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As crises of climate, empire, and identity unfold, queer and trans AAPI communities are cultivating fierce and tender ways of surviving, leading, and imagining otherwise. In this CLGS Lavender Lunch, Dr. Lisa Asedillo explores what it means to be “called” in a world that often erases or exoticizes AAPI queer lives.

Framed through the lens of Queer AZN and Pasifika Critical Race Theory (Alvarez et al., 2024), this talk weaves AAPI theologies with the six core tenets of this emerging framework, centering embodied memory, relational healing, and spiritual resistance as resources for community-rooted praxis.

Citing contemporary examples of Pride in the Philippines as a celebration of acceptance and the work of organizations like Bahaghari Center for SOGIE Research, Education and Advocacy, we will reflect on what becomes possible when queer AAPI leaders conspire to remember, resist, and reimagine together.

Our Presenter

Dr. Lisa Asedilllo

Dr. Lisa Asedillo (she/hers) is an ethicist and liturgist with research interests in decolonial/postcolonial feminist theory, transpacific and Asian American Christian Ethics, and Philippine studies. Lisa earned her MDiv at Union Theological Seminary and her PhD at Drew University in the Religion and Society area. Lisa’s co-authored chapter, “Becoming Asian American Christian Ethicists,” is included in Asian and Asian American Women’s Contributions to Theology and Religious Studies: Embodying Knowledge, edited by Dr. Kwok Pui Lan (2020); and she is a contributor to INHERITANCE magazine, which amplifies the Asian American and Pacific Islander experience of Christianity.

Lisa is also a board member of Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM), an organization for education, mentoring, and networking that was founded in 1984. Given her mixed race heritage, queer identity, and transnational upbringing, she takes seriously that her particular embodiment gestures back towards painful colonial history, and also towards a particular experience with something to offer the work of solidarity, community building and ritual, and spiritually-rooted leadership development.

A CLGS Fall 2025 Lavender Lunch