Sandra Kim
Stony Brook University IDEA Fellow
Long Beach, California, United States
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Dr. Sandra So Hee Chi Kim is a cultural studies scholar working at the intersections of transpacific Asian American studies, critical Korean studies, and the study of modern empire. Her research has appeared in "Diaspora," "Positions," "Korean Studies," and "Occasion," among other journals, and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled _Kinning Empire: Transcoloniality, Kinship, and Korean Historical Trauma_. Dr. Kim is also the founder and Co-Director of the grassroots community organization Asian American Justice + Innovation Lab (https://www.aajil.org).
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Feminisms II: The Self in Study: Identities within Asian American Feminisms
This roundtable is one of three sessions sponsored by the Asian American Feminisms Section. Just as Asian American Feminisms encompass complex histories, politics, disciplines, and theoretical frameworks, so too does the identity of Asian American feminist. In this roundtable, we explore how our individual identities inform our Asian American feminist work, the relation between the self and study, as well as the examination of the self in studies. We are interested in how our creative and scholarly pursuits often take an autoethnographic approach, informed by an interpretation of lived experiences that connect to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. We share how our various cultural, ethnic, racial identities, included within Asian American feminists, affect our research, art, scholarship, and teaching. We offer self-reflections from Asian American(ist) feminists that take up the question of what it means to navigate our selves in our work. Sandra So Hee Chi Kim reflects on how her Korean American identity informed her journey from a historically Eurocentric field to Asian American Studies. Catherine Ma describes difficulties she encountered as a Chinese immigrant mother in academia and the act of putting her rage of invisible mothering onto paper. Van Ngoc Tran Nguyen discusses making THE MOTHERLOAD, a film starring herself and her mother, that interrogates how Hollywood movies depict the Vietnam War. Lili Shi recounts the challenges of becoming a feminist as a transnational Chinese American academic in the past two decades, from international student to tenured professor.
Feminist Tellings 1: Sustainable Ways of Knowing
In two, linked roundtables sponsored by the AAAS Feminisms Section, we explore diverse ways of being, knowing, and speaking in the academy that are rooted in Asian American and other feminist traditions. To tell is to manifest experience and knowledge in forms (potentially) legible to others; telling is at the core of what we do as scholars, teachers, and activists. We offer a series of 5-7 minute "tellings" that are scholarly or research-based, and/or creative or reflective tellings that represent other areas of our lives, for example, our artist, activist, organizer, survivor, and mentor/mentee selves. We are inspired by feminist-of-color modes of telling, such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s “talk-story,” a vital way of knowing through story, and Audre Lorde’s powerful “transformation of silence into language and action.” We also bear in mind chimeric modes of listening and interpreting, such as Trinh T. Minh-ha’s observation that there is a “magical” quality to stories that reveal; Mira Shimabukuro’s urging that we “attend to” circumstances in which stories are told; and the visioning-healing encouraged by Mimi Khúc’s collaborative “Asian American Tarot.” We recognize the need for theories, vocabularies, values, and collaborations that accept our embodied experience as not only legitimate but vital. Together we take stock and envision: How do we arrive in our present moment intellectually, creatively, spiritually, and ethically as Asian American(ist) feminist scholars? How do our myriad genealogies shape our values and approaches, career paths, and ultimately, tellings to the world? How might we turn lessons arising from our exploration into a sustainable path forward in (relation to) academia?
In Feminist Tellings 1: Sustainable Ways of Knowing, we explore epistemologies, conceptual frameworks, methodologies, and styles of academic writing that are shaped by Asian American feminist thought and praxis. These tellings come from our experiences doing research as feminist scholars. Our tellings reflect unexpected lessons and convergences, reversals, disruptions, and reconceptualizations that arose as we developed frameworks consistent with our embodied experience and our intellectual, social, and political commitments. The panel is chaired by Mai-Linh Hong, who briefly introduces the linked sessions. Kylie Ching discusses collaboration and the co-constitution of knowledge, which entails decentering the scholar as a figure of authority. Lan Duong shares her retelling of Western feminist theory through the lens of refugee girlhood. Nadia Kim reflects upon her work with women-of-color environmental justice activists, whose practices of testimony and reciprocal care suggest a reconceptualizing of “citizenship.” Sandra So Hee Chi Kim discusses her trajectory as a scholar, educator, and community organizer, inspired by activists like Grace Lee Boggs and adrienne marie brown. Christine Peralta develops “Epistemologies of the Annoying” as a theoretical framework that arose from both embodied experience in academia and research on non-elite women’s intellectual history. Valerie Soe discusses the role of collaboration in her filmmaking about the Auntie Sewing Squad, a feminist-of-color mutual aid organization. May Yang offers refusal of legibility as an analytic to frame her work as an artist-scholar, drawing lessons from refugee women who feign incomprehension to refuse interrogation.
“Queering Goose Fathers, Sustaining Intersections”
This talk contributes to sustaining intersectional movements through scholarship that explores frameworks and narratives that push against the political, social, and epistemological borders that govern our world. It examines the transnational social phenomenon of “goose fathers” (기러기 아빠)— a term used for Korean fathers who typically work in South Korea and send money to their families in the United States so that their children can pursue “better” educational opportunities— through the lens of (de)coloniality theory and the history of U.S.-Korea relations. I then turn to Krys Lee’s short story “The Goose Father” (2012), which focuses on one such goose father, Gilho, whose austere lifestyle and struggle with depression takes an amusing turn when he accepts as a boarder a young man named Wuseong. Gilho finds his boarder eccentric and unpredictable; Wuseong brings with him a pet goose that he claims is his dead mother and disregards every masculine gender norm, puzzling and annoying Gilho initially. As time goes on, however, Gilho finds himself intensely attracted to Wuseong in a way that he has never experienced before, which leads to an inner awakening. Meanwhile, the pet goose takes on a magical realist quality that leads both Gilho and the reader to believe that it might indeed be Wuseong’s mother. I close-read the “queerness” of this text to bring out its critique of multinational capitalism, U.S. empire, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, told through the queering of desire and kinship relations.
AAAS Annual Conference 2023 Sessionize Event
Sandra Kim
Stony Brook University IDEA Fellow
Long Beach, California, United States
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