Different Sameness: Queer Autoethnography and Coalition Politics

Abstract

As a method, we use autoethnography to explore coalition politics from our positions in academia. We use autoethnography to examine how similar identity categories presume sameness and can lead to conflict within institutions. This autoethnography looks at how coalitional politics were learned, as well as how coalitional politics are practiced within the institutional spaces of the university and academic discipline. In particular, we examine how we have experienced conflict and competition, as well as ways that we continue to build coalitional spaces. Through this, we place autoethnography as an explicitly political methodology.

Keywords

queerness race Asian coalition autoethnography

[Andrew] During one week, the students at my previous institution are buzzing over a published piece in an undergraduate course my friend is teaching. They are covering an essay about being queer, Asian/Japanese, and foreign from someone who graduated from Howard University (see Eguchi, 2016). They discuss each passage as if they were learning about me, passionately defending me against the piece’s identified provocations and conflicts. The instructor is pleased with the intensity of the discussion. She later asks me about my own role in the piece. I look at it and point out, “Hmmm, that’s my buddy, Shinsuke, not me.” I could offer a catty comment about the careless readings of her students or the fact that clearly not everyone noticed the author name, but I choose politeness. She is surprised—she was as wrapped up in the class discussion as the students. She brings the news to the class, who refuse to believe it. In the hallway, a young man in both our classes confronts me. “Spields,” he says, “we’re reading about you in class and the professor says it’s not you. That’s crazy—how many Asian gay guys go to an HBCU?” I pause, counting. “When I was there? Three.” He is incredulous, “How did so many Asian gay guys end up at Howard?”

[Andrew & Shinsuke] Now we together argue that this story is one of many others highlighting the ways that both authors are mistakenly put into the same category due to shared identities. On the surface, we are both queer men of color with Asian backgrounds who attended Howard University. However, we are also markedly distinct and experience our “sameness” in different ways. Within the normative spheres of academia rooted in whiteness intersecting with patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, and English hegemony, we recognize the political choices made in our careers. We are both tenure-track professors at public universities doing work that is largely marginalized in our field. We are contingently connected to the shared political identity of “Asian” and “Asian American” in this country historically erasing the multiplicity of its racialized label; we prefer people of color, LGBTQ spaces to other gay spaces because of the shared experiences with culture and race, as well as reducing encounters with the larger White gay community (where we have each experienced various kinds of marginalization and exotification). We research communicative practices concerning queers of color. We refuse the boundaries of the discipline: it can be moved that must be shifted and expanded to include people like us.

We chose to attend a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) for different reasons. Location was important for us as queer men of color: neither of us wanted small towns and/or places without large communities of color. Washington, D.C. is a renowned hub for Black queer life; it hosts one of the oldest Black Gay Prides in the United States (Battle, Cohen, Warren, Fergerson, & Audam, 2000). Both of us had attended Predominately White Institutions (PWIs) for our Master’s degrees. Part of the rhetoric around Howard University is that it provides lessons in terms of fitting into institutions, being legible beyond anger and victimization, and building support with others. The HBCU system emerged from African American community organizing with religious institutions for African American education (Allen & Jewell, 2002). Howard University, in particular, positions itself as the “best and brightest,” the home of DuBois’ “talented tenth” and the “Mecca” of Black education. In a space where we remained racially other, we also gained strategies for dealing with whiteness and institutional marginalization from people who faced similar concerns. Training in graduate school is not just about course work and dissertations; it is a process of socialization whereby we are instructed how to be a professor, how to “fit into” academia. At Howard, we understood the option—and cost—of not “fitting in.”

When one is “other,” identity can become a conflagration particularly within hegemonic structures that insist on normativity, capitalist productivity, and neoliberal solutions to social injustice. Both authors occupy conflicting positions of power and privilege (as tenure-stream faculty) as well as minoritizing positions of race, gender, and sexuality (as queer cis-men of color) within academia. Rodríguez (2014) notes that “[w]hen we are not understood . . . we can know that it is due to someone else’s failure of imagination, their inability to read the moving marks of our gestures” (p. 3). As critical/cultural communication scholars, we recognize that identity is political, disruptive, and tense. Accordingly, we approach autoethnography as a means of making ourselves legible, to reach out to others who are also misread. Our autoethnography is rooted in queer of color critique: examining whiteness, capitalism, and heteronormativity (e.g., Alexander, 2005; Calafell, 2007; Chávez, 2009; Eguchi, 2015). We look specifically at our overlapping and conflicting identities and our strategies within our discipline to manage these. In particular, we pay attention to how homonormative and race-less politics are rewarded where queer and critical race positionalities are disciplined in our pedagogy, scholarship, and performances in academia (e.g., Alexander, 2012; Calafell & Moreman, 2009; Griffin, 2012). We see coalition as a means of supporting each other and providing an intervention in heteronormative whiteness (Chávez, 2013).

