The Entwined Fields of Ethnic Studies and Queer Studies: An Interview with Amy Sueyoshi
This month, Peter K. J. Park, the CPA Secretary of LGBTQ+ Affairs, spoke with an expert on the challenges and rewards of doing scholarly work at the intersection of ethnic studies and queer studies. Park interviewed Amy Sueyoshi, dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and professor of Race and Resistance Studies, Asian American history, and U.S. queer history. They are the author of Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American “Oriental” (2018) and Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi (2012). Among their many works of community service, they co-founded the GLBT Historical Society Museum, the first queer history museum in the United States. Below is a transcription of the interview conducted on October 10, 2021.
Amy Sueyoshi
Photo Credit: Falu Bakrania
Peter: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview for the CPA’s blog. The CPA is a philosophy association with a growing international membership that centers the Caribbean region and the historical experience of colonization in the Global South. I am the CPA’s Secretary for LGBTQ+ Affairs. In 2019, I convened a working group on LGBTQ+ issues. We composed the following mission statement in which “[We recognize] the need to counter the dominance of Western conceptions of gender and sexualities and prioritize the intellectual and activist work that emerges specifically from the Caribbean and the Global South.” To start us off, can you describe the field of ethnic studies and how it relates to “broader contexts of ‘discovery,’ conquest, racial and gender domination, genocide, capitalist dependency, and exploitation as well as freedom, emancipation and decolonization?”
Amy: In the late 1960s, a number of students at various university campuses, both community colleges and four-year institutions, started to demand curriculum that was relevant and accessible to them. They were mostly BIPOC students: Black, indigenous, and other people of color, such as Latinx and Asian Pacific Americans. They didn’t see themselves in the curriculum. San Francisco State University was one campus where the students actually had the longest running strike in history. They halted classes from November of 1968 to March of 1969. In the end, the University agreed to formalize a School of Ethnic Studies which would later become the College of Ethnic Studies, the first and only entire college dedicated to the field of ethnic studies until two years ago, when Cal State Los Angeles formed a College of Ethnic Studies.
It’s an interdisciplinary field that provides learning from the perspective of communities of color as well as indigenous people. Student activists initially called it “Third World Studies,” but incorporation into the university meant the adoption of the less radical term of “Ethnic Studies.” If you think about “Ethnic Studies,” it sounds super mild, right? It just sounds like simply the study of ethnicities, but it was, in its very formation, supposed to be transformative, an education that empowered people to become change agents.
Photo Credit: Marie Ueda Collection
Peter: Before I ask you how queer studies is related to ethnic studies, what is queer studies on its own terms?
Amy: Queer studies was born amidst the AIDS crisis. Many young gay men who were otherwise healthy were literally dying and discarded en masse. The U.S. government and the public healthcare system did little to intervene, thinking of it as an illness that only afflicted gay men. And, when these men passed away, they were so highly stigmatized that their families didn’t even come to say goodbye. Their belongings were literally thrown in a dumpster. So, queer studies was born out of this struggle, where many activists were trying to declare and assert that “gay is good” and that it’s not something that should be hidden away; that “we’re queer and we’re here” and society should just accept it.
Queer studies was and continues to be a site of radical inquiry. It’s again interdisciplinary, and similar to ethnic studies it is in any number of disciplines, such as literature, anthropology, sociology, and history. Queer studies though is really about asserting the primacy, the relevance, the value in having a queer lens, thinking about queer people and queer activism, and how ideas about queer sexuality can radically change the way we think about the world. Both ethnic studies and queer studies were born out of activists who wanted to see a different society that both embraced and advanced the needs and values of BIPOC folks as well as queer people. But they are two separate academic movements that were born separately out of two different crises in two different time periods.
This is not to say that Queer Studies as a field did not borrow and learn from the establishment of Ethnic Studies. If you think about the activism that preceded the formation of the two fields, you can see how cultural nationalist movements were in conversation with one another. “Gay Liberation” and “Gay Power” borrowed the language of “Black Liberation” and “Black Power” as they sought to forge better life for queers in America.
Photo Credit: Cornell University
Peter: Your College offers an undergraduate minor in queer ethnic studies. What is queer ethnic studies?
Amy: We may more commonly understand queer ethnic studies as queer of color studies. This is basically queer studies that more centrally talks about race. It’s about how queer theory and queer lived experiences change with a more serious consideration of race. Queer of color theorists, such as Cathy Cohen and David Eng, as well as some white radical theorists, such as Dean Spade and Judith Butler, have always insisted on what it means to be thinking about race and power—that we can’t think about sexuality without thinking about race. And so, the undergraduate minor in queer ethnic studies is really about answering this call; and that studying queers of color could also bring a radical transformation in how we think about ethnic studies.
