Queer Protectors of Chinatown: Imagining Spatial Futures beyond Displacement

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.