Asian American literary studies has long organized its accounts of transpacific mobility around the logic of return. Sau-ling Wong's foundational Necessity/Extravagance framework (1993) reads early Asian American movements as structured by the imperatives of survival and aspiration; Chih-ming Wang (2013) and Patricia Chu (2019) interpret autobiographical travelogues as homecoming narratives organized around either attempted reconciliation or deployed as countermemory to address racial melancholia. These frameworks remain generative, yet they risk consolidating a single teleological model—travel as diasporic return—that cannot account for the contemporary Asian/American subject who simply does not move along the axis of origin and return. They drift. They caregive. They find solace in their bodies. They exile themselves. What structures their movement is not the pull of homeland but the pressure of global capitalism, the unfinished architecture of American empire, the fraught affective economies of digital sociality and global tourism—conflicting erotics and ethics that the homecoming paradigm was never designed to hold.

This session takes that figure—the queer Asian/American traveler, queer in both its sexual and nonnormative sense—as its central object of inquiry. A recent wave of scholarship—from Cathy Park Hong's theorization of minor feelings (2020), Summer Kim Lee's meditation on anti-reparative spoilage (2025), to Christopher B. Patterson's thinking on transpacific brownness (2026)—has begun to reorient the field toward the affective, biopolitical, and geopolitical dimensions of Asian/American experience that earlier paradigms tend to sideline. The four papers gathered here draw on queer theory, affect theory, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies to ask how contemporary literary texts register the complexity of traveling while Asian, queer, and multiply positioned.

The session will run 75 minutes. Each presenter will have strictly 13 minutes to present their paper, after we will opening the floor have about 23 minutes of unstructured discussion, facilitated by the presider to generate constructive conversations based on the paper presented.

Aristotle Atienza's "To Dis/Orient: Wanderings of a Reluctant Migrant" theorizes a queer mode of travel through everyday urban infrastructure. Drawing on a year-long Instagram archive of bus stops, sidewalks, and coastal walks during a period of family caregiving in Orange County, Atienza reads these fragments as an affective archive of dis/orientation. Present in the U.S. not by choice but by care obligation, he argues that reluctant migration produces a form of queer mobility structured by suspension rather than by arrival or return.

Maia Vitarini Lwin's "The Asian/American Edge Case" takes up queer mobility at the level of the body through a reading of YZ Chin's novel Edge Case (2021). Through attending the Malaysian H-1B protagonist Edwina's metabolic self-transformations, Lwin argues that the Southeast Asian immigrant's incorporation into the U.S. nation-state takes place through the body's most mundane processes: eating, digesting, and ultimately autophagic self-consumption.

Pixie Shen's "Queer Solitude: Queer Utopia and Emancipation from the Asian Diasporic Abyss" intervenes in the debate between Edelman's anti-relational futurity (2004) and Muñoz's queer utopianism (2009). Reading Ocean Vuong's poem "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" (2016) and novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), Shen develops "queer solitude"—a form of utopia in which the Asian diasporic subject retreats into their own body as the "only altar" of queer possibility: singular, embodied, and urgently present.

Kam Tou Pang's "Exilic in Asia: The Anti-Travel Travelers in Kawika Guillermo's Stamped" takes Guillermo's novel Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel (2018)—five multiethnic Asian American expatriates drifting across nineteen cities in Asia— to consider the exilic analytic for understanding queer Asian/American mobility. Pang turns to Said's theorization of intellectual exile to account for the structural outsiderness these characters feel not only in the U.S. but, more unsettlingly, in Asia—the presumed "homeland." Yet Pang is equally critical of Said's idealization of exile, which fails to reckon with racialization, sexualization, and U.S. colonial imperialism. Ultimately, the paper argues that the exilic anti-traveler's "happy in unhappiness" is not liberation but a coping mechanism—bitter, transient, and produced within the shadow of empire.

Together, these four papers represent a range of scholarly positions, methodological orientations, and institutional locations that reflect the session's commitment to a diversity of voices. They are affiliated with universities across the Pacific— the Philippines, the United States, and Macau, and working across English, Philippine Studies, Philosophy, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, including non-binary and trans scholars at varying career stages. This heterogeneity is not incidental to the session's argument but constitutive of it: the claim that queer Asian/American mobility exceeds any single framework is itself enacted in the range of voices assembled here to make it.