Menyuam Laib Ua Laib [Gangster Youth Can Do It]: Queer and Trans HMoob Youth Storying Dab Neeg to Transform and Maintain Culture

Abstract

Racism remains deeply embedded in our society and education. Deficit language, devaluing of cultural assets, and assimilationist beliefs in an effort to maintain the status quo are still ongoing. But young people are resourceful and continue to find new ways to challenge and disrupt these occurrences while maintaining connections and roots to their heritage. In this dissertation, I introduce a theory of Menyuam Laib, which describes the different ways queer and trans HMoob youth maintain and transform their language and culture. In their pursuits, they are pathologized as “Menyuam Laib” (a gangster or bad youth) for what is perceived as non-normative practices. However, a theory of Menyuam Laib reframes and celebrates them as cultural reworkers who enact their history, language, and culture as sustenance; disrupt deficit narratives about themselves and their community; destabilize the status quo; and contest white-cisgenderheteronormative- patriarchal violence. By engaging in storying with five queer and trans HMoob youth, we see how their lived experiences influence the dab neeg they pass down to the next generation. A theory of Menyuam Laib presented in this dissertation draws on multiple frameworks such as history on the run, queer refugeeism, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and HMoob youth reclamation to shed light on the ways queer and trans HMoob youth are sustaining and transforming their culture with dab neeg of their own. This phenomenon can inform and contribute to ways curricula and practices across all learning spaces can improve for queer Asian and Indigenous youth more broadly and for all young people whose lives have multiple intersecting identities. Finally, this project also has the potential to build upon and extend interrelated theories of HMoob youth, communities, and queerness, Asianness, refugeeism, and Indigeneity.