Reading Meredith Talusan’s Fairest: A Queer Decolonial Critique of the U.S. Empire
Ying Ma | Nova Southeastern University
Publication: Volume 6 Issue 2
Abstract | This essay examines Meredith Talusan’s Fairest, the first book-length memoir by and about a trans Asian woman. I argue that Talusan’s gender and sexual reconstruction is an ongoing process of accepting, negotiating, and rejecting ideas deeply rooted in the white heteropatriarchy that prevails throughout the U.S. transnational empire. I first investigate Talusan’s critique of the colonial mentality that is imposed on Filipinos, and their suggestion to resist such a sense of indigenous inferiority. Next, I explore how Talusan molded themself to blend into the masculinity-obsessed American gay culture that renders Asian men undesirable, but they ultimately realized that either passing as white or gay erased certain parts of who they really are. Last, I analyze how Talusan proposes a new direction of trans feminism that centers on woman-identification while rejecting the male privileges that they had enjoyed before gender transition. Inspired by nineteenth-century British women writers, Talusan revisits the colonial history of Filipino transgender people as victims of gender-based violence.
Key words | LGBTIQ+, Asian American Queerness, Transwoman, Transfeminism, Filipino Transgender, Meredith Talusan, Sexual Fluidity, American Imperialism
Ying Ma (yma@nova.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Gender Studies in the Department of Humanities and Politics at Nova Southeastern University, USA. She completed her PhD at the University of Texas at Dallas, and her dissertation examines queer Asian American literature. Her current research focuses on queer family making.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Ma, Ying. “Reading Meredith Talusan’s Fairest: A Queer Decolonial Critique of the U.S. Empire.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 16 Oct. 2024, pp. 1.1–1.16, https://ellids.com/archives/2024/10/6.2-Ma.pdf.