Queer Autoethnography as Coalitional Method

As a method, autoethnography is generally concerned with the sense making of a life, the writer’s life, within its political and social contexts. Autoethnographers differ in our approaches: we make choices about writing styles and disciplinary traditions (Holman Jones & Adams, 2010). The queer praxis of autoethnography calls out the politics embedded in the narratives: it is a matter of making visible the invisible forces that undergird all social interactions and experiences rooted in heteronormativity (e.g., Alexander, 2005; Calafell, 2007, 2012; Eguchi, 2015). Also, in our original approach to a shared autoethnography, we fell into the easy rhythms—neat endings and what we have in common (Eguchi & Spieldenner, 2015). Our relationship is more complicated than what we share: we cannot avoid the ways that we are in conflict or the varied ways we experience our particular queer man of color-hood. With that in mind, we do autoethnography here as a form of coalitional politics. Chávez (2013) defines coalition as “a present and existing vision and practice that reflects an orientation to others and a shared commitment to change” (p. 146). When we consider coalitions, we take into account how messages are communicated, how differences are managed, and what values are at the core of the relationship. We see our own relationship with this lens, as we work against the hegemony that calls for normativity. We want to explore the spaces where we honed and continue to practice coalition. In this way, we take “seriously the need to create more livable, equitable and just ways of living” (Holman Jones & Adams, 2010, p. 211).

Autotheory approaches are interdisciplinary and involve multiple kinds of knowledge to uncover phenomenon. Cumings (2011) insists that autotheories “go beyond simply telling untold personal stories (important as that task may be) by bringing sustained and critical attention to the political forces that interact in and help shape those stories” (p. 52). In this particular approach, our embodied knowledge is integral to understanding coalition. Through the autoethnographic stories, our thoughts and framework of conflict, alliance, and resistance begin to emerge. Rather than relying on a single text, our merged narratives demonstrate the dissonance and synergy often found in coalitional processes. Our theory of coalition is embedded in our lived experiences and the ways that our lives have crosses and continue to connect.

Driven by such methodological praxis of autotheory, we utilize the genealogy of queer of color critique to bring to the fore the racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed aspects of our narratives about becoming and being academics. The intellectual and political movement of queer of color critique is to recognize and disrupt the ways in which the technology of heteronormativity, intersecting with institutional racism, patriarchy, and capitalism, together reproduce and reconstitute the material realities of LGBTQ people of color (e.g., Anzaldúa, 2012; Ferguson, 2003; Johnson, 2016; McCune, 2014; Snorton, 2014). The single identity epistemology can never articulate the politics of LGBTQ people of color fighting against the intersectional natures of underlying power relations in and across cultural and communicate contexts (Yep, 2013). As Cohen (2005) asserts, “While heterosexual privilege impacts and constrains the lived experiences of ‘queers’ of color, so too do racism, classism, and sexism” (p. 31). Consequently, accounting the conception of intersectionality—a simultaneous function of race, ethnicity gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and the body in the historical and ideological contexts—helps us as researchers understand and critique the particularities of embodied knowledge(s) for LGBTQ people of color to navigate the heteronormative matrix of whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism (e.g., Chávez, 2013; Eguchi, Files-Thompson, & Calafell, 2018; Ferguson, 2003; Moreman & McIntosh, 2010; Morrissey, 2013; Yep, 2013). Intersectionality originally emerges from Black feminist thought (e.g., Crenshaw, 1991) as they seek to account for how both race and gender together construct the institutional experiences of Black women. For example, the current political and economic system often ignores, erases, and marginalizes Black women. The legal system privileges White women over Black women when it focuses on gender. At the same time, it privileges Black men over Black women when it pays attention to race. Accordingly, Crenshaw is concerned with the way in which complex and nuanced experiences of women of color, in general, and Black women, in particular, who are affected by both race and gender, are institutionally recognized and/or not recognized.

