Exhibit Flashback - Across the Spectrum: Stories of Queer Asian Pacific America
#TBT During Pride Month, we wanted to revisit a past exhibit titled Across the Spectrum: Stories from Queer Asian Pacific America, which explored the journeys of queer Asian Pacific Islander Americans through a series of portraits and oral histories.
This snapshot of the 2009 exhibit’s introductory text panel delves into the topic of radical existence at the intersection of race, gender, and sexual margins. Queer and trans Asian Pacific Islander Americans fight not just for visibility, but for radical inclusion in the mainstream on multiple fronts.
As a museum, we are continuously aware that representation is not just about inclusion, it is the ability to tell our own stories in our own voices. Who is telling your story and who decides the narrative? This research study from 2017 by Alanna Schuh, titled Queer Representation and Inclusion within U.S.
Museums, examines the ways that queer representation shows up in US-based museums and the concerns that arise from specific types of portrayal.
Find the study at: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/22498/AAD_Schuh_FinalProject_2017.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y
Panel Text Excerpt:
Is being Queer radical?
Public representations of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Transexual, Intersex, Questioning and Queer people suggest that radical is to Queer as water is to life. Coverage of Gay Pride Parades is awash with images of people who go against the grain. Pictures of topless Dykes on motorcycles are featured on the front pages of newspapers while footage of people extravagantly dressed in drag make the 6 o’clock news. Clearly these people are living out, proud and against the mainstream.
Curiously, pictures of people wearing T-shirts and jeans, baby slings or respirators seldom make the front page. Fewer still are images of Asian Pacific Islander Americans who march along with parade masses. Being cropped out of the picture frame is nothing new; we have been cut out of pictures of the American railroads we have built and the American passports we have been denied. Yet absences of Asian Pacific Islander Americans in public discourse about gender, sex and sexuality beg the question, is there more to being Queer than meets the eye?
Asian Pacific Islander Americans who express gender and sexual difference live rich, colorful and complex lives. Most Queer Asian Pacific Islander Americans find themselves marching in more than one parade at one time. They could be Shaking Buddha in the Chinatown Seafair Parade across town, flying to attend an adoptee conference in Korea, or speaking to his or her parents who live in a small town in Northern India over the phone about getting married. While viewing the images may call to mind the commonplace, listening to the stories of race, gender and sexuality presented here Across the Spectrum gesture toward radical places. Indeed, the stories from people who are minorities twice over—coming from both racial and gender-sexual margins—tell us that living Queer within Asian Pacific America is perhaps the most radical place this side of the Pacific Ocean.
Take an audio journey through some of the places that make up Queer Asian Pacific America sightunseen. Visit the places where Queer meets Asian Pacific Islander American not at eye level but at ear level. We hope that by listening to these stories, we may all see the frequencies Across the Spectrum of life and love that illuminate the most Queer of human desires—the desire to be different yet live connected lives.
This then raises another question: Are you Queer too?
Radical.