A colonized life is often the life you do not live. A life lived apart. It is being the body defined, never the body defining. I was once asked to define for myself what it’s like. To talk about what it is to live with so many marginalizations in this one body. The problem with defining colonization though, is its pervasiveness in one’s life. I cannot tease apart, hold up and examine my queerness, femininity, or disability as oppressions distinct from one another. They all converge here, together in me somehow. This is not a story with a beginning, middle and end. I don’t have a neat box to put it in. I only have what happened, as my memory allows.
???Yes, my mother is Japanese. But??????: Notes on a hyphenated and colon-ized identity
Myneighbor was having a stoop sale this morning, and although I have been living next to this woman, her son and husband for the…