Shui-yin Sharon Yam

How reproductive justice birth workers and queer parents build kinships and care relations that resist oppressive structures. Anti-trans policies that restrict the boundaries of gender, reproduction, and family formation are a dangerous form of reproductive injustice with grave impacts on trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people. In Doing Gender Justice, Shui-yin Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz explore the intricate intersections of gender, race, and reproductive politics to illuminate how language and care practices can be reshaped to promote transformations at the structural level and in small everyday ways. Only by enacting justice-oriented forms of reproductive care and relations, Yam and Fixmer-Oraiz contend, could activists and health care workers challenge the dominant affective and ideological investments in binary gender and its complicity in white supremacy. Set against a backdrop of relentless anti-trans legislation and attacks on bodily autonomy, this groundbreaking work shares the lived experiences and advocacy of queer and trans parents, gender-inclusive birth workers, and reproductive justice activists. Through rich storytelling and rigorous analysis of ethnographic data and cultural artifacts, the authors highlight innovative tactics that trans and nonbinary people use to dismantle oppressive systems and create a more expansive definition of family and kinship. Organized to examine how the dominant gender system influences discursive and cultural practices in multiple contexts, this book amplifies rhetorical inventions and tactics deployed by reproductive justice advocates, birth workers, and queer people who have created trans-inclusive spaces for reproduction and family-making. Doing Gender Justice offers a compelling vision for a world where all forms of family and kinship are possible and where reproductive justice can be advanced in a deeply intersectional and coalitional way.

Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship draws attention to how intersecting networks of power--particularly race and ethnicity, gender, and social class--marginalize transnational subjects who find themselves outside a dominant citizenship that privileges familiarity and socioeconomic and racial superiority. In this study of how neoliberal ideas limit citizenship for marginalized populations in Hong Kong, Shui-yin Sharon Yam examines how three transnational groups--mainland Chinese maternal tourists, Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, and South Asian permanent residents--engage with the existing citizenry and gain recognition through circulating personal narratives. Coupling transnational feminist studies with research on emotions, Yam analyzes court cases, interviews, social media discourse, and the personal narratives of Hong Kong's marginalized groups to develop the concept of deliberative empathy--critical empathy that prompts an audience to consider the structural sources of another's suffering while deliberating one's own complicity in it. Yam argues that storytelling and familial narratives can promote deliberative empathy among the audience as both a political and ethical response--carrying the affective power to jolt the dominant citizenry out of their usual xenophobic attitudes and ultimately prompt them to critically consider the human conditions they share with the marginalized and move them toward more ethical coalitions.

Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship draws attention to how intersecting networks of power--particularly race and ethnicity, gender, and social class--marginalize transnational subjects who find themselves outside a dominant citizenship that privileges familiarity and socioeconomic and racial superiority. In this study of how neoliberal ideas limit citizenship for marginalized populations in Hong Kong, Shui-yin Sharon Yam examines how three transnational groups--mainland Chinese maternal tourists, Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, and South Asian permanent residents--engage with the existing citizenry and gain recognition through circulating personal narratives. Coupling transnational feminist studies with research on emotions, Yam analyzes court cases, interviews, social media discourse, and the personal narratives of Hong Kong's marginalized groups to develop the concept of deliberative empathy--critical empathy that prompts an audience to consider the structural sources of another's suffering while deliberating one's own complicity in it. Yam argues that storytelling and familial narratives can promote deliberative empathy among the audience as both a political and ethical response--carrying the affective power to jolt the dominant citizenry out of their usual xenophobic attitudes and ultimately prompt them to critically consider the human conditions they share with the marginalized and move them toward more ethical coalitions.