We sit down with Minh Huynh Vu, winner of the Karla Jay Prize for Emerging Writers in Gender and Sexuality Studies!
Minh Huynh Vu is a writer and teacher based in New Haven, CT. They are pursuing a Ph.D. in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a Graduate Certificate in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University.
Thinking and tinkering with material cultures of discard, decay, and decomposition across the Pacific, Minh is currently completing a dissertation all about cardboard boxes—across war zones, assembly lines, ports, front porches, and landfills—as these seemingly innocuous containers that continue to contour the militarized and capitalist matrices of US empire and its endless enfoldments across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their research is featured or forthcoming in ASAP/Journal, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, positions: asia critique, and Trans Asia Photography. Get to know Minh in a quick 5 Questions interview below.
Q1: How does your queer identity intertwine with your work, and how do you navigate this in an academic setting?
I have always been drawn to queerness as more so a matter of orientation (the where and how) than of identification (the what and who). Sara Ahmed captures this so lucidly in Queer Phenomenology: that being queer is a process of “finding our way” while cherishing all the detours and dead ends as these minor spaces of errant desire that reveal how “getting lost still takes us somewhere.” In other words, there is no destination, because “[q]ueerness is not yet here” and “we are not yet queer,” as José Esteban Muñoz reminds us. In this way, “my” queerness—or rather my relation to queerness—in terms of academia is that of ongoing process: less so a step-by-step navigation to a particular endpoint and more so a series of amblings around and about
toward somewhere else still.
Q2: How do you find queerness intersecting with ethnic and racial identity, and what led you to pursuing and researching this more?
Queerness, ethnicity, and race—as well as other social constructions of difference including class, disability, and citizenship—are inextricably intertwined in reproducing and reinforcing structures of oppression in service of racial capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Diagnosing the operations of power and exploitation within and across their respective historical contexts, theorists including Sojourner Truth on Black womanhood
(1851), the Third World Woman’s Alliance on triple jeopardy (1971), the Combahee River Collective on interlocking oppressions (1977), Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (as well as the contributors of This Bridge Called My Back) on women of color feminisms (1981), Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality (1989), Jasbir Puar on assemblage (2007), Joanne Barker on indigenous feminisms (2019), and others have confirmed these connections in their own compelling and capacious ways. My interest in these histories is driven by a lifelong commitment to deep study as a form of disciplined struggle (à la Robin D. G. Kelley). Rather than making a “novel intervention in the literature” to “expand the field,” the point of research is to acquire the theoretical and practical acumen in coalescing the intellectual, social, and political. In this way, I learn with and from this long genealogy of thinkers to continue proliferating the dreams and demands of anti-imperialist women of color feminisms.
Q3: Who are some queer writers/figures who inspire you in your field of work?
This would be an innumerable list of which I will only share a small fraction. I am inspired by and indebted to, alphabetically: Audre Lorde, C. Riley Snorton, Chandan Reddy, Eve Sedgwick, Félix González-Torres, Franny Choi, Gayatri Gopinath, José Esteban Muñoz, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Judith Butler, June Jordan, Lauren Berlant, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Mel Chen, Roderick Ferguson, Sara Ahmed, and so many more.
Q4: Do you feel as though your academic background in gender and sexuality studies has given you a different perspective when researching ethnicity and migration, as well as everyday war and displacement?
Absolutely, and conversely this answer would also apply. Critical studies in gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and war and migration are so deeply embedded with and enveloped into each other as historical and interdisciplinary formations born out of relentless social movements decolonization across the mid-to-late twentieth century. Even categorizing these terms into distinct fields is an impossible project given their permeability; for example, what we take for granted as “Ethnic Studies” today is actually an institutional filtration of “Third World Studies” as envisioned by the Black Student Union (BSU) and Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) strikes at San Francisco State in 1968. All this to say, it’d be irresponsible—if not impossible—to conduct studies in gender and sexuality without critical and careful engagement with ethnicity, migration, war, displacement, and other formations of power, and vice versa.
Q5: What advice would you give to someone pursuing the study of gender and sexuality/queerness in academia?
Returning to my initial response on orientation, I have been drawn to the etymology of “queer” as meaning “slant.” My obscure and open-ended advice for someone interested in or already pursuing academia is to move through it in a slanted or slantwise manner. The American academy is crumbling, and universities continue to expose their hollowness and ongoing failure as repressive extensions of the state, as especially evidenced in how they surveilled, suppressed, and sanctioned student organizers during the Gaza encampments in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians. In this way, obliqueness is both an everyday orientation of being in but not of the university and also an emergent practice of planning and plotting around and against it.
