2021 Theses Master's

the tidal flats: a documentary-collage on asian-american queer kinship

Chen, Liú

When this project began, Liú intended to make an oral history-based audio documentary in honor of their Taiwanese grandmother. Struggling with their grandmother’s failing health and the limitations of oral history— When we encounter overwhelming silence, how do we record those silences we find in a way that honors everything that they signify?—Liú decided to probe questions of power within familial storytelling. But what surfaced from their interviews with four other queer and trans Asian Americans was more visceral and embodied than they expected: feelings of belonging, feelings of kinship. Not answers to a research question, but an extended practice in co-witnessing and story-sharing, in vulnerability and wondering aloud. Episode 1, “finding the tidal flats” follows Liú’s queer diasporic wandering to a local beach, through their family history, and into their lines of kinship.

Keywords: Asian-American Identity, Queer Kinship, Queer Diaspora, Taiwan, mixed race identity, kinship and solidarity, creative non-fiction, gender and sexuality, trans non-binary identity, illness and disability narratives, grief and mourning, Afro-Asian solidarity, spatiality/location, audio documentary, oral history