Political Commitment and the Making of a Hmong American Feminist Movement

This article focuses on a Hmong American feminist movement against abusive international marriages (AIM), a form of gender-based violence that emerged from the transnational networks of Hmong diasporic life. While existing scholarship has examined Building Our Future, a national campaign that emerged from this movement, as well as its social entrepreneurship efforts in Laos, the movement’s Wisconsin origins have only been briefly noted, not historically examined in depth. My study addresses that gap by examining the Wisconsin-based community-led organizing that coined the term AIM. Drawing on original interviews with community advocates and organizers, archival materials, and born-digital sources, I contend that the movement has endured because of a sustained political commitment to liberation from gendered, racial, and economic injustices. This commitment has shaped a transnational identity not primarily grounded in shared cultural identity and suffering, which has begun to nurture an alternative form of belonging among advocates and organizers. Secondly, unlike existing scholarship, I argue that naming the violence as AIM is a community-driven initiative to recenter the “marriage” discourse away from the sex trafficking framework. Finally, this study is an effort to incorporate the narratives of a Hmong American feminist movement into the broader historiography of U.S. feminist movements in the twenty-first century.