Spilling the Tea: Aunty Discipline and the Queer Diasporic Child in D’Lo’s To T, or Not To T?

Abstract

Abstract This article examines To T, or Not To T?, a solo play by D’Lo, a queer transmasculine Sri Lankan Tamil American performance artist and comedian. Considering the Super Aunty character, I examine how aunties orient diasporic life towards multiple modes of belonging and exclusion. Specifically, I explore how Aunty Discipline directed toward the queer diasporic child is vital in creating future hetero-reproductive diasporic subjects, then consider the intimacies of fictive kinship through the term ‘fam’. The queer diasporic body is a text on which others enact diasporic meanings, but D’Lo uses that very queer body to actively reimagine and re-image family and community, thereby infusing these spaces with his own queer ontologies and epistemologies.