Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang

Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. The most recent issue 47.1, edited by Frontiers Co-Editors Sarita Gaytán, Debjani Chakravarty, and Wanda Pillow, highlights author Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang, Ph.D., winner of the 2023 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Women of Color Caucus-Frontiers Student Essay Award.

I keep noticing moments like these: moments when a person seems to have something to say, but those words seem impossible to articulate in accepted logics, a single language, or perhaps language itself. I sense that this person harbors unnamable thoughts and embodied experiences. Something inside this person’s body seems on the verge of bursting out with their passion for pursuing richer cultural worlds or their anger at unrecognized injustice. Yet, just as they almost burst out, they are acutely aware of an invisible pressure bearing down. They know that what is about to burst out has been labeled socioculturally uncool or politically incorrect, read as evidence of their inability, inferiority, incivility, and wrong ways of being queer. And so, in that moment, they swallow it back. This person might initially hope that speaking could affirm their world of meaning. Yet more often than not, what is spoken is distorted by normative perception and valuation, no longer remaining what it was meant to be. And so, they choose to speak in non-normative, creative, and strategic ways—ways that might be considered abnormal, deficient, too reserved, monstrous, or ghostly, and illegible to proper human subjects. The choice to stop translating, truncating, and distorting themselves to accommodate hegemonic communicative norms is their refusal to comply with the colonial order’s attempt to erase plural worlds. Through this process of un/translatability—refusing to translate themselves through normalizing colonial logics while simultaneously drawing on alternative logics to translate themselves and build bonds with the right people—this person could live and love both others and themselves with dignity.

Compared to expressions that appear polished and smart, sound logically coherent, and are readily understood and appreciated, I am more interested in what cannot burst out, what is swallowed back, and what is expressed in non-normative, imperfect, implicit, slow yet sophisticated, and abnormally queer manners. Growing up in post-Cold War Asia, I observed people who, in moments when they expressed their untranslatability, sought to challenge the transpacific racial-gender structure, interstate animosities, ethnonational and ethnolinguistic logics of exclusion, gender-framing performances, and ableist norms that devalue disabled and aged lives. They wanted genuine conversation instead of yielding to the demand to calculate and compare their respective victimhoods. After living in the United States for many years, I continue to observe people who express their untranslatability as a means to refuse settler-colonial tactics of divide and conquer and build communal bonds beyond intersecting categories that position them against each other. While reviving their long-stigmatized ethnocultural communities, they refuse to treat existing communities as immutable and unquestionable frameworks or to establish their own cultural identities by excluding or denigrating others. They know how difficult it is to come into intimate contact with one another’s untranslatable sides when neoliberalism, multiculturalism, and post-racialism eagerly translate everyone into differences within sameness, while conservative white supremacy resurges unchecked.

These moments of un/translatability, and the rich worlds they make possible, are what my article in Frontiers seeks to foreground, as well as what I wish to continue illuminating as a decolonial writer. My article owes much to the groundwork for decolonial coalition laid by transnational women of color and gender-nonconforming people of color and by inter-Asian, Indigenous, and Third World dialogues. Finally, I deeply appreciate the National Women’s Studies Association for recognizing the prior version of my article with the 2023 Women of Color Caucus Student Essay Award and Frontiers for the opportunity to publish a revised version.