Curating Queer of Color Utopia in Queer/Trans Asian/Pacific Islander American Nightlife

Abstract

My ethnographic study examines how three queer/trans Asian/Pacific Islander nightlife scenes in New York City – Bubble_T, A+ Pan-Asian Drag Revue, and Yellow Jackets Collective’s parties – play with race, gender, and sexuality. By situating queer API nightlife within frameworks of Asian Americanist critique, I examine how histories of racialization play a role in the formation of these parties as for queer API audiences, by queer API producers and artists, and of queer API experiences and narratives. Drawing from literature on queer utopia, I then look at how each party’s community guidelines and structures rearticulate queer Asian and Pacific Islander histories as interconnected with struggles against anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, imperialism, and labor exploitation. These new understandings of the past create reimagined visions of a utopic future, as performed in the present. Queer/trans API nightlife thus serve as sites for the curation of queer of color utopia.