Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2020 Identity Positivity in Decolonial Worlds: Making Room for Gender and Sexual Possibility Erica Chu Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Chu, Erica, "Identity Positivity in Decolonial Worlds: Making Room for Gender and Sexual Possibility" (2020). Dissertations. 3777. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3777 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2020 Erica Chu LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO IDENTITY POSITIVITY IN DECOLONIAL WORLDS: MAKING ROOM FOR GENDER AND SEXUAL POSSIBILITY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY ERICA CHU CHICAGO, IL MAY 2020 Copyright by Erica Chu, 2020 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS After years of white Evangelical Christian education, indoctrination, and repression, I moved to Chicago in 2006 to start graduate school. Upon arriving, I met up with a friend who came out to me and told me a story about his faith that made me realize I’d been judging others and myself too harshly. I started coming out to people as queer and then fell in love. What came after was a flood of life changes; broken and severely damaged relationships with family, friends, and communities; self-discovery, trauma, healing, and exploration; religious changes, alienation, distress, and worldviews shaken and then shaken again. During this time, I was trying to learn and be challenged in an educational environment in which I felt—and sometimes was made to feel—grossly inadequate. This is what the period known as “grad school” was for me. Eventually, I couldn’t do the work required of me, was severely depressed, and not able to do much of anything. I took some time off, spent a lot of money on more adequate mental healthcare, became more open about being nonbinary, sought medical intervention, tried to find more economic stability, and began finding communities of scholars in databases and in real life that made my life and my status as a student scholar seem more possible. And slowly I returned to the writing. I’d like to say this story is about overcoming hardship, but it’s not. I have completed a dissertation, but I haven’t overcome anything. I have, however, survived. And when I say survive, I mean everything that comes with that term because this has indeed been a life- threatening experience. iii There were a lot of people who aided me in surviving these dissertating years, and first and foremost is my partner T Nowacki, who has loved me and challenged me, been my home and my shelter, and provided much-needed encouragement, nourishment, and laughter. T, I appreciate your feedback, editing help, soup-making skills, and insistence we not stay home and work all the time! Thank you for enduring this time with me, for reminding me of what’s important, and for loving me the whole way. I must also recognize my dog Boo, who saved my life and saves it constantly. I am grateful to my dissertation director and main academic cheerleader, Suzanne Bost: thank you for your feedback, time, labor, patience, mentorship, support, friendship, and example. I could not have proceeded without you. This is a fact. To my readers and teachers Paul Jay and Harveen Mann, your patience, encouragement, feedback, and support have been more than I could ask for. Thank you. I have been lucky to have been welcomed into an academic and professional community in the Gender and Women’s Studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago as an adjunct and Visiting Lecturer. Thanks especially to Jennifer Brier for her mentorship, honesty, and encouragement. Her advocacy enabled economic stability that created emotional energy necessary to write this dissertation, and her support has been a gift. Other colleagues I’ve met in and around UIC’s GWS program have been incredible models and provided support and friendship over the years. Special thanks goes to Gayatri Reddy, Akemi Nishida, Kishonna Gray, Natalie Bennett, Carmella Gomez, Deana Lewis, Jennifer Ash, Nadine Naber, Ronak Kapadia, Elena Gutiérrez, Lynette Jackson, Roderick Ferguson, Sekile Nzinga-Johnson, John D’Emilio, Judith Gardiner, Rachel Caïdor, Lydia Hou, Emilia Chico, Hailee Yoshizaki-Gibbons, and Jason Stodolka. Karen Su and Anna Guevarra in Global Asian Studies have been inspirational models iv of leadership and teaching, and they’ve offered much appreciated encouragement and community. Lisa Freeman, Anna Kornbluh, Mark Bennett, and many others in the English Department and First-Year Writing Program have been excellent colleagues and leaders. I’m grateful to Briana Hanny, Mario LaMothe, Johari Jabir, Teresa Moreno, Adam Goodman, Victoria Bolf, Mark