Open Collections

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the digitally mediated forms and aesthetics of contemporary Asian North American poems, performance, and internet art on/about glitchy or non-performing feminine Asiatic cyborgs. Situated at the intersection of Asian American studies, posthumanism, and new media studies, it posits that the cyborg, as an enduring techno-Orientalist trope, continues to index the West’s anxieties about an Asianized future at the same time that it focalizes longer histories of Asian racialization emerging lockstep with shifting im/migration, aesthetics, and labor arrangements. Such arrangements, I argue, are reflexively tied to legacies of Western cybernetic history, US imperialism and Cold War militarism in Asia, as well as the global restructuring of capital engendered by the rise of information and communications technologies. To that end, this project traces how the feminine cyborgs in Chia Amisola’s poetic manifesto, “How to become a cyberfeminist” (2025), and performance art piece Himala (2024), as well as Franny Choi’s and Margaret Rhee’s poetry collections, Soft Science (2019) and Love, Robot (2017), respectively, come to instantiate the “real-life cyborgs,” or, the contemporary feminine Asian subjects discursively and materially shaped by enduring techno-Orientalist scripts and imperialist histories across multiple scales and geographies. I contend that Amisola’s, Choi’s, and Rhee’s turn to intentionally impractical or ornamental glitchy aesthetics and digitally mediated forms––manifest as broken codework poems, non-executable algorithms, lagging sounds, and corrupted graphics––as both mode and method, might, in turn, configure a feminist Asian diasporic cyborg poetics that critically maps and resists the ways in which contemporary feminine subjects come into being or legibility through digital objects. Ultimately, this project examines how strategic glitchy embodiments of the cyborg might enable us to imagine alternative relationalities or more capacious modes of being for Asian diasporic women dis/placed by the multiplicities of empire in increasingly intimate and de-territorialized ways.