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UBC Theses and Dissertations
Erotic mediations of queer Asian in/organicity in The Tiger Flu and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Wan, Amanda
Abstract
This thesis centers the production of the “Asian” body in terms of its erotic mediations— that is, the sensorial, sensual, and sexual registers that produce the concept of “Asian” as a legible subject of discourse around racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference. Following Audre Lorde, I conceive of erotics as a relationship with power that each body has the capacity to engender, offering a conception of subjectivity that critiques liberal humanist valorizations of sovereign speech and organic humanity. Erotics confounds binarized conceptions of in/organicity, im/materiality, and self/other by foregrounding forms of relationality that are considered illegible within the archives of imperial war and global capitalism. Practicing critique oriented to erotic mediations enables what is considered immaterial to become palpable, through critical and creative orientations toward the aesthetic materiality of power and ambivalence. Attending to critical theories of race, queer theory, techno-Orientalism, critical refugee studies, and critical Black studies, thinking with the Asian body surfaces the epistemological ambivalence of erotics, as it indexes speculative narratives around inorganic subjectivity and labour wrought within post-Cold War global capitalism. Reading narrativizations of imperial war in the transpacific within Ocean Vuong’s epistolary novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Larissa Lai’s speculative fiction novel The Tiger Flu, I suggest that ambivalence enables reciprocity to become a mode of ethical relationality that does not disavow interplays of power, but attends to conditions that have inscribed illegibility as absence. Chapter One reads The Tiger Flu for techno-Orientalist aesthetic tropes that have produced concepts of “Asianness” such as virtuality, glitches, and disembodiment in relation to global modernity. I ask how the Asian body both indexes and is conditioned by discourses of organic subjectivity and labour rather than functioning only as representations of ideological consciousness, or avatars of dialectical critique. Chapter Two foregrounds On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to develop the concept of “fugitive erotics” to frame refugee epistemologies around care, survival, and memory from within conditions of displacement and loss. Overall, I ask how we can address our selves and others as forms of mediating the uneasy interrelations between care and violence—through the body, without taking it for granted.
Item Metadata
Title |
Erotic mediations of queer Asian in/organicity in The Tiger Flu and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
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Creator | |
Supervisor | |
Publisher |
University of British Columbia
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Date Issued |
2022
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Description |
This thesis centers the production of the “Asian” body in terms of its erotic mediations—
that is, the sensorial, sensual, and sexual registers that produce the concept of “Asian” as a
legible subject of discourse around racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference. Following
Audre Lorde, I conceive of erotics as a relationship with power that each body has the capacity
to engender, offering a conception of subjectivity that critiques liberal humanist valorizations of
sovereign speech and organic humanity. Erotics confounds binarized conceptions of
in/organicity, im/materiality, and self/other by foregrounding forms of relationality that are
considered illegible within the archives of imperial war and global capitalism. Practicing critique
oriented to erotic mediations enables what is considered immaterial to become palpable, through
critical and creative orientations toward the aesthetic materiality of power and ambivalence.
Attending to critical theories of race, queer theory, techno-Orientalism, critical refugee studies,
and critical Black studies, thinking with the Asian body surfaces the epistemological
ambivalence of erotics, as it indexes speculative narratives around inorganic subjectivity and
labour wrought within post-Cold War global capitalism.
Reading narrativizations of imperial war in the transpacific within Ocean Vuong’s
epistolary novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Larissa Lai’s speculative fiction novel
The Tiger Flu, I suggest that ambivalence enables reciprocity to become a mode of ethical
relationality that does not disavow interplays of power, but attends to conditions that have
inscribed illegibility as absence. Chapter One reads The Tiger Flu for techno-Orientalist aesthetic
tropes that have produced concepts of “Asianness” such as virtuality, glitches, and
disembodiment in relation to global modernity. I ask how the Asian body both indexes and is
conditioned by discourses of organic subjectivity and labour rather than functioning only as representations of ideological consciousness, or avatars of dialectical critique. Chapter Two
foregrounds On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to develop the concept of “fugitive erotics” to
frame refugee epistemologies around care, survival, and memory from within conditions of
displacement and loss. Overall, I ask how we can address our selves and others as forms of
mediating the uneasy interrelations between care and violence—through the body, without taking
it for granted.
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Genre | |
Type | |
Language |
eng
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Date Available |
2022-12-22
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Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
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Rights |
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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DOI |
10.14288/1.0422830
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URI | |
Degree | |
Program | |
Affiliation | |
Degree Grantor |
University of British Columbia
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Graduation Date |
2023-05
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Campus | |
Scholarly Level |
Graduate
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Rights URI | |
Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
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Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International