Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality

by Kong Pheng Pha

Overview

A groundbreaking exploration of race, gender, and sexuality

In the wake of the US wars in Southeast Asia, the arrival of Hmong refugees reignited American anxieties about race and sexuality. Sensationalized media portrayals of child marriages, bride kidnappings, and polygamy framed Hmong communities as sexually deviant, reinforcing a racialized perception of their cultural practices. In Queering the Hmong Diaspora, Kong Pheng Pha dismantles these narratives, revealing how legal cases, media representations, and legislative efforts have constructed Hmong Americans as hyperheterosexual and ungovernable subjects.

Critically examining how Hmong Americans are positioned within racial, gendered, and sexual discourses of liberalism, Pha explores the lived experiences of queer Hmong Americans, whose existence and activism challenge mainstream and ethnonationalist constructions of subjectivity. Addressing Hmong American gender and sexual politics through feminist, queer, and social justice lenses, Pha offers a critical framework for understanding how race and sexuality intersect in shaping the lives of minoritized refugee communities in the United States and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295754062
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	10/14/2025
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kong Pheng Pha is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

What People are Saying About This

Martin F. Manalansan IV

"A sensitive and trenchant meditation on the tangled web of hyperheterosexuality—a racialized sexual formation that has shaped deviant perceptions of Hmong subjects as either violent male rapists or female victims. Kong Pheng Pha turns to Hmong queer activism, quotidian struggles, and cultural productions as alternative world-making projects that effectively unravel this structure of power. A formidable contribution to queer studies and Asian American studies."

Mimi Thi Nguyen

"Pha tackles the concept of ‘culture’ as a bounded essence or property that situates the Hmong in the United States as primitive, premodern, or even antimodern, particularly through Hmong forms of gender and sexuality. Tracking the circulation of Hmong forms of gender and sexuality through criminal trials, marriage bills, and gay liberalisms that target these forms as premodern remnants, Pha provides a necessary Hmong queer critique that complicates and refutes those cultural and institutional enclosures."

Sony Coráñez Bolton

"Queering the Hmong Diaspora challenges myths of hyperheterosexuality, reframing Hmong subjectivity through sharp and groundbreaking analysis. Bridging and expanding queer, Asian American, and Hmong diaspora studies, it offers an urgent, original lens on race, sexuality, and belonging in transnational contexts.”"

Chia Youyee Vang

"This incisive study explores how Hmong American experiences challenge mainstream ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. By focusing on queer voices and cultural identity, it offers fresh insight into belonging, justice, and the complexity of Hmong life in the diaspora."