Amy Sueyoshi is Queering the Academy 

Dr. Amy Sueyoshi, historian and joint appointee in the Race and Resistance Studies and Sexuality Studies Departments at San Francisco State University, talks with Virgie Tovar about her teaching philosophy, her work as an activist, and gives advice to students and faculty on fighting oppression in their departments.

Virgie: Tell me about your teaching philosophy.

Amy: I went into academia because I wanted to do community activism. Initially, I thought about being a social worker or an activist for a non-profit. I worked as a community organizer both in New York City and in Cameroon while I was a Peace Corps volunteer. And while I was in the Peace Corps one of the key things I learned about development was that the most sustainable development happens when people from within the community do things for the community. So me being middle class, college-educated, from an immigrant household, I thought it made sense for me to go back into my community, which would be a middle class, college-educated, immigrant community. Going back to the university to teach could be my contribution.

For me, like most faculty of color, going into academia is about creating a world that can see inequality and values social justice. When I teach it’s less about me delivering knowledge and more about teaching people how to think critically about the things around them that might seem innocuous. And so to look at representations and think about what they really mean, to think about what history means. How has it been delivered, what does it erase and what kind of implications does that have? To think about language, the kinds of language we use, the ways in which we tell a story, how that erases certain people or implies or suggests pejorative stereotypes about certain people, and to teach people how to think critically about the messages that are delivered to them from a white supremacist perspective. When I say white supremacist, I’m not talking about raging, cross-burning KKK but rather folks who forward privileges for white people. I hope students can better see not just racism but also misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia. I want people to become more aware of the ways the world oppresses all of us. After all an injustice against one is really an injustice against everyone. Ideally we should all be able to live a middle class lifestyle, not worry about healthcare, not worry about where our next paycheck is going to come from. If all of us could live this kind of comfortable life then we could all be sort of happy. You can never build a just or a fulfilling society where one group is really rich and one group is really poor.

Virgie: Can you tell me about crystallizing moments or moments that were influential to where you are right now as an academic, artist, activist?

Amy: Moments of racism and misogyny. There’s all these moments in my life within the educational system that really hammered into me that I had to be determined if I wanted to get the most out of school. During the 70s before the model minority, when Asians were not yet weren’t considered smart, I was called learning disabled and trapped in the track that wasn’t going to college. I told my mom, “You’ve got to get me into the gifted program because everyone’s going to the gifted program except for me and five other kids in the classroom.” And she said “Well, I met with the teachers and they said you weren’t as smart as your brothers.” And at that moment I said, “Well, mom, if you were a white mom you would push for me.”  At the age of 10, I demanded that they give me an IQ test. I scored really high on the stupid standardized test. What it did for me was send me along an educational track headed toward college.

Once I was in a PhD program, I failed my comprehensive exam and I had to take it a second time. When I failed it the first time I had answered the questions about women, and people of color. And I knew that the committee didn’t like my answers for whatever reason or they knew that I was the person of color, probably a woman of color. So, the second time I took the test, I answered all the traditional questions about Puritanism, American Revolution, Civil War, and presidents. And then I passed. I passed the freakin’ exam, but the point is that there are these key moments of trauma that occurred in my life, where I realized that I had to push to forward  myself if I was going to make through all the hurdles piled on top me. These moments all compiled made me think I may not be the smartest, but I will certainly be the hardest working one there. I will scratch and scrape to get – not to the top- but just to get in. I had to delude myself that I was going to do it and no one was going to deny me, but I mean it was hard without a doubt. These moments, even though traumatic, were important for me, since they forced me to figure out how to survive and in the end gave me the confidence and skills to survive in a world that continues to create barriers for people of color, women, and queers.

My mom who is an immigrant used to say – Americans are inherently lazy. So you just work a little hard and you’ll succeed. I don’t know if I believe her because my mom had three jobs just to maintain regular middle class comfort. I do think though that working really hard is one way to deal with the hurdles of social inequality.

Virgie: I’m wondering maybe how you stack your identities. I think of you often as a race scholar, but I think of you as a lot of things, but how do you see yourself as a person, as an academic?

