What does a cosmological queer subject formation look like? How do spirituality and cosmology complicate racial, gender, and queer identities and its relationship to belonging? This talk showcases how Hmong Americans draw from their unique cultural and metaphysical worlds to challenge dominant identitarian politics that are constructed under the contemporary phase of queer liberalism. In a world where queer people and refugees are often subjected to surveillance and death, queer Hmong Americans are imagining modes of subjectivity that do not yet exist in material form, to create social and spiritual worlds that can foster life and justice for their communities. Drawing from interviews and the cultural productions of queer Hmong American artists, this talk reveals how one refugee American community can enable alternative frameworks of racial, gender, and queer identities and subjectivities to emerge.
Professor Pha's talk will be followed by a catered reception in the same venue.
Kong Pheng Pha is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator whose research explores the histories and politics of refugee migration; radical queer, feminist, and anti-racist social movements, activism, and community organizing; U.S. imperialism, war, and empire; minoritized student experiences in the modern university; and Asian American racial, gender, sexual, and queer formations, with particular attention on Hmong and Southeast Asian communities in the United States.
His book Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (University of Washington Press, 2025) analyzes Hmong racial subject formation and cultural transformations against the backdrop of U.S. racial, sexual, and queer liberalisms. He is also writing a second book of personal narrative nonfiction essays about Hmong's place in a revolutionary America, and another academic book on the visual politics of invisibility, secrecy, and statelessness.
This event is sponsored by the Gender Studies Program, the Department of American Studies, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, the Institute for Social Concerns. the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, College of Arts and Letters.
Originally published at genderstudies.nd.edu.