A New Plot for Living
Storytelling as Collective Action and Homemaking
This page was created as a presentation for the 2022 Computers & Writing Conference
ON LAND
For all of us in North or South America, every one of our colleges and universities stands on Indigenous land. What we know now as “land grant universities” including Penn State, where I completed my graduate degree, and the University of Arkansas, where I worked my first job—were built and funded by the 1862 Morrill Act, which took nearly 11 million acres of land from tribal nations and turned it into property and seed money for public universities. Texas, where I now live, has been home or gathering space to the Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Caddo, Tonkawa, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo. Despite this, there are only three federally recognized tribes with reservations in Texas.
Land acknowledgments are very far from the necessary return of stolen land, but our universities are also built on long histories of Indigenous erasure. I often think of rhetoric, at its heart, as a technology of attention. So I am pulling our attention here: to the legacies of violence we’ve inherited and with the potential that we can choose differently with our futures.
PROLOGUE
I have lived nearly half my life on the computer. When I was in middle school, my family won a used laptop at my Chinese school’s fundraiser raffle. Outdated even for the early 2000s, it could barely handle floppy disks, and the screen was already damaged. I spent my evenings writing around the yellow starburst bruised into the center of a Word document.
I discovered forum-based roleplaying, where I could spend thirteen straight hours occupying our dial-up modem, inhabiting characters in made-up worlds, armored in other bodies. This is where I built my foundations for trans survival—long before I had the words for it. Here, I learned to dream the impossible and to write the story that would take me there.
For those looking for a conventional academic presentation, I'm afraid this will not be it. Stories are the medium through which I encounter digital rhetoric—or everything, really. Given the freedom to envision this “presentation” in whatever form it might take (thank you, C&W Organizers), I’ve decided on this experiment, should you choose to journey with me. I regret that I could not join those of you gathered in North Carolina, though I hope my small contribution helps us think through the variations that “gathering,” “togetherness,” and “connection” might take.
ON STORIES
In telling the “Story of America,” LeAnne Howe uses “story, history, and theory as interchangeable words because the difference in their usage is artificially constructed to privilege writing over speaking.” This story is going to move through writing and speech, history and theory, trying—as bell hooks taught us to do—to name sites of pain as “location[s] for theorizing.”
Here, I intend to share with you a bit from my forthcoming book, Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics, to explain how I approach story as a means of connection and of social and cultural criticism. I didn’t want to just repeat a lot of that material for you, though, so the latter part of this document offers some nascent thoughts on possible connections and invites your explorations.
Photo by Jake Carter on Unsplash
CONSTELLATING HOME
An abbreviated version of the story I tell my students: As a PhD student, I compiled exams lists that had little to do with my dissertation prospectus, which in turn had nothing to do with my dissertation, which was also thrown out before I wrote my book. This is, obviously, not a blueprint for much other than added panic, but I do like it as an example of the fact that many journeys meander—and none of those steps are lost.
The project that would eventually become Constellating Home began in the early months of my first job. I was living in Northwest Arkansas, in a rented duplex I had found on Craigslist months before I had to move. A Confederate flag emerged in the window across the street shortly after I moved in. The town’s largest event was a motorcycle rally where one could purchase Nazi merchandise in the stands just off campus.
I found The Dragon Fruit Project, The Visibility Project, and the Queer Ancestors Project not because I was trying to do research, but because I was looking for stories of queer Asian Americans. I hadn’t even yet envisioned QTAPI community—I had no idea what that would look like. Until I found these organizations—until they pulled me to the Bay Area and I sat in their offices, classrooms, and galleries—every queer space had I been in had been predominately white; every Asian American space was overwhelmingly heteronormative.
I had learned unbelonging as my natural state. The theories that emerged from this project are learned from communities that taught me that there is power in naming the knowledge in your bones, and that home is not a place, but a network of relations that move and grow as you do.
Homing is "an interminable, relational process—constellating our shards of memory with the peoples affected by those histories, and the futures we can cobble from these fragments of sky."
DEFINITIONS
Homing: a critical approach to storytelling that situates individual experiences in relation to relevant histories and events. This approach to narrative deliberately confronts systems of power and representation, paying particular attention to the author’s relations and responsibility. Homing enables the writer to deconstruct, co-construct, and maneuver among sites of (un)belonging.
Diasporic Listening: an approach to Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening and García’s community listening that applies queer diaspora’s attention to “promiscuous intimacies.” Put more simply, diasporic listening is a critical orientation that searches for reciprocities ignored or obscured by normative understandings.
