The Image of the United States in Meredith Talusan’s Fairest
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Drawing on my PhD research on contemporary North American queer immigrant life writing, the presentation will discuss the ways in which the United States as a new homeland are approached and portrayed in the 2020 memoir Fairest by Meredith Talusan. Touching on the westernization of the term queer and related themes of queer imperialism and Jasbir Puar’s homonationalism (2007); on the calls to decolonize and decentralize queer studies (Oswin 2004); and drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed (2004), the presentation will focus on examining whether and how the Western cultural hegemony demonstrates itself in the text by an immigrant author who was since childhood presented with the ideas of superiority of the Western-North American culture. Specifically, the presentation will concentrate on how this portrayal of the United States by Talusan is influenced by her queerness (while admitting the impossibility to avoid the intersection with her immigrant, racial, and disabled status). Furthermore, it will point to the strategies that Talusan as an author from the Global South, which is often depicted as regressive and hostile towards queer individuals, uses to depict both her dreams and the reality of her new homeland of the United States through this queer lens. Oswin, Natalie. “Decentering Queer Globalization: Diffusion and the ‘Global Gay.’” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 24, 2004, pp. 777-790. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke UP, 2007. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004. |
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