Into the COLAverse – Episode 26: Jo Hsu 

[0:00:01 Frederick]  Welcome to into the verse A podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Aldama. As we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. It is my great, great honor to be here with Jo Hsu, assistant Professor of Rhetoric and writing, core faculty for the Center for Asian American Studies and the faculty affiliate of the LGBT Q studies program. Welcome, Jo. Thank you for having me. So exciting. Oh my gosh, just kind of, you know, getting to know you and getting to know your work. Wow, you know, ut is, you know, is like, definitely, what can I say? Like should be thankful that you’re in our space and doing all the really amazing work that you’re doing. Jo just out of the gate, you know what, you know, rhetoric and writing. So, rhetoric, exactly what you know is this rhetoric kind of ancient Greek kind of the idea of persuasion today. Like what is rhetoric

[0:01:19 Jo]  or? Yeah, so thank you for that, very generous and kind intro and that is a very frequently asked question. And I think one that we asked continually through grad school, both what is rhetoric and also his rhetoric, everything. and in many ways, it is, I think about it very broadly through the lens of communication and arguably everything we do communicate, right? Like how I dress, how I present myself in a room, communicate something about, you know, who I am, where I come from, what impression I’m trying to make. my favorite definition of rhetoric comes from JD and it is the strategic study of the circulation of power through communication. And my, I appreciate that emphasis on power and the way that it is always sort of moving through the ways that we communicate, how we feel authorized or not authorized to say certain things, how we receive words from certain people, or body language or unspoken things. But that is the part that I’m really attuned to. So, yes, there’s a large strand of rhetoric that is based in the sort of Greco roman tradition. But if we think about it very broadly, in terms of the study of power circulated through communication, there are traditions of that through sort of every community and every history because we’ve always needed one way of communicating information to one another. And that’s, that’s the approach that I take, thinking specifically about, you know, its flows of power and the ways that it affects the lives and opportunities specifically of marginalized

[0:02:51 Frederick]  people. Jo, you’ve, you did your B A in English at Rice and then went on to do an M FA and a phd at Penn State. The phd being in rhetoric and composition, but was there something I don’t know at Rice or before in your life in your journey? That kind of was a gravitational pull toward the what, what I don’t know, could we call it the rhetorical arts, the literary arts, language, arts? And you know, when, when was there a kind of, you know, that light bulb moment when you’re like, gosh, this is very much woven into the fabric of everyday life. And there are ways to not only kind of understand better how it works but also see and understand how others are dismantling and remaking worlds through rhetoric.