Queer of color theorist Muñoz (1999) expands such theorizing of intersectionality by accounting for how sexuality and sex complexly serve a culture-specific and text-specific knowledge embedded in the material realities of sexual minoritarians of color. Muñoz carefully showcases that sexual minoritarians of color actively utilize and revise the majoritarian codes of sexuality and sex to embody queerness. For example, Asian/American men often adapt and perform the feminine and submissive stereotypes of the Asian gay male body to break though the U.S. American gay sexual cultures rooted in whiteness (e.g., Eguchi, 2015; Han, 2015). Otherwise, they remain marginalized as a result of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. Consequently, Muñoz (2009) develops the conception of queerness as a futuristic ideality in which sexual minoritarians can never perform perfectly in the heterosexual matrix of present time. Queerness helps push sexual minoritarians to recognize what is missing from today.

Simultaneously, there have been critiques against a queer intersectional analysis as it evaporates the points of critique it makes. Puar (2007) reasons that “all of (one’s) identities (not just gender and sexual) must be troubled, leading to an impossible transcendent subject who is always already conscious of the normativizing forces of power and always ready and able to subvert, resist, or transgress them” (p. 24). However, we assert that a queer intersectional analysis is the basis of our autoethnography. We argue that intersectionality helps us to carefully attend to the nuanced ways in which multiple directions of power reproduce and reconstitute the material realities of advantages and disadvantages in our institutional lives. Honoring the emergence of intersectionality from women of color feminism, we centralize the technology of race intersecting with gender, queerness, and other identity markers in this essay.

More precisely, we explicate our queer intersectional learnings of coalitional race politics that unites us both at a historically Black University setting. Also, we focus on the ways in which such learnings influence our differing and contradictory queer intersectional performances of the Asian male body that identify with and disrupt the heterosexual matrix of whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism in the academy. Consequently, we demonstrate our racialized challenges to sustain our own queer relationality rooted in the intergenerational, academic, and political coalition. In so doing, we discuss the implications of our autoethnography as the queer intersectional modes of theorizing, researching, and living in the academy. As such, we see two distinct movements in our relationship: our learning of coalitional race politics through graduate school and the strategies we have to exist in academia. Now, we invite each other (and the audience) into our narratives.

Learning Coalitional Politics: Lessons From Graduate School

[Andrew & Shinsuke] Graduate school serves as the starting point because it is where we met, where our understanding of needing each other in coalition began. Through this autoethnographic journey, we build a model of coalitional politics. We were shaped partially by our relationship to the gay community; we emerged from graduate school politically committed to queer identities as the basis for our work. Queer’s disruptive premise interrogates the norms that have disciplined the authors in different ways. By the time of graduate school, we already were firmly entrenched politically as people of color in this country. Throughout, we will speak as “I” in clearly identified sections, and as “we” when we share a voice.

[Andrew] My friend Catron Booker and I were at UCLA together for our Master’s degrees in the early 2000s. She was in the acting program, I started in playwriting before moving to Theater Education. As out queer people of color, we were placed in odd positions. “I just think you should try out writing musicals,” a faculty member told me, “I just have a feeling you’d be good at it.” I collaborated with Catron on two pieces. She has an elegant rage in her, an intelligence in her performance choices, and a sophisticated talent in voice and movement. Years later, she reflects, “do you know how many times I played a maid or housekeeper there? I was only ever something else in the shows we did together.” As the only African American woman in her cohort, she was consistently cast in this role. Whenever UCLA comes up in conversation, we cringe, remembering what we went through.

This was my experience at UCLA. In my program, the people of color often found ourselves together in resistance to the institutional onslaughts, including the ways that we were visible and invisible. As Catron was visible as an African American woman, she was placed in maid roles. Our desires to do interdisciplinary performance art remained unseen in the program, as if this kind of overt political work was not “acting” or “theater.” In the program, the people of color discussed our wounds over coffee and in bars. On campus, we did not hang out as much—if we were together a (White) student would comment “is this a NAACP meeting or what.” Professors would encourage us to be more “multicultural” in our approach to theater if we looked at people of color playwrights. While this happened, if a (White) student had thrown a dinner or a party that only one of us had been invited, similar responses were not welcome, such as “well I see that your people of color quota was filled.” We became conscious that our visible gathering was being read by our faculty and (White) cohort in ways that their (White) gatherings were not. We over-performed our identities: I took opera and musical theater courses, Catron took each cleaning role without public comment. We were mindful of discussing race in mixed company. Catron and I have continued collaborating, choosing to remain in coalition to uphold our voices and resist the conditioning that we were not “good enough” because we did not “fit in” to our Masters program (Spieldenner & Booker, 2017).