Constellations: I owe the term constellation to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Malea Powell, and the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab. In Nishnaabeg thought, constellation names a knowledge system based in relationality. When applied to rhetoric, constellations permit “multiply-situated subjects to connect multiple discourses at the same time, as well as for those relationships (among subjects, among discourses, among kinds of connections) to shift and change without holding a subject captive.”Rhetorical constellations are not about declaring a singular truth but about listening for and accommodating a multiplicity of relationships and responsibilities.
Commonplaces: For their rhetorical potency, Ralph Cintrón defines topoi as “storehouses of social energy” that organize, constitute, and help generate our social lives. To capture their reiterative nature, Christa Olson describes them as “places of return” or “nodes of social value and common sense.” For the purposes of my study, I keep in mind Aristotle’s definition of topoi as “lines of argument.” In the context of global diaspora, commonplaces can be seen as storylines that provide common understanding in the absence of physical common ground.
ON RESILIENCE
CODA: ON LIVING
The first time it happens is in the Bay Area, in 2019. I am on my final research trip for Constellating Home, riding a Lyft from San Francisco to Oakland, when a heavy fog rolls across my mind and settles. For the next few days, I feel as if every thought were dragged through mud. I assume I am getting sick—which, I am. I do not yet know that the sickness has come to stay.
I take four trips to the emergency room that year. Each time, nurses withhold treatment until I agree to a pregnancy test, which always takes hours to process. CT scans find inflammation with no identifiable cause. I’m sent home with a battery of antibiotics. They don’t help, and I sweat and shake for weeks.
I teach a two-week graduate seminar in this state, hobbling from podium to desk. It pays for the ER visits, but not for the MRI, the 7-day heart monitor, the two ACTH stimulation tests, the tilt table test, the endoscopy and colonoscopy and sigmoidoscopy, the EMG, the nerve biopsy, or the many, many vials of blood.
As the world began to understand COVID-19 as a lasting condition, my own long-simmering illness surfaced as the medium through which I encounter the everyday. I’ve been sitting with the notion of chronicity ever since. What happens when the temporary becomes permanent – or rather, when what you experienced as passing distress has always been there? How do you spend a lifetime in that stretch that everyone else is trying to "get through"?
Though all writing feels unfinished to me, personal writing feels especially like—at best—a snapshot. It suspends a moment in time, but my thinking on this will have already moved on by the time my words reach you. As humans deeply entangled in the world, we continue to evolve and transform, as do our relationships with one another. Most of Constellating Home was completed by 2020, but the events of that year kept seeping into my revisions. With the arrival of COVID-19 and the concurrent rise of anti-Asian violence, I felt as though I were trying to wrap my sentences around a rising tide.
Like constellations, every story we tell is one trajectory among infinite possibilities. I’m ending this presentation with a scattering of events, ideas, and nascent considerations that I’ve been sitting with in recent years. The form here is open-ended in that, while I have discovered some resonances, I am inviting you to chart your own journey into and away from my (in)conclusions.
In Atlanta, a shooter opens fire at three massage parlors, killing eight people, six of them Asian women. The New York Times first posts this headline, which I screenshot and share to Instagram before it is changed.
I can’t stop thinking about enthymemes—about the premises buried in our common ground.
Enthymeme: 8 Asians were killed in Georgia in a shooting motivated by sex addiction.
- Stated premise: The killer was a sex addict.
- Unstated premise: Asians are responsible for—or otherwise the natural targets for—sex addiction.
Long before I had the words for it, I always saw myself in a space far outside the category of “woman.” Another thing about being trans, though—at least for many of us—is carrying stories of ourselves we cannot yet speak, or that others will not hear.
In the past two years, Asian American women filled airwaves, newspapers, and journals with accounts of objectification, exotification, and targeted violence—though not enough people are listening. Their vulnerability and their outrage trained a searchlight on my own past, on the tracts of my journey I had never permitted myself to see—on the ways others imposed their narratives of race and gender onto me, and on the histories etched onto my bodymind.
This is the distance between experiencing a wound and having the theories to name it.
Deep into the pandemic, I am watching a movie with my partner, switching from computer to television after a marathon of Zoom. Opening credits wax and wane and everything fades to gibberish. Characters, dialogue, and plot lose all meaning. I can’t hold any detail in my mind long enough to connect it to anything else. I’m trying to ask her to explain, but my head is a jumble of panic. Every word feels like a piece to a different puzzle—all fragments and broken edges.
As COVID-19 suffuses vulnerable communities – including long-term care facilities, poor neighborhoods, and predominately-POC neighborhoods – disabled patients are pressured to sign DNRs. Due to social distancing measures, many are separated from their advocates and loved ones. At least 25 states have standards of care that could deprive disabled people of critical treatment in the event of medical rationing. Policies in Alabama, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah identify dementia as a reason to de-prioritize someone’s access to a ventilator, and Washington instructs doctors to consider “baseline functional status” including “loss of reserves in energy, physical ability, cognition, and general health.”