[0:03:53 Jo]  Yeah, that I appreciate that question. So I think that’s a two part answer. My drawn toward language and the light bulb moment. I’ve always been a storyteller. I was the kid in like, I think third grade, I was writing a quote unquote novel in one of my notebooks. And my teacher was kind enough to indulge me. And I would spend, I don’t know, some period after recess reading out loud the chapters of this novel to my classmates. So as an only child of immigrant parents, I spent a lot of time alone and stories and books and novels were just, they opened entire worlds that I wouldn’t have had otherwise had access to., so I’ve always just disappeared into words and they’ve always been the way that I process things. I think that that has been a gift to me in this job specifically that I, I would be writing anyway, even if this weren’t my job that it’s just, you know, how I move through my experiences and, and make sense of them. So, so that’s always been a really strong thread in my life. And that was why I went into the M FA program and creative writing. And it was in that M FA program that I wound up with my light bulb moment that turned me toward rhetoric, which I did not know was a field. when I got into my M fa now there are some, some undergraduate programs in rhetoric and writing that might have been done, but there certainly wasn’t at rice, which is a very, you know, traditional liberal arts program when I was there. And so I did my M fa and I always joke that this is my super villain origin story. But I was finishing up my M fa I was at my thesis reading, I was a fiction writer. I had written this novel that was about a fictional queer Taiwanese American character and a faculty member in the audience asked me, is there a reason you wrote this as fiction and not as nonfiction. The sort of through life being the presumption that there’s only one story possible for like queer Chinese Americans. And that, that must be the only one and it must be mine. And, you know, it is, it’s a very common presumption that work by people of color is always autobiographical. Even when it’s not marked as autobiography, it’s always research, you know. And that, of course, it’s not a question asked by, asked of any of the, you know, white folks in the room who write all the characters. If they have the sort of advantage of, of narrative proliferation, there are just so many stories that they could possibly have. And I was also just the only person of color in my entire class of M fa students. And so it was it was a real light bow moment in terms of me thinking about the way they’re reading. My story has a lot to do with not just what’s on the page, but my body in this room, it has to do with my name at the top of it. It has to do with the assumptions that they’ve carried about authors who look or sound like me or about stories about Taiwanese Americans or queer people. So there’s an entire sort of narrative ecology that surrounds the way that they’re reading my story. And that led me to a bunch of questions that I realized, you know, rhetoric actually provides a theoretical vocabulary for otherwise I was just sort of like thinking real hard about it, but I didn’t know that there were, you know, bodies of research out there that would help me understand and help me talk about, you know, what are all of the narratives we carry into the ways that we encounter other people and other events and, and what is their effect on you know, the decisions we make the policies we implement? And so then I, I was lucky, I was completely just randomly lucky to be at a school that had a very strong rhetoric phd program. So I just kind of fell sideways into that and studied rhetoric and here I am

[0:07:25 Frederick]  wow, remarkable. Yeah. amazing. And on that this concept of narrative ecology that you mentioned, there are different ecologies, right? So I was curious, I know that you work in rhetorics of health and medicine, trans and queer studies, disability studies, could we call each of these sort of narrative ecologies? And well, maybe even like a step back from that, what, what exactly are these spaces that you are working with in to expand to, to at once sort of solidify and fluidly grow?

[0:08:10 Jo]  So I think the answer is yes and like in that, I don’t think about ecologies as, as bounded spaces or sub disciplinary spaces as bounded spaces. I kind of feel like my stick in most spaces is this thing that you’re talking about is actually about so many more things than you think it is. So, for example, if I’m invited to talk about a queer quote unquote issue, the thing I might emphasize is actually there are all of these racialized assumptions embedded into our sort of Presumptions of what normative families look like or what normal quote unquote gender looks like. So let’s talk about that too. And part of that, I think comes from just how I experience the world as a, you know, trans clear, no diversion, disabled Taiwanese American. It’s just that I’ve always sort of felt off center, but I’m in a lot of, you know, spaces that are single issue. And so I necessarily sort of bring in some of that, you know, like there are elements of this experience that don’t make it to these conversations and to these spaces and let’s talk about why. And also let’s talk about what we’re missing if we don’t talk about, you know, the whiteness of how we think about gender or the class dimensions of what trans politics we pursue. And I think those things are, are really important in terms of understanding how to pursue like a sustainable and genuinely transformative politics, you know, like, without that bigger picture, we’re always perpetuating some form of discrimination that at the end, the end of the day doesn’t serve us, you know, is actually made to make us always less than,

[0:09:47 Frederick]  yeah. And it’s so important not only in our scholarship and our creative writing, of course, but in our classrooms. Right. I mean, if, if you weren’t there doing the work that you’re doing, to open, you know, the, those possibilities for our students, you know, gosh, we would still be kind of grinding away and, you know, in patterns that, you know, you, you know, don’t really get us to that full complexity of who we are as humans, right? Or as, as as people on the planet that I

[0:10:21 Jo]  appreciate that. Yeah. Oh, please go, go, go ahead. I was gonna say, I think our students come in with really expansively like impressively extensive vocabularies. I think working here that’s been a really like just a wonderful gift about this job that they come in so curious and having, you know, asked so many questions and with so many questions about how the world works and how they can engage it. So I think that’s been a really great, very cool part of this job.

