FIRESIDE CHAT: “Death Becomes Her: Asiatic Femininity and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement”

Dehumanizing descriptions of Asian people have saturated the U.S. cultural imagination, and encouraged a long history of anti-Asian violence. In particular, Asian women and femmes have been objectified in popular culture in ways that have marked their racial difference and femininity as licentious, morally corrupt, and threatening. Because of this perceived threat, portrayals of Asiatic femininity as complex and multitudinous are often arrested through representations of disfigurement, mutilation or harm.

Rejecting these representations as foregone conclusions, Asian American diasporic, and cultural producers are re-appropriating the aesthetics of disfigurement. This talk explores the relational and feminist possibilities that emerge when disfigurement is not merely a reflection of racial and gender-based violence, but a mode of engagement that explores differentiated histories of imperialism, lived and embodied experiences, and human and non-human intimacies. By paying attention to the ways bodies, flesh, and in/animacies are rendered in their works, this talk offers a critical reading practice of disfigurement through Asian American feminist frameworks.

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