Sean Metzger: Rethinking Respectability in US LGBTQ Asylum Cases: The Oeuvre of Staceyann Chin
Theatre Studies at Glasgow welcomes you to the latest instalment of the Glasgow Theatre Seminar series with Sean Metzger (UCLA) exploring the work of LGBTQ rights activist, poet and performer Staceyann Chin.
Glasgow Theatre Seminar
Date: Wednesday 26 November 2025
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Venue: Online via Zoom
Category: Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Sean Metzger
Rethinking Respectability in US LGBTQ Asylum Cases: The Oeuvre of Staceyann Chin
Online: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/82670523080?pwd=99Bzw89JPuhO4eOgDaDbSxg22xolK2.1
Poet and performer Staceyann Chin’s oeuvre enacts the lifeworld of a queer refugee that far exceeds the narrow legal parameters that would define her. The artistic work demonstrates the costs and contradictions of legal recognition. In this vein, I explore specific examples to discuss how Chin might complicate refugee and asylum discourse. Moving from some of Chin’s early poems such as “If Only Out of Vanity” and “Speech Delivered in Chicago at 2006 Gay Games” through her collaborative mother-daughter vlogs (the Living Room Protests: https://www.youtube.com/@chinpoet/videos) to a recent documentary film (A Mother Apart, 2024, directed by Laurie Townshend), this essay explores how performance studies might illuminate the law and vice versa, specifically in relation to queers of color.
Chin’s creative output will be contextualized with the legal precedents that raise the stakes of the performance and render them a particularly useful intervention in the juridical sphere. Such legal decisions and Chin’s own practice also raise questions about performativity. Therefore, the essay also explores both the Austinian sense of this terms as well as some of its meanings in the larger philosophical domain of ordinary language philosophy in order to think about questions of efficacy, duration, and kinship in performance.
Sean Metzger is a professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. He is the author of Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (2014) and The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (2020), both from Indiana University Press. The latter won awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and the Association for Asian American Studies. The editor of Theatre Journal (2020-2023), he has co-edited several special issues of journals—Cultural Dynamics (2009 and 2020), Third Text (2014), and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2019)—and several books, including Embodying Asian/American Sexualities (Lexington, 2009); Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (Intellect, 2009); and Awkward Stages: Plays about Growing Up Gay(Cambria, 2015). He was the president of Performance Studies international from 2016-2020.