[0:10:49 Frederick]  Well, speaking of classrooms and spaces where we at once, want it to be comforting and at the same time discomforting in a, in a way that pushes us, right, wherever we’re coming from whatever backgrounds and journeys we’re coming from in a kind of shared collective push forward. I’d like to ask you about this constellation home, your book, of course. And what that might mean just right now in terms of, you know, what you do in that classroom space to possibly, you know, create a constellation of home.

[0:11:35 Jo]  Yeah. So I guess the central metaphor of the book, which comes from scholarship and cultural rhetorics is this notion of constellation that if you think about the metaphor of, you know, stars in the sky, it’s not that there’s a preset or predetermined constellation out there. It’s that we looking at it are drawing a particular configuration of stars to, to see something, an animal or a shape or whatever and somebody else might not draw the same lines, might not make the same connections. And so it’s on us to sort of show them how we’re getting where we get to and also to see sort of what other people are seeing there. And so you’re able to sort of grasp in a constellation that they’re both individual stars and also what the stars make up when you look at them as a whole. And they just sort of what we’re doing a lot in the classroom and that we can look at individual stories, we can think about our individual experiences and the personal perspectives we bring into the room. And also we’re looking at them in the broader picture, we’re getting out of it, right? So like maybe I’m taking a disability class and I don’t identify as disabled, but I come in here with experiences of disability or of not encountering disability. And all of that is data in a way. All of that is, is knowledge about how information travels or doesn’t travel about how we communicate or don’t communicate. And I can put that into a bigger picture of how we think about disability and the history of disability and, and the history of who’s gotten to speak and shape our policies. And hopefully we come away with a bigger picture of how we are all sort of bound up in these systems together and therefore in some ways, you know, collectively responsible for it.

[0:13:08 Frederick]  Mm Beautiful. Yeah, absolutely. And in the, the writing and the research for Constellation Home, which came out last year with Os U Press. and I see too that there, there must have been some funding behind it because it, I think in 2027 it will become available, right? Freely available.

[0:13:30 Jo]  Yeah, it’ll be all open access. It was also open access for two months this summer, which is something that I negotiated into the contract. I was really happy about just to make it accessible to folks for whom it might not be affordable. But yes, the thing, one of the things I love about Os U Press is that all of its academic titles become open access after five years.

[0:13:50 Frederick]  Yeah. So important. speaking of which, you know, making the kind of conceptual deep work that we do accessible to the public, to publics. there is a very much a blending here in this book of the personal narrative. But also there’s a kind of beautiful way that you also craft the narrative. And so I was thinking back to your mentioning that narrative, it’s not narrative ecology, it’s narrative ecologies. And there’s, you know, really, you know, while some people want to put boundaries between disciplines, between public and private academic or Ivory Tower and community, you’re pushing from where I, what I can see. You’re really, obviously, you’re, you’re, you’re basically erasing these walls, these so these sort of lines drawn in sand. Can you share your experience with writing and researching this book? It’s, it’s beautiful.