At Howard University, the coalition work seemed more deliberate. In the race-explicit context of Howard, I saw graduate students choose which kinds of difference they were comfortable aligning with. Sexuality, gender, politics, research areas, religiosity, and pedagogical practices all came into play.

When I started at Howard, I felt judged. The person in charge of assigning teaching sections always asked to “pray on it” when I brought forth paperwork or requests. This confused me—do I pray on it? Does she? How does one pray anyway?—since I do not come from a religious background. While her religiosity was off-putting to my atheism, she further asked me whether undergraduates should be “exposed” to my sexuality—a conversation she pursued at least once per semester throughout my doctorate. I would point out that other graduate students were free in discussing marriage, having children and how to get a spouse in the Intro to Public Speaking sections. She always looked blankly at me and responded with “But those are normal conversations at Howard.” If I pushed her on this, she would go further to shut me down, commenting that I “will never understand Howard and what it means.” Each semester for 3 years, she assigned me sections at 8 a.m.—the only graduate student who never requested mornings was always stuck with them. With her clear disdain of my openly queer identity, I was not sure if the other faculty felt the same. I also wondered if there was part of Howard that I could not access, or know, since I am not African American.

My experience as a graduate student was also marked by racial and sexual differences. My final project for Health Communication focused on narratives in HIV prevention social marketing for African American gay and bisexual men. The presentation includes an overview of the HIV epidemic, as well as historical social marketing images and the emerging Black gay cultural images from the late 1980s and through the 1990s, some of which are sexually explicit. The professor got ruffled and walked out of the room. I finished the presentation, pointing out the various themes I found in the HIV prevention campaigns. When I am done, another student goes out of the room to inform the faculty person it’s “safe” to come back in. While the response could be because I am not Black, the professor had told the class at the start that she was uncomfortable with sexual topics.

This moment made clear to me that there are topics considered acceptable and others that are not. While the particular faculty had admitted her discomfort, she supported my research project. She further encouraged me to turn the project into an article, which was published in Communication Education (Spieldenner & Castro, 2010). I want to see her actions as not rejecting me or my research area; rather, demonstrating how to support even through our differences. In short, a form of coalitional politic. This is what I want to believe, since this professor defended me against two other faculty members that commented on my sexuality (including the one who assigned teaching assignments). It is also likely that other students read her behavior as encouraging of sexual silences, as reinforcing ideas of what is acceptable and what is not in the classroom—and that queer sex is decidedly unacceptable. This moment taught me about how I want to be in the classroom, how to bolster support deliberately so that the students do not need to question where I stand. I did not want a student to wonder if I chose to be in coalition with them.

Being a critical scholar means engaging the norms, especially the ones I am rewarded for. It means being reflective of my positions when I enter the classroom in terms of identity. While I am disabled, this is, for now, an invisible disability. Queeny through my teenage years, I grew into and built a body that is more traditionally masculine. I have completed my doctorate, but do not believe my students at a teaching-intensive public university should have to endure through the same pedagogical processes that I did at elite public institutions—including two 25-page papers per semester, midterm, final and 10-book reading list in each class. Undoing the canon requires labor: it would be far simpler to repeat the pedagogical praxis where I succeeded. If I am critical of norms, I must also recreate notions of merit and value in the classroom, expand what are the kinds of way that knowledge and learning are expressed. I do not want to continue the myths of meritocracy which reward only the regurgitation of the professor’s beliefs or the capacity to memorize information. These acts constitute my critical approach to pedagogy and become part of my work in developing coalitional spaces.

[Shinsuke] Before entering into the HBCU space, I assumed I was aware of how my cis-gendered male body is structurally categorized into the racist, essentialist, and monolithic box of “Asian” and “Asian American.” Voluntarily coming from Japan where I belong to the ethnic majority, I struggled to embody such umbrella terms as a part of my intersectionality. The White western production of racial terms such as “Asian” and “Asian American” ignores complex and multiple differences in and across Asia and Asian diasporas (e.g., Eng, 2001; Ono, 2005). At the same time, a part of my racialized confusion was ironically an outcome of my nationality rooted in Japan’s ethnocentrism. I (sub)consciously felt how the term Asian hinders Japan’s global power, advancing my transnational mobility, privilege, and cultural capital. However, I also negotiated such contradictory awareness of my race as I participated in metropolitan gay sexual cultures (i.e., San Francisco and New York) rooted in whiteness as the normative desirability. Asian/American men are almost always imagined as the undesirable feminine Other (e.g., Han, 2015). Yet, going to Howard University challenged what I thought knew about race from that standpoint. I was subjected to complexities and contradictions of an interplay between privileges and disadvantages embedded in the material realities of my body.

