Queering the Hmong Diaspora

When Hmong refugees arrived in the United States, American media reached for child marriage, bride kidnapping, and polygamy, and built from them a picture of a people defined by excessive heterosexuality. Kong Pheng Pha takes that framing apart and asks what it was doing: how sexual and gendered narratives about refugees became a way of sorting them racially, and what happens to queer Hmong people inside a story that insists the community has no room for them. This is the newest scholarship in the catalog and the most confrontational, and it earns its place because the myth it dismantles is still doing work in classrooms and casework files. Read it alongside Claiming Place, which makes a parallel argument about Hmong women's agency. For graduate readers and anyone teaching refugee, gender, or Asian American studies.