[0:15:00 Jo]  Yeah, thank you. So the book really began with the question of sort of what does trans and queer and disabled Asian American community look like. I grew up in Phoenix Houston. These are spaces that are incredibly diverse but not particularly, you know, Asian American heavy or like, you know, it’s not, it’s not the Bay area basically. And so I hadn’t really experienced specifically like queer Asian American Spaces. I had experienced queer spaces in which I was the only Asian American person and Asian American Spaces in which I was the only queer person. And so it was a question of, you know, how do you create community out of this identity that often feels really sort of abstract. And not particularly grounded, especially when you think of Asian America as the racial group with the largest, you know, wealth and educational disparity with no shared language, no shared homeland. That then gets lumped together into this, you know, like you are all the same group on, on this particular soil. So what does that mean? You know, like, what does it mean to build a community out of that? And so I went to the Bay Area actually. and I spent time with queer Asian American orgs that were trying to do that thing, that we’re trying to build community and build a sense of like, you know, collective investment in one another in a, in a, an idea of a shared past and a shared future. And it was like, what can I learn from this space? And what does it teach me about the ways that I should be engaging other people engaging my students, engaging the idea of making knowledge or telling stories? And so it, it, it began, you know, as a question and as a search for relationships basically. And, you know, because of that, I think it is, it spends a lot of time asking, you know, what does it mean to be a researcher in these spaces? And what is my responsibility? What are the risks that communities are taking when they allow me into their spaces? How do I honor that? How do I avoid perpetuating the sort of violences of academics historically going into community spaces and extracting them, you know, for their own careers? And how do I produce something that hopefully, you know, other queer and trans and disabled Asian Americans can see themselves in my biggest fear was to produce a thing that like somebody else, you know, would look at and, and be like, you know, this is yet another representation of me that actually erases my very presence. And so, you know, the most, I don’t know, having a book is a weird experience. Having it go out in the world is a weird, weird experience. But the most gratifying thing about the book being out in the world are the responses I’ve received from, you know, queer and trans and disabled as Asian Americans who have written me or other, you know, queer and trans people of color about the ways that they see themselves or that they connect to the story. And I think if I had one hope for the book, it’s that it is like an invitation, you know, you might disagree with it, you might have other things you wish I could have said. And I hope that that’s a way that people can connect into it, you know, like I hope that that means it gives you a conversation to latch on to and, and move from. because for me entering academic conversations was such the challenge for so long was I don’t know if there is a conversation I, that I want to be a part of or that sees myself as, as a potential participant. And so, you know, if I have one hope for this, it is that it, it does that, that it opens a space for people to, to enter these spaces and engage and build their knowledge that speak to them.

[0:18:39 Frederick]  Mhm Yeah, that that careful listening, right? That gosh are lives, at least my life seems to increasingly disallow, you know, but that you do so, so well. in your book and in your work, generally, I also know that you, you know, it’s not just writing, alphabetic, writing, creative writing, but it’s also photographic narrative and video narrative, oral history, narrative. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[0:19:22 Jo]  Yeah, about the archives in the book. I think, I mean, I was one of the things that really blew me away was just the diversity and depth of expertise and knowledge in these spaces. For example, one of the first writing sort of workshops I attended was a free school run by Celeste who’s a writer activist out in the Bay Area. And it’s school technically, like, it’s, three hours of class each week that there’s no degree. There’s no, there’s nothing you can get at the end of it except that there are, you know, this, this group of 18 to 25 year olds who come every single week because they’re so hungry for that history, for that education, for that connection, for these, for this knowledge that they never received before. and it was the first time that I really, it really struck me like, what does education look like when it’s not bound up in these ideas of production? And you know, what job will this get me? What grade is this, you know, leading toward how many points is this worth? And it was really beautiful to sort of witness, what is it like to make knowledge or to archive history when the motive really is, you know, self and communal knowledge when it is like, I am trying to create connections that are meaningful to leave something behind for future generations where they can see themselves. And so I think because of that, there is such a diversity of approaches and a diversity of expertise. So there are, you know, photo photo portrait gallery. So me and Ian is a photographer archivist who runs the the Visibility project. And she has this book, she, she spent a period of time traveling across all of the United States, taking portraits of queer and trans Asian American and Pacific Islander women and trans people. And it’s, if you buy the book, it’s this full color like portrait photography book. And I just remember like having my breath stolen when I first opened it just because I’d never seen that many faces that like in some ways, like I felt a deep personal, like relationship toward. and it was just, yeah, for me, it was really moving to, to just see this collection of, of so many Grand trans Asian Americans in one space. And from there, they built other projects that are like performance shows and you know, the gallery exhibitions. But yeah, I think there’s a diversity of approaches because there’s a diversity of people and expertise and also because it’s a matter of access, you know, like different people connect in different ways. And it’s important to have all of those different approaches in order to enter this conversation, to feel a part of this community, to feel like you are authorized to contribute to it.