Once I step into Howard University, I immediately learn how people are less hospitable to my embodied performance of transnational queerness, translated as a super gay, Asian male, than my previous schools. The way I speak English as a second language further adds to mark me as a foreigner or the Other. My queerness is clearly the foreign product that visibly troubles a historically sacred space securing the technology of blackness intersecting with elitism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy. Here at Howard, the performance of queerness, intersecting with, race, gender, and class, is much more subtle, ambiguous, and ambivalent than what I used to know (e.g., McCune, 2014; Snorton, 2014). Other graduate students who are also known as queers do not bring their sexualities to the fore in the classroom (see Howard, 2012). Consequently, in the middle of my first semester in the Fall 2008, Andrew relays a message from the graduate faculty. He says, “They want you to tone down your queerness. They are concerned if you could get through this place.” Now that I am graduate faculty working with PhD students, I understand why such a message has been delivered to me via Andrew, who shares “outsider” status with me. Even when the message itself reinforces the heteronormative idea and social relation, they intend to create a support system between Andrew and me who also performs queerness but differently. I would not be lonely and isolated. However, at that time, I could not take such a suggestion productively. I say to Andrew, “Why the f*** do I need to change who I am? Take it or leave it.”

Simultaneously, my immature reaction illuminates how I have been already selfishly feeling as an outsider in an HBCU space. Whether I am at a PWI or HBCU, I everyday feel I am indeed a foreigner no matter how long I am in the United States. I am in search of space for acceptance. At the same time, I need to recognize the contradiction of my privilege rooted in global mobility and cultural and economic capital. I came to the United States to experience the embodied state of becoming and being a foreigner to begin with. I did not want to be just Japanese by staying in Japan where I am the ethnic majority. In fact, I admit that I secretly desired to become different from the Japanese people I know. Also, I have come to Howard to personally, intellectually, and politically deepen my research program on critical race studies. So, I should have taken the suggestion from the graduate faculty constructively because that is an expected part of my global and transcultural journey to become and be different. Yet, my self-indulgent loneliness continues to surface my memory about Howard. Even today when people ask me a question, “Why did you go to Howard University?,” what I often want to say is that “I do not remember.” While I am very thankful for my experience and the resources at Howard University that has allowed me to get where I am now, I also do not owe anyone an explanation for where I have a PhD from.

I argue that the question “why did you go to Howard University?” reconstitutes the politics of racial triangulation at play. Kim (1999) maintains that “Asian Americans have not been racialized in a vacuum, isolated from other groups; to the contrary, Asian Americans have been racialized relative to and through interactions with whites and blacks” (p. 106). For example, the historical superiority and intellectual elitism of PWIs determine which PhDs are more respected than others. Such elitism illuminates the material reality of how Asians and Asian Americans aspire to achieve prestigious educational stature. They are over-represented populations in PWIs. Consequently, Asians and Asian Americans who choose to go to HBCUs are questionable because “white racial power can continue to thrive in a formally colorblind society” (Kim, 1999, p. 108). The perfectly successful narrative of Asians and Asian Americans as the model minority, centering whiteness as a normative institution, does not center Asian-Black relationalities and spatialities. This is why some people automatically assume my PhD is granted from the University of Denver where I actually conducted only post-doctoral training. Thus, I feel the urge to answer “I do not remember” to counter-identify with the reproduction and reconstitution of whiteness as the normative institution when people ask me, “why did you go to Howard University?”

[Andrew] My self-doubt about fitting in at Howard remained until my last year. A senior faculty person asked me to “look out” for the flamboyant new graduate student and “talk to him” about his presentation because he might have difficulty in the job market. “We enjoy him,” the faculty person proclaimed, “but we know him. Others might not give him a chance.” By involving me in the process of disciplining, I felt that I had become an insider member of the community at Howard, at least in my department. I had become “one of us” and Shinsuke had been made “other” through his gender performance and “foreign-ness.” Being inculcated in American identity politics my whole life, I understood the concern about the new graduate student and his prospects on the market. Normative performances are rewarded at most institutions, and this is a lesson for all people of color, gender non-conforming and queer folks, women who identify as feminists, people with disabilities, and working class individuals attempting to find a space in academia (Ahmed, 2017). Claims of diversity at many schools are predicated on normative performances and a politics of neutrality, especially about identity issues.