Martell, Veronica Arreola, Liz Anh Thomson, S Simmons, Dean Adams, and the many others who have offered friendship and support. I could not have completed this work without the friendship and collaboration of A. Ikaika Gleisberg. Thank you, Ikaika, for the feedback, texts, good conversations and many Skype calls giving me advice, support, and just being in community with me. It has meant a great deal and made so much possible. I have benefited greatly from reading work by and presenting work with Ikaika as well as Ari Burford, Nishant Upadhyay, Miriam Abelson, Derrais Carter, Ching- In Chen, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Prageeta Sharma, and Metta Samha. Thank you for your generosity and your fantastic ideas. You are each an inspiration and valued co-conspirator. I must also extend thanks to friends and colleagues I’ve met at conferences and folks I’ve read and subsequently followed on social media. Though we don’t always keep up “in real life,” I value the thoughts and experiences you share and am grateful for the communities we form in digital and real spaces. KJ Cerankowski and Megan Milks gave feedback on early versions of my first chapter. Their tireless editorial work on the Asexualities: Feminst and Queer Perspectives while I was early in my writing processes gave me some much needed awareness of scholarship as community work that is accountable to multiple populations. I am grateful to OiYan A. Poon and Badia Ahad-Legardy for the opportunity to extend my thinking about gender-affirming pedagogy in practical terms in their collection Difficult Subjects: Insights and Strategies for Teaching v about Race, Sexuality, and Gender. Thanks to Ana Horvat and the other editors of the Trans Narratives issue of a/b: Auto/Biographical Studies for giving me the opportunity to distill some of what I learned from my second chapter into a reflective piece about teaching gender variant students. I’ve also benefited from thinking together about the power of transgender art and culture with Arbor Archuletta, Joseph Liatela, and A. Ikaika Gleisberg. It’s been a struggle to stay seated writing at times. Thanks to Claudia Sofía Garriga- López and Laura S. Logan for the writing sessions, community, and friendship. I am thankful for my experience as a teacher and tutor at Truman College over the years. Thanks to Anne Close for her mentorship, leadership, and support when I was an adjunct in the Communications Department. Special thanks too to Ana King, Keith Sprewer, Geoff Martin, Yue Liu, and the other English faculty for offering advice, support, and modeling what it means to be there for students of all varieties. Thanks to Tobias Bengelsdorf for working with my occasionally strange schedule and for letting me do independent projects in between tutoring appointments. I’m grateful for his and Laura Cheatham’s work to ensure the future of support systems for students and of the workers who rely on them. And to all the tutors and adjuncts at Truman past and present, thank you for your friendship, creativity, and support. Special thanks to Aja Gorham and Cherie Berzon for all the encouragement. To my students over the years at UIC, Truman, Loyola, and IIT, thank you for learning with me and providing academic community that has helped sustain me, challenge me, and hold me accountable. I owe you a great deal. I’m grateful to the members and leadership of the UIC United Faculty and to the Cook County College Teachers Union Local 1600 Professionals at Truman and City Colleges for vi ensuring compensation and working conditions that have made it more possible for me to live and therefore to have the emotional availability to do this work. To mentors, fellow volunteers, friends, and youth from Youth Lounge Lakeview, I am appreciative of the community, support, and demonstration of love YL represented. Gratitude especially to Z’jae Williams for your leadership, vision, and example, which have shaped my approach to the academic work I do. Gratitude to my sisters Katrina Laukaitis and Sara Brady for community, support, and necessary gifs! Thanks also to my friend Ashton McLean-Hall who has always been there when I needed a hand. Thanks to my partner’s parents Roger and Pat Nowacki for support and delicious meals! Love always to my mother Katherine, my brother Winston, my two nieces, and my aunt Anita as well as my father and extended family in Nebraska, Vancouver, and Hong Kong. It’s been a long road, and I appreciate your love and care even if from a distance! Blessing Uchendu, I know we don’t talk much, but you always said I had to dedicate my first book to you! I hope you’ll accept a mention in the acknowledgements of this dissertation.