This dissertation examines the ways in which Asian Americanists might deploy queer or slanted methodologies by interpreting literary and cultural texts that center not only on race, sex, gender, class, and desire, but also call into question discourses of heteronormativity. Contemporary gay and lesbian movements have been critiqued for what Lisa Duggan has termed, "homonormativity" or assimilation to dominant culture, and we have witnessed the recent commodification of queerness in popular culture that depoliticizes the term "queer" or trivializes complex forms of sexuality or desire. Within Asian American Studies, queer scholarship has been limited to issues of identity while simultaneously using the term "queer" as synonymous with gay or lesbian. I argue for queer interventional reading strategies that offer transgressive interpretations of literary and cultural texts that center on more than Asian American queer bodies, or mismatches between sex, gender, and sexuality. These reading strategies focus on other forms of queerness by addressing some of these issues from a slanted perspective in four specific areas: (1) children's sexuality, cross-generational desire, and the bottom position as a place of pleasure, (2) queer acts of child abandonment and the disaffected performativity of the maternal as postcolonial resistance, (3) transgressive readings of mental illness through disability studies as queer madness, and (4) and the potential queer future of Asian American Studies.

This project also arises from experiences with deploying a queer pedagogy in my classrooms. Such reflective experiences are foundational to this entire project, since there is a clear understanding of how the areas of teaching, service, and research are not discrete categories but discursively inform each other. The chapters rise to the challenge of grappling with difficult and at times, uncomfortable social issues that might help all of us to become part of the solution to social problems, rather than perpetuating injustice or oppression.

All of the chapters in this dissertation focus on a specific Asian American literary text. These texts and the analyses that are offered all have emerging gay or queer bodies somewhere within them. The focus of each chapter, however, is not limited to producing close readings only of these bodies. Rather, each chapter opens with a controversial popular cultural moment, which becomes a point of departure that delves into the specific text as a means to demonstrate slant \ings/ as a heuristic practice that offers connections that go beyond the mere interpretation of literature and can demonstrate for students how a queer methodology can lead to material changes in the world that are centered on a strong sense of ethics and contestations over the hegemony heteronormativity holds in culture.