In recent years, Chinatowns across the U.S. have faced rising gentrification and displacement. Chinatowns, located often in historic downtowns and urban centers, have been lauded by developers and city governments as prime locations for new developments and sites of profit-driven urban revitalization. However, these development projects, often led by large corporations or city governments, often end up driving rent prices up, shuttering Chinese-owned small businesses, and displacing especially low-income or renting Chinese residents from what has been their cultural home for decades. In New York City, despite years of residents’ and activists’ protest, Mayor Eric Adams’s city government proceeded with building a megajail in the middle of Chinatown. The 300-ft tall concrete mega-jail building (“the world’s tallest jail”) would house over 3000 incarcerated people, while the large construction site that takes up several blocks has already decreased walkability and public safety in the Lower Manhattan walkable neighborhood. It would also make the Chinatown community—which itself emerged out of histories of U.S. racial exclusion— yet another a site of racialized carceral violence. In Boston, where we gather for AAR this year, Chinatown’s identity is likewise threatened by large developers and hoteliers who seek to transform the few available sites of affordable housing in Chinatown into luxury high-rise hotels. For Chinatowns across the country who face similar fates of gentrification, redevelopment, loss, and displacement, the future of Chinatown is an ever-shrinking one. In the spatial battle between Chinatown cultural centers and profit-driven urban developers, it is clear—for residents and activists alike— that Chinatowns are on the losing side of this spatial battle. Racialized displacement has defined the past and present of land and bodies in the United States, and it seemingly inevitably will come to define our future also.
Emerging from this above context, this paper highlights the unique role of artworks produced by queer Chinatown-based artists in resisting against futures of racialized displacement. While the issues of gentrification, housing crisis, capitalistic/racialized displacement, and carceral violence seem to be only related to issues of queerness and sexuality by means of intersectionality, this paper argues that queer-of-color (artistic) imaginations of alternative futures (Muñoz 2009) and alternative modes of spatialization offer a productive, constructive counter-narrative to capitalistic futurities that have come to reshape U.S. urban centers in general. Specifically, the queer artworks I examine in this paper both offer an alternative imagination of what freedom and safety looks like for Chinatown communities & communities of color. These queer imaginations stand in direct contrast with patriarchal and capitalistic visions of freedom and safety— implicitly offered by urban developers and city governments— as something that can only be achieved through carceral violence and financialized development (i.e. the myth that more development and wealth equal more public safety).
The first work of art I examine in this paper is a 2025 risograph print of queer door gods (2025) by New York City-based artist Singha Hon. In the art print, the artist reimagines the Chinese “door gods,” traditionally often imagined as a pair of violent and masculine deities who offer protection for homes, instead as two queer feminine gods who offers protection to Chinatown homes and businesses the same way that Chinese diasporic women have for centuries sustained and protected their homes through their labor and care. The artwork offers a queer and feminist vision of divine protection that imagines both the door gods and safety itself as something that does not need carceral violence and retributive justice. In doing so, the queer door gods, in the words of the artist, serve as protectors of a Chinese community from the carceral violence that increasingly take root in its midst. I observe that in the months following Lunar New Year 2025, these queer door gods decorate the entrances of various Chinatown homes and small businesses, spatially transforming these ever-shrinking spaces of kinship, under the skyline of the megajail, into “sanctuaries” that “plots against the profane” and opens gaps in the violent everyday (Sostaita 2024).
The second work of art features the illustrated children’s book Noodles & Bao (2024) written and illustrated by Boston-based queer artist Shaina Lu. The book’s main character, a middle schooler who lives in Chinatown, works prevent his favorite Chinese-owned eateries from being shuttered by looming forces of gentrification and big business development. This section of the paper briefly analyzes how the book, in its explicitly queer imageries and magical realism elements, offers the queer child (Stockton 2009) of color alternative futures of spatialized communal belonging that dominant, capitalistic futures deny for its marginalized subjects. A child-oriented work of art such as this book offers a potent counter-narrative to a vision of futurity where Chinatown slowly dissolves into the urban jungle of high rises, mega-corporations, and indistinguishable architecture: that the queer child of Chinatown, and Chinatown itself, will continue to survive.
Typically, existing research on gentrification and displacement does not often speak about spirituality, religion, or sexuality in relation to these material concerns of land loss. However, this paper— through its focus on artistic representations of queerness, deities, magic, and spirituality in relations to material contestations over land in Chinatown— suggests that queer imaginations of futurity and queer spatializations offer a language for Chinatown residents to create “other worlds” of belonging and resistance from the underside of rising megajails and shrinking Chinatowns. These artworks, when read through a queer theory/queer theologies lens, offer reimaginations of futures of freedom and safety that arise from diasporic kinship, care, and protection from the (queer) deities.
This paper examines the works of two queer artists in U.S. Chinatowns who imagine alternative spaces and alternative futures in resistance to rising gentrification, displacement, and jail-building in New York City and Boston’s Chinatowns. In these cultural communities that are increasingly forced into spatial visions of futurity offered by capitalism and carceral violence, queer Chinatown-based artwork (many of whom employ religious and mythical symbolism) instead opens up alternative futures that redefine what safety and freedom look like: they instead illustrate queer visions of freedom and safety through kinship and community that reject mass incarceration or cultural assimilation as means to queer diasporic safety. Reading these queer artwork through the lens of both queer theory and theological aesthetics, this paper considers how these queer/feminist artworks reimagine futures of freedom for Chinatown communities and open up “sanctuary spaces” for queer and minoritized subjects.