Demanding Explanation and Coming Out as Normative

I’m very interested in the narrative of “coming out” that runs through The Feeling of Kinship, and its implications for what we’ve been thinking about in class in general. As Eng says in his introduction, this concept was the foundation of his book. He claims he was driven to write The Feeling of Kinship after “a growing number of students in my Asian American literature and culture classes have come out to me—not as gay or lesbian but as transnational adoptees” (1). Eng, in later chapters, explores the feelings of shame, isolation, difference, and confusion that exist in many transnational adoptees, and which draw obvious parallels with the struggles of gays and lesbians who have or plan to “come out of the closet.” Similarly, although I haven’t read it, we’ve heard a lot in class about Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth, which includes a similar “coming out” moment. What I find the most compelling about this issue, especially in relation to Eng’s concept of “queer liberalism,” can perhaps be described via his chapter concerning Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural.

The underlying theme Eng sees in Borshay Liem’s documentary is the suppression, silence, and ultimately failed colorblindness that exists within the structure of her white American family, and possibly most or all white American families who include transnational adoptees. Borshay Liem’s documentary, then, can be seen as her “coming out,” as it were, but as what? As a transnational adoptee, perhaps, but was this fact “hidden”? Eng considers how a kind of isolated and thus doubled form of racial melancholia can haunt transnational adoptees, because their pasts become erased, blocking them from any kind of collective racial melancholia: “Borshay Liem’s history,” Eng argues, “only begins with her entry into their [the Borshays’] family unit” (113). Just as the transnational adoptee’s access to a culturally necessitated emotional pathway is blocked, thus spawning a new kind of emotional necessity, her access to her history, and importantly, to the very “hiddenness” of her history is similarly blocked. This is all tied up in what Eng refers to in a later section of the chapter, in which he discusses the maternal tensions that transnational adoption will create: “Because the racialized difference between the white mother and Asian daughter can elicit comment, because it can become something demanding explanation, the maternal bond often appears as something unnatural and in need of support” (124). In this way, I think, Eng describes how “coming out” implies not just “I’m a transnational adoptee” or “I’m gay,” but also “I’m something demanding explanation.” This is especially intriguing because it casts coming out as a double-edged sword.

To come out as something demanding explanation is to come out as something hidden; to come out of the closet is to acknowledge that the closet was there to begin with, saying “I was hidden and now I am not.” Interestingly, the space outside the closet is, to carry the metaphor, a living room or, better yet, a master bedroom, where a normative couple will sleep. Borshay Liem “comes out” via her film and goes on, as Eng reports, to marry a Korean American and have a biological child. Linda in Bitter in the Mouth, comes out as a queer figure “hiding” within a normative structure, as do the transnational adoptee students who came out to Eng. To come out as gay, similarly, simultaneously reveals that this person has been “passing” as straight until this point (Molly’s post about adoptees “passing” is really helpful here). Is coming out, then, as a person “demanding explanation” to, essentially, come out as normative? To pave the way to normativity, as queer liberalism would have it? The rambling nature of this post is revealing that I’m more confused by how to deal with this sometimes oppositional structure of coming to “demand explanation” by “coming out” of a non-normative space into a normative one, than I am confident in my ability to interpret it. In any event, here are a couple of links that I think really speak to what I’m trying to get at.

I tried to find a video of just the commercial I saw for this show, but I can’t, so here’s a link to the entire web site for TLC’s “All-American Muslim,” in which Americans who are Muslim “come out” as high school football players and Thanksgiving celebrators, not to mention members of normative nuclear families.

And finally, some of you have probably seen this Australian ad, but I think it illustrates extremely well what I’m trying to grapple with. Most of the response that I’ve seen and/or heard has been really positive. This reminds me forcefully of transnational adoptee examples like Linda in Bitter in the Mouth.