While I did feel included, I also could see Shinsuke through the lens of queerness and culture. Rodríguez (2014) notes, “gestures are always relational; they form connections between different parts of our bodies; they cite other gestures; they extend the reach of the self into the space between us; they bring into being the possibility of a ‘we’” (p. 2). What others saw as flamboyance and a need to “butch up” to fit in, I witnessed his defiance of normative gender, his practice of expanding the pedagogical and institutional spaces to more inclusivity and less disciplinarity. I could also see how his performance attracts a certain kind of masculinity. Rather than view this as an opportunity to discipline Shinsuke, I noted both the need for some kind of normative masculinity and a repressive politic against celebrating queerness.

This is the first step toward building coalition: identifying common problems and structural forces again us. Both Shinsuke and I have to have awareness about political realities: we cannot just pretend these are not operating on us and positioning us in certain ways—whether that be as surveillance and discipline to each other, or even cast as competition in the diversity model where only one of us is needed. We have to be aware of these challenges and be willing to understand our positions and prospective complicities within them. We also have to commit to being a “we” within the context of these structural barriers.

Building Community Through Coalitions

[Andrew & Shinsuke] We have carried forward these lessons from graduate school. Andrew went back to the non-profit HIV field immediately after graduating, and Shinsuke immediately entered academia. We maintained contact through conferences where we often presented together. When Andrew entered academia full-time, we both experienced feelings of competition with each other along our similar identity categories. Ahmed (2017) describes diversity in university settings as processes that serve to reinforce the institutional well-being, which do not, in fact, diversify curriculum, faculty, or students. Instead, identities are placed in competition with each other for the few spaces being made available. Whether these positions have adequate resourcing is often beyond the scope of these initiatives. Within this context, there might be room for one person of color, one queer person, one disabled person, or one woman, but what about more than one? How are people counted with multiple kinds of intersectional diversity? Why and how do these forces matter? Currently we are both tenure-track faculty at public universities in the Southwest trying to make sense of these questions.

Coalition work becomes even more important as more of us stand in the instability of capitalist-run neoliberal educational industries. We build community in our academic discipline and in queer studies. Our understanding and experience of coalitions is dynamic and embodied in communication practices. Forging community when one is “other” requires deliberate intention. Similarities in the margins often put us in competition, especially at universities where one person of color or one queer person is counted as “diversity” (Ahmed, 2017). In graduate school, we were able to work through this competition among other people of color facing similar challenges. This comes to our second tenet of coalition: we have to choose to work together. This involves conscious and deliberate actions that support the voices of people we are in coalition with, as well as to resist the structural forces that devalue us.

As we have moved forward on tenure-track lines, we are reminded of the many ways that we are disciplined for our identity performances as gay men of color (whether that discipline be around “too much” queer sex or queer masculinity) and rewarded in our academic identity performance as productive researchers, as well as the need to consistently (re)connect.

As critical scholars, we are aware that coalition, therefore, is a dynamic process where we negotiate difference(s) and privilege(s) again and again. Chávez (2013) warns that “[t]he rhetorical silences created by discourses of privilege such as whiteness or wealth are perhaps the biggest roadblock to forging coalitions” (p. 130). To work against this roadblock, we share and build spaces to have dialogue. The university does not always reward this in terms of tenure and promotion guidelines which focus on our scholarly productivity of publishing and grants.

Tenure and promotion guidelines are used as markers of acceptance in the university, even as they reinforce and reward regimes of normativity and meritocracy. They reify rules about who is accepted, what is acceptable, and how to interact with each other. The uncertainty of tenure can cause one to falter in resisting the rules, in speaking up, in asserting one’s self in the university as “other” than the normative center. If and when one succeeds within this framework, the trap of acceptance emerges, where one becomes a “wall breaker”—proof that the system is inclusive and there is no need for coalition (Ahmed, 2017, p. 147). Rather than accept this proof, we remind each other of the many obstacles behind us and ahead.

These kinds of roadblocks put pressure on relationships. As Ahmed (2017) remarks, “ . . . that is one of the hardest things about coming up against walls: it can threaten some of our most fragile and precious, our best, our warmest connections” (p. 172). We work inside the formal and informal labor of “productive” and “collegial” narratives in the university. These push us away from each other: we reside in different states and at different kinds of schools, one a PhD-granting institution, the other an undergraduate one. The walls rise up between us, where we are tasked with engaging our individual universities and their inherent structural challenges, as if this work is not connected, our battles are not mirrored. We find strategies to connect.

