Listening Incommensurably

This article juxtaposes two ethnographic moments from five years of fieldwork (2013–18) with a group of queer Taiwanese immigrants in Toronto, which coincided with the pivotal years during which Taiwan became recognized in Anglophone West as Asia’s “beacon” of queer liberation. I situate the first moment—an unruly, noisy night of transgressive vocal play and aural contestations at home—within a political climate marked by potential, when a capacious, non-identitarian, Sinophone queerness may become legally sanctioned in Taiwan. The sense of fluid, open possibilities contrasted starkly with the second moment, two and half years later, when the same group conspicuously performed an act of “sounding out” at Pride Toronto, and in so doing submitted to the interpellations of homonational multicultural Canada—feeding the liberal Canadian hunger for an exceptional queer Asia(n) that proves the rhetoric of Asia as “backwardly homophobic.” I analyze my interlocutors’ sounding practices to demonstrate their multiple incommensurable modes of listening across these two moments, in order to interrogate how liberalism moralizes minoritarian gestures of “sounding out.” Positioning the immigrant’s irreconcilably heterogenous lifeworlds as a critical resource (rather than brokenness), I argue for an intersectional minoritarian praxis of listening incommensurably.

Duke Scholars

Author Yun Emily Wang Music