“Tarot, Femmes and Asian Diasporic Literature” with Xine Yao

Queer Lit

Warm up your tarot deck and trim your undercut: Dr Xine Yao (UCL) is here to tell you all about femme invisibility, politics of unfeeling, queerness and race, occult queer practices, fashion and queer coding, ugly feelings, and so much more. Xine talks about her research on queerness and race in 19th century America, about race and professions in literary history, but also about her experience of working on these subjects in a Canadian versus a British context. If you want to think about queerness and race, or if you would like to learn about the subversive potential of unfeeling, hit play!
Selected works by Xine (http://christineyao.com) :
PhDivas
Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America
https://www.dukeupress.edu/disaffected
“Femmes in Science: Queer Erasure and the Politics of Dress in Nineteenth Century America.” Gender in American Literature and Culture. Eds. Jennifer Harris and Jean Lutes. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021.
“The Craft: QTPOC Tarot in Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim.” Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America. Eds. Kale B. Fajardo, Alice Y. Hom, and Martin F. Manalansan. Temple University Press, forthcoming 2021.
Concepts, texts and people mentioned:
#NoDAPL
Idol No More
Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion
Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Trans Child
Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings
Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy
Gloria Anzaldúa
Audre Lorde
Martin Manalansan
Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories/Theory of the Gimmick
Susan Sontag
Invert
Jane Austen
Bildungsroman
James Barry
Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness
Elizabeth Phelps’ Doctor Zay
Mammy trope
LGBTQIA2S+
QTBIPOC
Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim
Dusk II Onyx
Ready for (a) reading? Follow Xine (@XineYaoPhD) and me (@Lena_Mattheis) on Twitter!
Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:
1.What does Xine mean by ‘unfeeling’?
2.List some prejudices attached to being femme. Why are they harmful?
3.Please look up Sianne Ngai and try to write a brief definition of ‘ugly feelings’.
4.How does Xine describe the respective (literary) histories of the white woman doctor and the black woman doctor?
5.What does Xine mean by ‘frigidity’ in this context?
6.We talk about the undercut as an element of queer fashion. Can you think of other queer fashion moments? What do they say about sexuality and gender?
7.In how far is tarot a queer practice?