In Oregon City, OR, Sarah McSweeny is taken to the hospital with 103 degree temperature. The hospital calls her caregivers because they are confused by the orders for life-sustaining treatment. Why, the doctor wonders, would a woman who couldn’t walk or speak have instructions for full medical care rather than a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order? He pushes for a DNR, insisting that intubating her “was a matter of risk versus quality of life.” Days later, she dies from complications of aspiration pneumonia—a condition that is usually treatable.
At St. David’s South Austin Medical Center, Michael Hickson is admitted with a fever and trouble breathing. COVID-19 was discovered in the nursing facility where he lived – one of many care facilities he’d circulated through after a cardiac incident paralyzed his arms and legs. Within days, Hickson is transferred to hospice care. His wife records the conversation where a doctor explains—against her protestations, “Right now, his quality of life — he doesn’t have much of one.” Hickson dies after six days without treatment, hydration, and nutrition.
Enthymeme: A disabled patient is denied life-sustaining care based on presumed low “quality of life.”
- Unstated Premise: quality of life is measured by abled perspectives
- Stated Premise: disabled lives are low quality
- Unstated Premise: people with low quality of life are undeserving of life
AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF THINGS THAT DIMINISH MY QUALITY OF LIFE
- State legislatures assailing trans youth
- Cisgender apathy
- A campus and profession where disabled, trans, and/or queer POC faculty are grossly underrepresented
- A profession and a global economic system based in labor exploitation
- The weaponization of precarity to silence pre-tenure and non-tenure-track faculty and staff
- A state legislature trying to dismantle tenure
- A political climate hostile to discussions of racism, transphobia, ableism, and other forms of structural violence
- A global climate made volatile by an extractive economy
- Heavy snowfall and neglected state infrastructure
- A poorly-funded public transportation system
- Treatment protocols with no evidence for patients with comorbidities or patients who are trans
- Therapists who ask if it was really racism or perhaps just a misunderstanding
- Colleagues who ask the same question
- Colleagues who ask our students the same question
- Zoom meetings that last longer than an hour
- Meetings that should’ve been an email
- Emails that really shouldn’t’ve
- Sometimes, my immune and nervous systems
- Standards of care that would blame those immune and nervous systems for all of the above
Those who love McSweeny describe her as a vivacious, outgoing, and filled with joy. She enjoyed country music concerts, trips to the mall, and getting her makeup done. She’d just completed training for employment, hoping to work as a greeter in one of her favorite stores.
Hickson’s wife recalls how he chatted with her in the hospital, responding through the ventilator mask that pushed air through his lungs. They FaceTimed with their children. She joked that she would bring him a Long Island iced tea. Reports on Hickson show him surrounded by his family—five teenage children beaming, surrounding his hospital bed.
I hate that disabled people need humanizing stories before audiences will see us as human. How many abled people need to love me before I am worthy of life? How much positive thinking will make that life worth saving?
Those are the wrong questions.
What were all of the decisions that preceded the need to ration care? How do I hold your attention here long enough to trace one event to another so that we can see the full constellation of actions?
Conditions believed to increase the risk of severe illness from COVID-19 include diabetes, asthma, HIV, and pulmonary hypertension. Diabetes is far more prevalent in communities of color than white ones; the diagnostic rate for American Indians and Alaskan Natives is twice that of the white population. Black Americans are 1.5 times as likely to have asthma than white people. One in five trans women – and nearly one in two Black trans women—is living with HIV. Black folks and other people of color are not only more likely to experience hypertension, but to remain untreated for hypertension.
These disparities are not innate to communities, but rather propagated by the same discriminatory mechanisms at work in COVID care rationing. Colonial invasion decimated Native American food culture, leaving tribes dependent on crude federal rations. Risk factors for asthma include air pollution, which is more common in urban and predominantly-POC areas. HIV-prevention has focused primarily on white, affluent cisgender men, and HIV/AIDS research continues to overlook transgender people. Hypertension is exacerbated by discriminatory health care practices, poor access to quality food and physical activity, and environmental hazards.
A 2020 survey conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education reported more than half of university and college faculty “are considering retiring or changing careers and leaving higher education.” This year, a third of student affairs professionals are also searching for an off-ramp. This was far from the first time that higher ed employees raised alarms about their working conditions. Reports abound of workplace bullying, harassment, and mental health crises. Built on rigid hierarchies, academic institutions are structured for abuse. This profession has the second-highest rate of sexual assault—second to the US military. Faced with the intensification of pandemic stressors, institutions fell back on individualistic solutions such as “mindfulness seminars.” Reporting on pandemic burnout in academia, the prominent scientific journal Nature advises academics to “normalize conversations and mental health” and get “sleep, nutrition, [and] exercise.”