[0:22:19 Frederick]  Where is fiction and nonfiction in your life today? I know that you, you write fiction, you’ve even been up for a push cart and a number of other prizes. How, how is this, how do you kind of breathe in that space as well as the kind of scholarly, the teaching space?

[0:22:42 Jo]  Yeah. I think, I mean, I never moved away from story. It’s always been my method. For me, nothing makes sense. If there is no story, like you can have all of the data in the world, but you have to put it into some kind of narrative to make an argument with it, you know, like changing global temperatures are only climate change if you can story the sort of actions we’ve taken and the effects that they’ve created. So, so story still is I I think about rhetoric as a series of stories, you know, like when you get a diagnosis, for example, there’s a story embedded in there about sort of what led to it, what its consequences are, what you might be doing because of it. And sometimes whether or not you that diagnosis, whether the physician thinks it’s possible for you has to do with the stories they get about what that disease or illness looks like. whether or not you match that description. And it’s led to things like, you know, under diagnosis of a lot of things among people of color and over diagnosis of a lot of things among people of color, depending on sort of what the story is around this, this label. So that the story is like largely how I think about things. It is a large part of my method in the book and that I do a lot of storytelling. I think that storytelling makes things accessible in a way that more traditional forms of academic argumentation do not. I think, I, I mean, I, I think as a red, I like to use genres for their strengths, right? So there are some things that are, that are fit for arguing and more straightforward, like logical developments and some things that only make sense through story and a lot of the messiness of human experience makes sense through story. Like it’s reductive to try to make it a claim counterclaim. But it is important that we sit with this experience and that we consider what its implications are for us and our actions and that for me is done through story. So there’s that and then there’s the fact that now that that book is out I’m doing, I’m trying to, to sort of revive more of the creator, creative writer in me. and working on more projects that have to do that are more like straightforwardly narrative. Now that I sort of have the first academic book off my shoulders, I guess.

[0:25:01 Frederick]  Big sigh of really. Yeah, it’s interesting in my smartphone and storytelling. and wellness course, right now, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of work in that, in that same space that you were just talking about. And fundamentally coming to the conclusion that at least at this stage A I, because it’s logic driven A equals B equals C can never capture the messiness of story telling or story thinking that’s so important and, and in fact, as you’ve mentioned, and as our, as our students confirm, that’s where the deeper memory, the deeper engagement and the kind of long, almost deep planetary time takeaway happens. It’s in story, it’s not in the kind of A equals B equals C,

[0:25:53 Jo]  right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that’s where our memories and our sense of self come from. You know, like we, we put events into a story about who we are and who we want to be. And that’s, you know, what makes us human

[0:26:04 Frederick]  in your classroom in, in these, you know, in the classes that you teach, disability rhetorics, transgender rhetorics, podcasts and paradigm shifts, storytelling for the revolution. Could you where maybe, maybe we’ve already sort of answered this but what journey do you wanna take your students on or maybe where do you want them to end up? at the end of their journey with you in any given class?

[0:26:38 Jo]  I think, you know, in the most, in the broadest sense, I hope that they’ve developed a more expansive set of tools for understanding and for examining, for questioning the information that comes to them and the experiences that they have. my, my joking description of what I do as a rhetorician is I study how you, how you say things without saying things. and so much of, especially, you know, systemic discrimination is buried in our communication. It’s not overt anymore, but it is, you know, implicit in a way that sometimes is obvious, but often makes us complicit without knowing it. And I think it’s really important that we develop a more robust set of tools for encountering that and for taking responsibility for it. So I hope they feel better equipped to do that. Just to, to interrogate how they’re engaging the world, how the world engages them. And also that they feel empowered to, to do something about it.

