA activists, this collection offers just a small sample of the experiences faced by individuals, as well as by queer APA communities. At just over 130 pages, the slimness of this text masks the richness of its content.

One of the most reoccurring and elusive themes in much of the queer APA literature I’ve read has to do with “home,” specifically the search for home. By no means has there been any consensus about what “home” is, or that it even exists, or that it would be a good thing to find or be “at home.”

Still, the pull of “home” has been one I have strongly felt over the years. At various times in my life thus far, I thought that I had found home in lovers, in family, in friends, in learning, in teaching...

What was most powerful, perhaps, was when I found home in myself.

By no means an easy task, or one that once accomplished doesn’t continue to be an ongoing struggle, but certainly one that I’ve gotten the sweetest rewards from, even if only for short moments at a time.

Reading Restoried Selves was its own sweet reward. The essays echoed my own experiences and feelings, and did a fabulous job of bringing much needed queer APA activist voices to the foreground. Not only did I feel in community with the authors, but it turns out that my life’s path actually crossed, and continues to cross, with a good number of the authors’ lives. It’s a small world, indeed.

It’s specifically in this context of community that I think revolutionary social change will happen. One of the things that the stories in Restoried Selves strongly instill is that we must recognize the ways in which we get in our own ways, succumbing to various internalized oppressions, so that we may be able to come to loving terms with ourselves, and then with one another.

While there are some stories in this anthology that are far from painting rosy pictures of queer API life experiences, there isn’t one single essay that doesn’t leave readers with hopefulness. In fact, I think the ultimate strength of Restoried Selves lies not in its embodiment of a vibrant queer APA activist community (as HUGE an asset that this is), but rather in the way it presents the challenges facing queer APA individuals and communities in order to offer insights and practical advice to ALL readers to work towards combating these challenges. In this way, this book isn’t merely by queer APA activists, about queer APA activism, for queer APA activists, but for every person who wants to better understand what it means to work in coalition for broad social change.

I have nothing but the highest praises for Restoried Selves, and if you haven’t already read it, go out, buy it, and read it, NOW!!!

As usual, some of my most favorite passages:

Kumashiro, Kevin K. (ed.) Restoried Selves: Autobiographies of Queer Asian/Pacific American Activists. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004.


(12) All in all, my goal is to convey to my peers that I am willing to fight for their cause, and all I ask in return is that they walk beside me as I fight for mine.

(15) I turned my life upside down only to find that nothing had a natural moral quality to it. Good and bad existed to reinforce different structures and relations of power.

(45) What happens now happens to all of us. What we can make happen is an understanding that we will not be divided along these or any other lines. Make the circle bigger. And bigger.

(45) To what degree is language just language?
When does speech become action?
When it changes people’s minds.

(46) Now I understand that becoming a bi bi grrl, a bisexual hapa feminist, is a process of enacting my identities. It isn’t just about me and how I see myself or how I ask others to see me. It’s also about being a part of communities. I wouldn’t exist without my communities to support me, so I need to support them. My communities include my family. My communities include people I may not at first see as being like me. My job is to recognize our connections and to create them, and to encourage the same from others.

(50) In the process of reaching out to families of color, PFLAG realized that simply trying to include people of color in PFLAG may not work. The work of challenging heterosexism and transphobia in communities of color has to happen on at least two levels. First, predominantly white organizations need to look at internal barriers and examine how their power structure, language, and resources are preventing oppressed people from participating…The other way that challenging heterosexism and transphobia in communities of color can happen is through the actual work of people of color.

(66) Anyone can be a mentor, but not all kinds of mentorship challenge oppression.

(78) “Oh God, you’ve become one of those angry militant minorities.” He further accused me of playing the racial victim and scolded me for jumping all over the white guy for something that I wasn’t even a part of. “But I was a part of it!” I cried. “It’s not just about a guy being rude to another guy. It’s about a white guy being rude to an Asian guy based on his race.” … I rolled my eyes and thought, “How typical.” I wanted my partner to be angry and indignant with me. I wanted him to be my ally.

(79) But intentions are worthless when accusations are true.

(98) The call for a “postidentity politics” of gender made by one leading national transgender organization ignores the fundamental reality that many identities form in response to oppression. Clearly, “transgender” is a social construct, as is “Asian/Pacific American,” “Korean adoptee,” or any other identity label. But eliminating identity labels will do nothing to address the particular oppressions that gave rise to those identities in the first place. Rather, such identity formations can be used to construct communities and to organize such communities politically.

(131-132) Recognition is not simply the condition of being seen, or even of being granted a political or legal right. Legal and political rights, as so many political scientists and philosophers have noted, are crucial forms of recognition produced [end page 132] through liberal democracy. But I am referring here to a sense of recognition that is deeper and more profound than what is promised by liberalism. It seems to me that the kind of recognition storied by these writers is a deep longing about others as well as about ourselves.

Who recognizes and who is recognized? I suggest here that being seen involves others as well as ourselves. Of course virtually everyone would agree that in an act of recognition, an Other sees and acknowledges another. Indeed, much activism is oriented towards changing the conventions, ideologies, and discourses uttered by others that we find repressive, limiting, and unjust. Social movements help transform prejudice into tolerance by changing ideas and selves. But perhaps it is less obvious that this activism is already linked to the self. What I mean by this is that, in effect, there is another aspect of recognition: the self-recognizing itself. Activism changes our own sense of self.