Open Collections

Wan, Amanda

University of British Columbia

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.

Text

2022-12-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/83497

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/