Queer Disorientations, States of Suspension

Chapter 2 examines the work of Indian American artist Chitra Ganesh alongside a film by Latina filmmaker Aurora Guerrero in order to analyze how these texts, as instances of the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora, disrupt dominant notions of immigrant success and respectability. It argues that both texts evoke states of suspension and disorientation that reject the straight lines of metronormative narratives of gay and immigrant success and “the good life.” This chapter also engages the poetry of the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose work similarly evokes an alternative cartographic imagination of gay and immigrant life.