The Lessons of Travel: Teaching Queer Asian Canada through Joella Cabalu’s It Runs in the Family and Alejandro Yoshizawa’s All our Father’s Relations

Abstract

This short essay reflection mines two recent documentary films—Joella Cabalu’s It Runs in the Family and Alejandro Yoshizawa’s All our Father’s Relations—for pedagogical and curricular resources for queer(ing) Asian Canadian studies. Its focus is on the films’ common use of their subjects’ travels as narrative devices, highlighting particularly how these mobilities and the encounters that they enable provide opportunities for unpacking how the racial, gender and sexual politics of Asian Canadian subjectivities intersect with multiple colonialisms, transnationalisms and migrations in the Pacific Rim. Each in its own way, the films tackle normative gender, racial, class, sexual and religious orders, including non-normative heterosexualities. As well, for students of Asian Canadian studies and Asian diaspora studies, they offer crucial illustrations of queerness not as LGBT identity per se, but as fraught relationships to legally, religiously and socially enforced notions of proper domesticity, citizenship and subjectivity. Both films also offer important engagements with Canadian legal regimes and narratives around social difference, albeit with different political and ethical investments. While All our Father’s Relations tackles the queerness of mixed-race Musqueam and Chinese subjects through a fierce interrogation of the conjoined legal projects of Indigenous and migrant control in Canada, It Runs in the Family belies an investment in the notion of Canadian progressivism on LGBT issues. As teaching resources, the films illustrate the importance of queer of colour approaches for theorizing Asian Canada, including and especially its historical, transnational, settler colonial and lived dimensions.