Queer Resonance: Sonic Corporeality and Relational Resistance in Asian American Undergrounds

This multidisciplinary panel of queer early-career scholars explores how underground sonic scenes created by Asian Americans function as counterspaces where multiethnic, transnational, and cross-racial coalitions are forged through new forms of affective experience and collective resistance. By queering the analysis of the sights and sounds produced and encountered in these experimental artistic spaces, the panel foregrounds sonic corporeality as a vital yet overlooked dimension of Asian American subjectivity. It examines how Asian Americans have reimagined expression, embodiment, and relationality through sonic performance that subverts normative boundaries of pleasure, politics, and transnational belonging in times of state repression and global crisis.

The first paper analyzes a poem about white punk communities “settling” in Los Angeles Chinatown in the 1970s and 1980s, including how their countercultural practices (e.g., anti-war efforts against U.S. imperialism in the Asia-Pacific) paradoxically reproduced scenes of “invasion” in Asian migrant neighborhoods. The second paper builds on the panelist’s memoir about their experience in the Los Angeles rave scene and how electronic music and embodiment can gesture towards the rupture of colonial epistemes of race, gender, and sexuality. The third paper offers an ethnographic account of an emerging structure of “Gaysian affect” that shapes mutual aid, solidarity work, and nightlife among gay Asian Americans in Los Angeles; in it, rage, humor, and pleasure engender a new shared aesthetic and political strategy for mobilization. The fourth paper presents a multimethod exposé of the Sansei dance scene in Southern California during the Cold War, interpreting it as a site of multiracial sonic performance that fostered cross-cultural solidarity amid state tactics of Asian-Black racialization and citizenship contestation.