Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
11-2022
Abstract
In terms of Asian Americans whose reputations have been popularly derided, the concerned parent activist Hak-Shing William Tam perhaps ranks among the top. Tam was a citizen proponent of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008 to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage and became a hostile witness for the plaintiffs in the subsequent 2010 lawsuit to overturn the amendment, Perry v. Schwarzenegger. In this paper, I explore Tam’s claim to privacy in his understanding of these events, both in terms of his sexualized imagination of liberal civil society and his suffering from what he understood as violations of his own privacy. I argue that Tam tried to operationalize an understanding of society that idealized the “Asian family” as the bulwark of an order composed primarily of secure private spaces, which speaks (I further claim) to longstanding anxieties within Chinese America about how what Gary Okihiro calls the “social formation”—an interlocking institutional network that composes a governing apparatus—subjects Asian Americans to ongoing colonization. In so doing, I hope to show that Tam’s concerns do not only speak to concerns in Asian American studies about pervasive evangelical influence in Asian American communities. Instead, they reveal that Asian American conceptions of the private sphere are ideologies that circulate within our communities and should be taken seriously in Asian American studies.
Discipline
Political Science
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume
26
Issue
1
First Page
63
Last Page
85
ISSN
1096-8598
Identifier
10.1353/jaas.2023.0011
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Citation
TSE, Justin Kh.(2022). The privacy of Hak-Shing William Tam: Imagining asian families in California’s proposition 8. Journal of Asian American Studies, 26(1), 63-85.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3894
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2023.0011