[Andrew] We started having dinner at our national convention a few years ago. Just a few queer men of color at a square table. The food wasn’t particularly memorable at the buffet, but the cheap wine was plentiful. We joked, and some of us flirted. These seemed to be the safest tactics, the ones we were most used to with each other. Some of us were on the job market or considering it. One was a graduate student who raised interesting questions in his curiosity about our respective careers like “How do we support each other across racial lines?,” “Are there spaces for Black gay men in Communication? Where are we?,” and “Who do we date in academia?.” None of us had easy answers but it spurred our conversations forward. We were content in this moment where we did not feel judged at this convention where we mostly stick out among our colleagues.

The next couple of years, we maintained the tradition but expanded our group to include other queer people of color. This past year, we had a range of graduate students and junior faculty. The food was better—we were more deliberate in our choices, but the flow of communication was noisy with more people and more need. Some people were struggling with dissertations; others were on the market; still others were managing hostile departments. Was there enough room at the table for these experiences, these traumas? I enter academia from HIV activism. I am experienced in coalitions and trauma, working with other people living with HIV, yet I somehow did not reconcile that academia was hostile to queer people of color in practical ways, perhaps because of the privilege of attending doctoral programs. Insecurities and fears can drive brilliant people into strangers from themselves. Ahmed (2017) notes

this is another way we learn about the figure of the stranger: strangers are not simply those we do not recognize but those we recognize as strangers, not only those you do not know but those you should not know. (p. 32)

We have these dinners to, at least, have a space where we are not strangers to each other because we live and work in such precarity.

[Shinsuke] Since the completion of my PhD, I have learned that academia is a major site of affective labor through which people of color, in general, and LGBTQ people of color, in particular, always already experience some kinds of isolation (e.g., Alexander, 2005, 2012; Calafell, 2007, 2012; Griffin, 2012; Yep, 2003). As Calafell (2007) well articulates, “I have people I can call friends, but so many times I still feel so lonely. It’s funny because no one tells you about the loneliness you feel once you are out of the protective shell of graduate school” (p. 428). The system rooted in the technology of capitalism produces and constitutes a huge competition and stress in and across academic rankings (Eguchi & Collier, 2018). At the same time, various minorities are pitted against each other (Calafell, 2012).

Consequently, under such environment, I, as a transnational queer of color subject, long for engaging in the politics of coalition with people of color and LGBTQ people of color advocating for diversity and inclusion in the academy. Such longing allows me to move to, move from, and move through the border culture connecting and reconnecting identity fragmentations. This movement becomes my sense of belonging, that is, “about desire and a longing to be, in the sense of being, but also a longing to be attached” (Chávez, 2013, p. 41). However, I often feel that I fail to embody the intersectional queer politics of coalition. My everyday academic experiences reinforce the competitive natures of the academic industry that can easily distract such queer coalition building.

Before going to 2015’s National Communication Association’s (NCA) conference in Las Vegas, NV, for example, I am so looking forward to spending some time with Andrew. To me, my relationship with Andrew signifies my protective shell of doctoral program stage where I belong to a part of the metropolitan gay sexual cultures in Washington, D.C. So, being around him, I am reminded of my youth when I was care free. However, as soon as we start to hang out, I feel something is off. Andrew looks stressed because he directly comes to the conference right after having gone to an on-campus job interview. Then, he tells me that he really wants to get a job offer from this school. Apparently, he is nervous. Next day, after dinner, we go out to a gay bar as is our tradition. We run into a graduate student who is interested in applying to my doctoral program, so, I am persuading her to apply to my institution. Then, in front of me, Andrew says to this student, “oh you can also apply to [the University Name]. That may better speak to your research interest.” As soon as I hear it, I vividly feel my blood pressure is going up. I begin to think, “why did Andrew discount my effort to recruit the student?” Then, I pull him to a side and then tell him, “What the F*** did you just say? I am D-O-N-E!.” I clearly forget to perform being a good ally. I allow that the capitalistic logic of competition, rooted in individualism, becomes the default of my interaction with Andrew.

Here, I critique how I immediately become individualistic, self-absorbed, and competitive. At that time, I am pressured to prove myself as a transnational queer of color scholar to my institution, so I can achieve tenure and promotion. Yet, I am constantly framed for “brutally” pushing critical and queer agenda into the previously social scientific department and/or questioned why I sometimes utilize autoethnography as a method (Eguchi & Collier, 2018). I am a threat to some U.S. American, White, heterosexual citizens who believe in #alllivesmatter. So coming from a space of everyday stress and victimization, I misread Andrew’s intention. His possibly honest and kind suggestion to the student feeds into my own narrative through which I assume people undervalue me. However, the conversation is not about me. It is about the student finding a right place for her doctoral program. I do not need to make this about me. Also, I forget to care about Andrew feeling anxious about his job offer. I could have connected to his stress and given my job market experience. Thus, I once again fail. My default is to be defensive. Therefore, I everyday seek to develop my own way to embody the intersectional queer politics of coalition that is not only about political alliance but also caring and love because there is no one way to do this right.