We, in fact, have quite a few students at SFSU who identify as queer, and this minor is important to them. It allows them to not just see themselves in the curriculum but also think differently about the world. It seems to me that ethnic studies since its inception in the late 1960s has been slower to incorporate queer of color curriculum, whereas queer studies since the 1990s has known the importance of queer ethnic studies and the need to incorporate more materials that center queers of color.
Peter: What are the streams of influence between queer ethnic studies and Africana and Latinx studies in particular?
Amy: A number of queer of color theorists are in both Black/Africana Studies and Latinx Studies. Folks such as Rod Ferguson and José Muñoz are just two of more than two dozen scholars working at the intersection. I would say that probably the earliest queer theorist, whom people don’t necessarily label as such, is Gloria Anzaldúa, who was very much writing from a queer woman of color perspective. She published a number of books and essays, but probably the most influential might be This Bridge Called My Back. It’s a critique of the white feminist movement and features nearly all queer BIPOC women writers. She calls for an embrace of things “squint eyed,” “perverse,” and “los atrevidos,” and embarks on creating this coalition of women of color for liberation.
Political scientist Cathy Cohen’s essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” similarly calls for coalition building based not necessarily on identities, but in terms of politics. Thus, if we are concerned with narrowing the wealth gap and eradicating poverty, then a white gay man should be aligned with dykes and straight welfare recipients to forward our same political values. There are obviously more contemporary queer of color theorists, such as LaMonda Horton-Stallings and Kara Keeling, and quite a few books in Black Queer Studies and Latinx sexualities.
In fact, I remember having a conversation with geographer Laura Puildo about ten years ago and she insisted that all of us needed to now engage in queer theory regardless of whether we were in queer studies or not. Hence the influence of queer studies—queer of color theory—has been staggering for all academicians concerned with equity and social justice.
Peter: Is “Global South” something that you see cropping up in queer ethnic studies? Does it make more sense to preserve and keep attached the U.S. context seen in a lot of ethnic studies and queer ethnic studies?
Amy: Ethnic studies in its original formation was meant to be both domestic and international. A number of historians who study the formation of ethnic studies, such as Jason Ferreira, have said that many of the thinkers who envisioned “Third World Studies” as global were jailed. Thus, Ethnic Studies when formalized within the university became largely a study of the United States. In the past twenty years, however, there has been more of a push to internationalize Ethnic Studies. I’m thinking in particular about the co-authored article by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan titled “Global Identities” that appeared in GLQ in 2001 as leading this push.
There is also, though, a need to distinguish area studies from Ethnic Studies. While area studies is not necessarily political and can simply study an area or region from a cultural perspective, Ethnic Studies is always distinctly political and at heart remains a critique of white supremacy. We also know that area studies have been around forever in the form of well-established disciplines, such as anthropology, as opposed to Ethnic Studies, which is a relative newcomer to the academy. Thus, if we’re not vigilant we could lose a more politicized field to a more depoliticized one since those with less power are often squashed by those with power.
We can see this happening in this past year’s legislative attacks on critical race theory, which is, in fact, an attack on Ethnic Studies. For sure, it’s easier to point the finger at other people being oppressive rather than think about you yourself as oppressive; hence area studies is more acceptable and less scary than Ethnic Studies.
What I am trying to say is that while we must think about Ethnic Studies as a field that includes other racialized populations outside the U.S., we must also never lose focus on the fact that we also need a space to illuminate and address social problems within our own communities.
References
Anzaldúa, Gloria and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015.
Cohen, Cathy. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (1997): 437-465.
Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7:4 (2001): 663-679.
Dr. Peter K.J. Park is an immigrant from South Korea to the U.S. He received a PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is one of the co-editors of Sanskrit and Orientalism: Indology and Comparative Linguistics in Germany, 1750-1958. His other book, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830, was selected as a Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book by the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Park is proudest of the first ever proposal to create an Ethnic Studies curriculum for the University of Texas at Dallas, which he drafted in 2018. He has served as a member of the Exhibits Committee and the Programming and Education Committee of the GLBT Historical Society and Museum (San Francisco). He is currently reading Chinese and Ayurvedic manuals on food and medicine to gain alternative perspectives on philosophy.