Research

Presently, Joanmarie is working on her first monograph, which explores the relationship among gratitude, indebtedness, and family in contemporary narratives about Asian American and Pacific Islander adoptees, refugees, and migrant domestic workers in the U.S. South. Her research theorizes southern hostilities: affectations and sensibilities that make visible how family, home-making, and the domestic sphere function as contradictory sites of gratitude and belonging but also indebtedness and servitude. The project argues that how adoptees, refugees, and migrant domestic workers perform gratitude, indebtedness, and hospitality as conditions for belonging within the family reveals the conditions for belonging as subjects under U.S. empire. Centering narratives of queer kinship that subvert “good adoptee,” “good refugee,” and “good immigrant” tropes, her research makes visible ways of being, caring, working, and persisting that are irreducible to limiting narratives of model minority resilience.

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

“Synaesthetics of Transracial Adoption in Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong.”MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 50, no. 3 (2025) 77–97.

Book Chapters

“Good Ghosts and Other Southern Specters.” Our Southern Accents: Asian American Voices in the U.S. South. Edited by Thảo L. Hà and Roy Vũ. Rutgers University Press (under contract).

Essays

“Sister, Outsider, or Reflections on My Mother.”Southern Cultures 31, no. 1 (2025): 116–23.

Book Reviews

Solicited Review of Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong.The Georgia Review 71, no. 1 (2022): 332–35.

Review of The Disappearing Act by Sara Pirkle Hughes. South Atlantic Review 84, nos. 2–3 (2019): 283–85.