“Blessed are the Beloved”: On Trans and Asian American Suicide

Examining various definitions of dissociation in trans studies and Asian American studies, this essay analyzes the work of Mark Aguhar and Andrew Pham to deconstruct racialized experiences of suicide and articulate the simultaneous process of becoming both grieving subject and (ag)grieved object. In particular, the author highlights the ways that trans and Asian American communities have both developed a discourse of distance—between subjects, temporalities, and various versions of the self—to describe experiences of fractured and broken becoming. Rather than rejecting or pathologizing these descriptions, the article develops the term, “dissociative distance,” to name the shifting relations produced by such narrative conventions. Turning to a number of gender transition narratives from refugee and migrant subjects, the author shifts away from psychoanalytic emphases on life and death in transition to displaced identifications of grief. Finally, the essay ends with visions from Aguhar and Pham, expanding on the relational possibilities they open up with their lives and work and the limits of relation in their deaths.