Amy: My identity or how I see myself shifts depending on what group I’m in. When I’m in Ethnic Studies, I’m the sexuality scholar. When I’m in Sexuality Studies, I’m the Ethnic Studies scholar. I think for sure that in terms of my scholarship I would be more comfortable saying that I’m an Ethnic Studies scholar than a queer theorist per se. And I would say that issues of race are super important for me. Queer issues are important to me too, but if I had to choose between fighting for immigration rights on the street or protesting for same-sex marriage, for example, I would fight for the immigration rights hands down. And that in part has to do with – not my valuation of race or sexually – but my investment in radical politics, in transformative politics that really centers the person who’s marginalized.  I think undocumented folks or folks who can’t stay in this country because of these complex immigration barriers, they get the serious shaft. Professional, upper middle class white gays, they for the most part I think don’t face the same challenges that an immigrant would face. In those ways, for me, I would say that I do strongly identify more with folks of color.

There’s cool queer folks who are white. I don’t doubt that they exist. I know a few of them. But for me I found more folks of color who are cool with queer folks of color than white folks who are really, really cool with folks of color. 

Virgie: Any thoughts about that tension?

Amy: Well, I’m a historian so I think of it in terms of time periods, but I think that in the late 60s and early 70s it was much harder for a queer person of color to be queer in a people of color space than to be a person of color in a white queer space. I know a lot of activists who had to hide their sexuality in people of color spaces and then they would go to white queer spaces and they could be out. But I think that now in the year 2010, folks of color are less homophobic than they were 40 years ago. I think folks of color now also live in a time where there’s more opportunity for them, where they don’t feel as strapped for resources as 40 years ago.  So they’re more able to afford to embrace even the “queerest” among them

And I think about the way that race politics have gone in white America, like the advent of multiculturalism in the 80s where people thought “Oh we should embrace all these cultures and eat their food and go to their parties and that makes us sort of one with folks of color.” That may have been a big step in the 80s, but that’s not enough now in the year 2010. People are demanding serious anti-racist movements from white people and I think the vast majority of white folks are not so invested in issues of race to take that step into  radical anti-racist mode. On the other hand, many progressive folks of color have stepped out and said “queer folks are part of us.” Even same sex marriage as a conservative movement within queer politics, there have been religious leaders of color who have said that same-sex marriage is just as valid as opposite sex marriage. So I think in these ways I feel much more comfortable in progressive circles of color than in progressive white queer circles. Obviously the most ideal community I have around me are the queers of color who I really cherish, and who inspire me on a daily basis.

Virgie:  For people who are faculty who might read this, who are asking how to work against oppression in their departments, what does that look like?

Amy: That means mentoring folks of color even when it’s hard. It means really thinking about diversity and practicing affirmative action - as evil as that word might be to some people - in a concerted way. And not just letting folks in, it’s training them to be really good at whatever they’re supposed to be trained in doing. So, for example, the two peer-reviewed journal articles that I published, one was with Frontiers, a women of color scholarly journal. There was this scholar, Gayle Gullet, who was the editor at the time. She accepted my article and it wasn’t that great in its initial form. It had been rejected already at five different journals. She took it and she said, “Amy, I think that there was some great things about this article.” She sent it to reviewers who were generous; she really worked with me to revise that thing instead of saying “Oh, this person needs too much work,” and kicking me out the door, which is typically what happens in academia. But Frontiers.. really took the time to work with me, to mentor me, to turn me into someone who could write scholarly journals and that’s what is really needed.

I also think for folks who are scared of people of color or don’t want to really interact with them, then donate money to people of color scholarships. These are the ways in which people outside the community who don’t want to interact with those people can still help the community. You don’t have to be at the soup kitchen giving bowls of soup to people of color if you’re scared of them. Just donate a bucket load of money because the truth of the matter is that white people generally speaking tend to make a lot more money than folks of color even with the same qualifications. White folks in America have been able to accumulate a lot more capital than folks of color. And with a lot more capital comes more money again and more opportunity. So, I think these are the ways that folks can be anti-racist. Mentor folks of color or give a lot of money to organizations that support folks of color.

Virgie: What projects are you working on right now?

Amy: This summer I just turned in my book manuscript about Yone Noguchi, the Japanese immigrant poet who comes to the US and has an affair with an older white man who has a fetish for Japanese and Native Hawaiian men. Yone also has two affairs with women, one of them I argue is a lesbian because she says she only wants to marry Yone for a year and then wants to spend the rest of her life with women. All of these people are moderately famous. So it’s supposed to be a titillating, potentially sellable book. It will be marketed as a trade book through University of Hawaii Press. Right now it’s there being copy edited. So, that’s one project I finished in June.

Also in the summer I finished an article on how to teach whiteness from a queer, feminist and of color perspective. It’s about teaching whiteness at San Francisco State, which some might see as odd. At San Francisco State, the College of Ethnic Studies was created to provide more classes on people of color so it’s weird to have a class on white folks. I argue though for the utility of teaching whiteness from so-called radical theoretical perspectives as a productive way to further social justice not just among white liberals but students of color as well.