[0:27:44 Frederick]  Yeah, I love that. And it’s funny, I was last spring, I was in a conversation with, you know, on the end into the Collier office hours where we were tackling this kind of doom gloom sense that, you know, the humanities has failed and, you know, we’re obsolete and all of that, right? And the one thing that I was kind of the takeaway and the surprise for me was that people forget or the mainstream obliterates the fact that we’re all, of course, we’re all driven by the same goals to have our students, you know, acquire the kind of concepts and knowledge to critically engage with the world and to be sort of transformative members of this planet. But we do it in different ways. There’s no one way, right? And it’s like listening to you, you know, of course you’re doing this incredible work over here and this with students and providing them with these really important tools that then they can remelt and make a new and do really wonderful things with. And I’m over here doing something with comic books and, you know, pop culture or what have you. But somehow the mainstream puts humanities all into one thing and decides that we are failing like, you know, future generations.

[0:29:09 Jo]  Yeah. Yeah, the I think the crisis narrative of a higher education, that’s a whole different conversation anyway. But it completely obliterates the sort of nuance the power of what we do. And also the fact that even if you’re going to talk about things in utilitarian terms, if you’re gonna talk about its usefulness or like it, it’s additive properties to your, your future as a job in your job. Like that’s all there too actually. Like this is all crucial tools for being humans in the world. And there’s that joke that like stem can tell you how to clone a dinosaur and humanities can tell you why it’s a bad idea. But like the, the disciplines work together in, in, in really important ways they, they give us as part of that consolation, right? Like they give us different perspectives on really complicated issues and we need all of them, we need experts in all of these different areas. We need disagreements, we need different perspectives because we are human and we need to be able to, you know, account for the diversity of, of experience and possibilities in the world.

[0:30:22 Frederick]  Wow. Absolutely. Completely 100%. So Jo, tell me, what are you, what’s preoccupying? You mentioned, you know, with the constellation home now out there and, you know, being received so wonderfully. Now you’re able to kind of take a, a bit, a big breath of, you know, fresh air. What have you, but tell me what are you reading or viewing, what’s occupying your mind? That’s exciting, that kind of proverbial bed stand, you know, reading that you’re doing right

[0:30:59 Jo]  now. Yeah, it’s funny. I was just, writing this to a friend the other day. so Roger Reeves and Center and Department of English over here, a phenomenal fair, acclaimed writer just had a nonfiction book come out dark days. fugitive essays I think is the sub subtitle on a series of essays on Black ecstasy. He’s a really brilliant poet. And when I’m writing, sometimes I read certain texts just like, like just certain pages or certain sections, I’ll just keep returning to them in the same way that you might listen to a song while you’re writing, like, just trying to put your mind in a certain space. And that book has been sitting with me a lot as I’m sort of returning to a sort of creative writing, I don’t know, mode in my head. I think, I mean, Roger is a writer. I could never hope to be. He’s also a very different writer than I am. Like I can tell in the way that he does words, that he sees them differently and reading him, I feel like opens the way, opens my relationship to language in a way that I find really inspiring. And so that’s been really just like having that voice, the way that he sees things, the way that the sort of the rhythm of his sentences and his words and the images with me as I’m trying to sort of reacquaint myself with the creative writer that I wanna be has been, I don’t know, a really great journey I think in just this past month has been the thing that I’ve been sitting with.

[0:32:33 Frederick]  Yeah, another incredible special talent that I feel very lucky to be sharing, you know, a campus space with Jo. This has been absolutely amazing. You’ve taken us on this wonderful journey, powerful journey, you know, you finding the power of story already as a child making your way through, you know, the, these different degree programs, creative writing, phd in rhetoric and composition, the constellation home, which has so many ripples across, you know, you, you know, our work and our lives and finally, this kind of beautiful way that you bring us to listen and open to new ways of experiencing language. Thank you, Jo. Thank you.

[0:33:27 Jo]  Thank you for, for having me. This is fantastic

[0:33:31 Outro]  into the verse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts instructional technology services. You can find into the coli verse podcasts on Apple podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time