Photo by Adrian Pelletier on Unsplash
In 2021, my university invites applications for a “research reboot”—a semester's course release to relieve faculty from the accumulated strain of the past two years. Two years of adapting classes for classrooms to computers, to both and neither. Two years of sickness, loss, uncertainty, and fear.
When my application is denied, I survey my students on the mode of instruction they prefer. Many have struggled to learn in online settings. Others have immune-compromised family or roommates whose health they cannot risk. Still others share that the prolonged isolation devastated their mental health.
I learn to teach to a classroom while managing a zoom screen, and I learn to adapt my lesson plans for any ratio of in-person students to online attendees. I stockpile KN95 masks. I check my white blood cell count and track the remaining weeks in my steroid taper until my immune function returns to normal.
Like so many faculty across institutions, I try to wrest accessible possibilities from inaccessible spaces. I steal from my own time and wellbeing what the institutions would not give.
Enthymeme: The Research Reboot program is an effort to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on “the lives and careers of the UT community.”
- Stated premise: Awards will be decided based on a “negative professional outcome,” measured solely by research production.
- Stated premise: applications “should not include COVID-related (personal or professional) circumstances.”
- Unstated premise: This is the only recognition the university will grant for the toll of the past two years.
- Unstated premise: Respite is a scarce resource—worth rationing from the second largest endowment in the country.
- Implied Conclusion: Research production is the only form of loss legible to this university. The only thing worth “revitalizing” is your research agenda.
bell hooks describes story as theory—as “making sense out of what was happening.” This is “a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently." I have begun nearly every day of the past two years by writing—in part to prove to myself that I still can, that I can hold each piece of the puzzle long enough to trace its contours and fit it to a larger picture.
I have written because it is the way I have always made sense of my experiences. It is how I carved space for queerness into a childhood where it was otherwise denied. It is how I sought and found brilliant, generous co-conspirators inside and outside the academy. It is how I am trying to find order in this moment, when my communities are under threat and we desperately need new plots for inhabiting our shared worlds.
I have also written, however, because this has been the measure of my worth, because I am terrified of who I would be without my words.
When/if I get to come up for tenure, I will have to justify each venue in which I’ve published, ideally having focused most of my writing in prominent journals in my field(s). A senior colleague advised me to reserve public-facing writing “after promotion of full.”
- Unstated premise: that I will become a full professor
- Unstated premise: that my promotion matters more than what I have to say
- Unstated premise: that only full professors need to engage the public
- Unstated Premise: Women of color are disproportionately denied tenure. (There are no data on nonbinary faculty.)
- Unstated premise: For the privileged few with tenure track positions, the average time from completion of graduate school to full professor is 17-20 years.
- Unstated premise: that I have time for this shit.
One of the first articles I sent out received a desk rejection from the editor of a flagship journal. The rejection, reproduced verbatim:
“I don’t actually recognize our field in your characterization of it as largely white, male, and agonistic. You seem to have a much stronger identification with feminism and related cultural studies. Perhaps you should pursue publication in one of the many journals in those areas."
Enthymeme: Articles about feminism and cultural studies should pursue publication outside of rhetorical studies.
- Stated premise: This submission seems as if it is about feminism and cultural studies.
- Unstated premise: Rhetoric (capital R) does not include feminism and cultural studies.
The thing is, I believe in the value of professional genres. Conversations within our fields, in theory, should shape the sorts of knowledge we make, the types of research we conduct, and the ethics that guide that research. When speaking to one another, we can start deeper and go further than when moving specialist knowledge to a general audience. Though, I am not sure that’s what our genres are structured to do.
Enthymeme: Faculty should focus their energy on writing for “high impact” academic journals
- Stated premise: “High impact” journals influence their fields.
- Unstated premise: Readers will open themselves to being influenced by the articles in their journals.
- Unstated premise: We will take this knowledge from our correspondence to one another and allow it to move us differently through the world.
I know illness narratives are supposed to end with cathartic resolutions. I’m supposed to heal—most of all to assure abled audiences that their own encounters with illness will be passing journeys through the kingdom of the sick. If I don't heal, my story is supposed to heal you—my life a pithy argument for your self-improvement.
I want to refuse that resolution.
I want you to see me—and increasingly so many others—suspended between cure and kill. I want you to feel the urgency of those who wake every day braced for pain, for the theft of our agency, and for a mercurial “quality of life.” I want to ask how we get each other through today when we do not have the promise of tomorrow.
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