My newest project is about turn-of-the-century San Francisco. It’s actually my dissertation, which I had set aside because I didn’t know how to revise it into a book manuscript at the time. It’s on multi-ethnic San Francisco, looking particularly at representations of gender and sexuality. And in San Francisco at the turn of the century it was Asians who really captured the imagination of white San Franciscans. Asians became the mirror upon which white people projected their moral anxieties as they negotiated changing mores in gender and sexuality. As sex work becomes a “problem” in the city, the Chinese are depicted as evil prostitutes. As white women are starting to wear pants and become more “mannish,” Japanese women are painted as hyper feminine geishas.  So, it’s a story about how white middle class folks working on their own gender and sexual freedom in fact oppress people of color.

I’m also working with the GLBT Historical Society 25^th Anniversary exhibit. December is the soft opening. January is the official opening. I’m really excited to have a really full exhibit that represents trans folks, disabled folks, women, folks of color.

V: I’m curious what you’d recommend to queer folks of color who are pursuing academia and facing challenges.

Students sometimes express anxiety about whether they deserve to be in graduate school. Bottom line is nobody “deserves” to be there. You can have a sense of entitlement, but we’re really not entitled to anything. Everything that’s given to us is a gift. So, the fact that we survived infancy and managed not to kill ourselves is a gift that our parents and other caregivers gave us. I think if you want to do it, the road is always going to be tough. In Buddhism there’s this saying that “life is suffering.” And that might sound kind of depressing, but it’s actually kind of uplifting. Because if you know that nothing in life is going to be easy, when the hard thing comes you can be like “ok, this is a hard part but I’m going to get through it since it’s just a part of life.” And ultimately I believe that people should choose what makes them happy. If you’re in grad school and you discover that you hate everything around you, then decide to go do something else and be happier. But if it’s about your insecurity and it’s about your not wanting to become that professor that you hate, or be surrounded by professors that you hate, you don’t have to surround yourself with those professors that you hate after you become a faculty member. When I was going to UCLA I looked around me and I was like, “oh my god, I’m never going to have academic friends” since I felt like such an alien among them. I came to SFSU, and found particularly in the College of Ethnic Studies, but also outside,all these folks whose parents never went to college, or were not academics. They were people who struggled to get into academia in the same ways that I did. And all of a sudden I could be friends with academics because we’d had similar struggles. Their struggles are amazing stories of inspiration.

I think it’s also important to remember that the people who came before us struggled way more than we did. Our struggle is nothing compared to the sharecroppers’ and braceros struggle. Some Japanese Americans in the 1930s would be the first in their family to get a college education and they would still be denied a job. They would come out of UC Berkeley and no one would hire them so they would have to back to the farm and pick fruit with their parents. And I think that we’re at a stage where our life is not like that, like our grandparents’, like our ancestors’. And we really have to keep in mind that as much pain and struggle that we face now we can get over it and it will help create a better world. So, I do think that even as I was at UCLA getting beat up by the institution, I had an amazing opportunity to earn my degree due to an affirmative action grant. Even for my undergraduate degree from an elite east coast women’s college called Barnard, it was a privilege for me to be accepted since they valued me as an interesting student that would bring intellectual and racial diversity to their school. Perhaps they thought, “Oh an Asian kid from California. How cool is that.” But 60 years ago few if any institutions of higher education would have thought that. So, in those ways I do think that as much as we feel like our problems are really bad in the moment, they’re actually not as bad as you might think. And not to invalidate people’s suffering but I would tell queers of color and others struggling that we live in a world where we can create a better future for ourselves, more so than folks in the past. Allow that to inspire you and give you courage. I think history can empower all of us. Not just to count the injustices but to think about the ways people struggled and survived if not overcame those circumstances.

So, that’s what I’d tell folks of color. If there’s something you really want to do then don’t worry about whether you’re smart enough or you’re the best or whether the professor likes you. I was considered the reject student in my program, and my second reader, Laura Edwards, a white woman said to me, “Amy, the best graduate student doesn’t make the best academic.” You’re just in training when you’re in graduate school. It’s likes you’re living with your parents and then you move out. It’s not the way life is always going to be.

That’s what I would say to queer folks of color and others who might be facing challenges in their graduate programs.

Want to read more about Dr. Sueyoshi? Find her here.

Have comments or an idea for an article? Contact Virgie Tovar at Virgie@mail.sfsu.edu