https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i2.003
A List of Queer Possibilities: (Dis)Orientating Objects in Selected Poems of Ocean Vuong and Chen Chen
Marvin Khailalven
PhD Scholar, Centre for English Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru University
ORCID ID: 0009-0005-8487-8789
Ayush Bhardwaj
Independent Researcher
ORCID ID: 0009-0000-5938-7949
Abstract: Asian American poets such as Ocean Vuong and Chen Chen have gained some notoriety for their works, which explicitly explore queerness, domesticity, and identity. Through poems such as Chen’s “In the City” and “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities” and Vuong’s “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds,” this paper explores how things that appear as deviant objects in these works can (dis)orient the reader’s perception to offer a look into the queered ways of living embedded in the poems.
Building on Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” as they explored in Cruel Optimism (2011) and Sara Ahmed’s “orientation devices” in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), the paper identifies things encoded in lines of poetry that produce a discomforting or disorienting effect in the reader. Berlant discusses the discomfort felt by the self that fails to experience a sense of optimism in things and activities that were previously associated with pleasure and comfort. Things that fail to yield a sense of optimism bring the subject face to face with the absence of optimism where it was expected, and in so doing, they function as “disorientation devices.”
If orientation devices or things in a room help an individual locate themselves in the room, the disorientating objects defamiliarise the location of a subject in the world, sending them in an “emotional frenzy” (Butler) to identify themselves and their location with respect to other/new things in their proximity.
(Dis)Orientation devices serve yet another function: they build knowledge bridges between the subject and its Other. They allow the subject to transgress the boundaries of their subjective experiences and make way into the Other’s ontological-epistemological space. Literature, the paper argues, can become a space where otherness is not resolved or mastered but rather a space that allows the self to remain open to what it cannot fully claim as its own.
Keywords: Queer Objects, (Dis)orientation Devices, Naive Knowledge, Cruel Optimism, Chen Chen, Ocean Vuong
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