Rethinking Transnational Frameworks for Asian American Women's History

The transnational frameworks by which Asian American and U.S. women’s history are understood have been premised on a settler colonial definition of the transnational which disavows the existence of indigenous sovereignty.   This paper explores how our understandings of Asian American women’s transnational history changes when indigenous nationhood is acknowledged, specifically for Hawai’i and American Indian nations.

I will bring together in discussion Native Feminist epistemologies (Arvin,  Tuck, Morrill 2013) as well as  Rhacel Parreñas and Winnie Tam’s conceptualization of an Asian American Women’s epistemology (Parreñas, 2008), in which they re-historicize Asian American Studies through the experiences of Asian American women in relation to immigration policies that – focusing on wage labor-- sought to diminish the reproductive labor capacity of Asian American immigrant communities and have structured the Asian American experience in the United States.  I will explore how the framework of labor and migration emerges from the settler colonial state even while working to obscure the process of colonization.  I will then advocate developing a transnational Asian American women’s epistemology that addresses settler colonial logics by refusing the invisibility of indigenous sovereignty, and problematizes Asian Americans as arrivants to colonized spaces who are both included and excluded through settler colonial logics. I argue that this intellectual labor is an necessary project for transnational feminisms to achieve actual change.