This is our third tenet of coalition work: to revisit the relationship regularly. We have to attend to our pains and wounding, even from each other. Our coalition work involves a politic of compassion and forgiveness as a deliberate political engagement. We acknowledge that our positions and traumas can produce tension and negative interactions; we propose that these are part of coalitions and drive us to attend to our relationship in active dialogues.

What Lies Ahead

In this autoethnography, we explore coalitional actions and relationships. We propose three parts to coalition work: (a) identify common problems/structural barriers, (b) agree to be in coalition and work together, and (c) revisit the coalitional relationship regularly. We develop these strategies through auto-theory in our autoethnographic stories. We start in the context of graduate school and then move through tenure-track positions in the Communication field to offer examples of the value and difficulty in building and maintaining coalitions. Through our narratives, we unpack how race, culture, nationality, sexuality, gender, and language place identity categories on us and how we play into and resist them. As a method, autoethnography provides the room for us to come together and engage our conflicts.

Storytelling is meaningful and reveals the values of the tellers, the audience, and the social context that produces it. As such, stories are political and subjective. A temptation in storytelling is to tell neat narratives. Plots and conflicts resolve, characters find love and success, actions are always intentional, yet we do this autoethnography as a way of staying within the unresolved. We want

[a] differential, oppositional, performative and above all transformative, queer approach to autoethnography is one which recognizes that bodies are immersed in, and fixed by, texts, but also recognizes these bodies as doing, speaking and understanding beings, forthrightly incomplete, unknown, fragmented and conflicting. (Holman Jones & Adams, 2010, p. 211)

We resist the “ossifying effects of neoliberal ideology and the degradation of politics brought about by representations of queerness in contemporary popular culture” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 22) by continuing to make spaces for coalitions in academia. We understand community as complicated and dynamic. We use social and professional spaces—meals, drinks, conference presentations, guest lecturing, and writing—as opportunities to build coalition.

We build these spaces so that we (and others) can express what may have been internalized: that our teaching is not good enough, that our work is not respected, that our concerns are as marginal as our identities, that we are only ever valued as “diversity hires.” To move into coalition, we have to identify the external forces that force those labels—whether it be the gentle warning of a senior colleague or the outright aggression against our social identities. Where is the potential for venting or being in dialogue at universities where our identities tend to be flattened or minimized? These are ongoing processes, fraught with tension and potential conflict.

Coalitions need to have room for trauma and hurt. When self-proclaimed allies want to be engaged, they need to understand what that might entail. Chávez (2013) calls coalitions “a liminal space, necessarily precarious, and located within the intermeshed interstices of people’s lives and politics” (p. 146). When these lives have been restrained, disciplined, marginalized, discriminated against, and/or subjugated, people bring this pain and experience to the table, which can be turbulent and the basis for conflict. There is no easy way to approach coalition, and—as we have shown—discomfort is an important part of building politically engaged relationships.

As queers of colors, we recognize that our sameness is illusory. We are actually different, yet our sameness is constructed through processes involving whiteness, heteronormativity, and transnationalism. These cause frictions and tensions, which must be faced to be in coalition. Through dialogue and many uncomfortable encounters, we work with our differences to sustain our relationship to support each other (and others in similar marginalized positions) to uplift and nurture our voices in the university and in the wider society. We pay attention to the tense moments, the strife we both face. We work to suspend our egos to live with/in this imperfection.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Andrew R. Spieldenner

Author Biographies

Andrew R. Spieldenner (PhD, Howard University) is an assistant professor of Health Communication at California State University-San Marcos. He coordinates the US implementation of the Stigma Index for the Global Network of People with HIV/AIDS/North America, and serves as Vice-Chair of the US People Living with HIV Caucus.

Shinsuke Eguchi (PhD, Howard University) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico. Their research interests focus on global and transcultural studies, queer of color critique, intersectionality and racialized gender politics, Asian/Pacific/American studies, and performance studies. They are co-editor of Queer Intercultural Communication: The Intersectional Politics of Belonging in and across Differences released from Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD).

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