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Erotic mediations of Queer Asian in/organicity in The Tiger Flu and On Earth We’re

Briefly Gorgeous

by

Amanda Wan

B.A. Hon., University of British Columbia, 2020

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

in

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

(English)

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

(Vancouver)

December 2022

© Amanda Wan, 2022

ii

The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate

and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled:

Erotic mediations of Queer Asian in/organicity in The Tiger Flu and On Earth We’re

Briefly Gorgeous

in partial fulfilment of the requirements

for

submitted by Amanda Wan

the degree of Master of Arts

in English

Examining Committee:

Dr. Danielle Wong, Assistant Professor, English Language and Literatures, UBC

Supervisor

Dr. Christopher B. Patterson, Assistant Professor, Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice,

UBC

Supervisory Committee Member

iii

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

iv

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.

v

Lay Summary

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 race, gender, and sexuality. Following Audre Lorde, I think

with erotics as a relationship with power that each body has the capacity to engender, offering a

conception of ethical relationality that critiques liberal humanist aesthetics around subjectivity.

Erotics can foreground what might be felt in the body but isn't necessarily legible. This

ambivalence troubles binarized distinctions between in/organic, im/material, and self/other.

Working with critical theories of race, queer theory, techno-Orientalism, critical refugee studies,

and critical Black studies, I read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Larissa

Lai’s The Tiger Flu for figurations of the Asian body that depict, and enable, ambivalence

around power and relationality within conditions of post-Cold War global capitalism.

vi

Preface

This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Amanda Wan. An

earlier version of Chapter One was presented as “Melancholic capital and postures of kinship in

Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu” at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in 2021. In

2022, an earlier version of Chapter Two was presented as “Fugitive erotics and textures of

intimacy in Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous” at FLESH: Embodying Praxis, the

annual symposium organized by UBC Art History, Visual Art, and Theory (AHVA) graduate

students.

Epigraphs for Chapter One and Two feature excerpts from Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with

Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press) and Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of Mercy (Arsenal Pulp

Press). Permission has been granted, by the copyright holders and publishers, for use of these

excerpts in this thesis and in all copies to meet university requirements, including

ProQuest/University Microfilms edition and other thesis/dissertation repositories and archives.

Standard acknowledgement is included with each epigraph.

vi

i

Table of Contents

Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... iii

Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... v

Preface .......................................................................................................................................... vi

Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... vii

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... viii

Dedication .................................................................................................................................... xi

Introduction: Ambivalence and the aesthetic materiality of power ….................................... 1

Chapter One: Virtuality’s ambivalence in The Tiger Flu ...................................................... 15

Glitchy dis/embodiments ................................................................................................. 23

The doubling of the real ................................................................................................... 31

Feeling temporality, failing time ...................................................................................... 40

Chapter Two: Fugitive erotics and refugee figurations in On Earth We’re Briefly

Gorgeous ..................................................................................................................................... 46

The phantom limb: Vulnerability in fantasy .................................................................... 53

Dear Ma: Erotics of the epistolary and queerly reproductive labour ............................... 59

Arriving at love: Sex, pain, pleasures in power ............................................................... 65

Coda ............................................................................................................................................ 69

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 71

vi

i

i

Acknowledgements

Abundant generosity sustains this body of work. I’m deeply grateful for my supervisor

and mentor, Dr. Danielle Wong, for always saying what needs to be said, always with care and

thoughtful intensity. Our conversations throughout the process have been restorative, whether I

was feeling excited about a concept or incredibly alienated by the conditions of academic

scholarship. I am also exceedingly thankful for my reader, Dr. Chris Patterson, whose own

writing and stories enable me to sit with the queasy complexities of pleasure, and who offered

“gutsy” as a remark I continue to cherish. Thank you both for being you.

Many others have supported me over the years as caring teachers and mentors. Gratitude

goes to Drs. Chris Lee, JP Catungal, Phanuel Antwi, and Dina Al-Kassim for your formative

encouragements and gorgeous sense of humour. And thank you to Dr. Y-Dang Troeung, whose

profoundly kind, caring, and visionary presence in life and in scholarship and are deeply missed.

Appreciations also to Drs. Kimberly Bain and Christine Kim, whose counsel has been much

appreciated. This first-generation student could not have arrived at graduate school without all of

these incomparable guides.

Fellow staff members at the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM)

program have made all the difference through both my undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Thank you to the ACAM team, including members from then and now, who have shared their

unique tenderness with me through a nearly decade-long period of my life.

All those cited have created space for me to enter my own questions. Ocean Vuong and

Larissa Lai, your artistry moves me to become a wiser student and poet of both life and death.

Thank you to facilitators and participants of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting

2021, and the 45th Annual AHVA Symposium 2022, who generously received earlier versions

ix

of Chapters One and Two, respectively. Threads of Chapter Two also began in seminars on

queer theory (taught by Dr. Chris Patterson) and on critical refugee studies (taught by Dr. Y-

Dang Troeung, with Dr. Chris Patterson). Thank you to classmates alongside Drs. Patterson and

Troeung for being the loveliest teachers. Appreciations also to the staff at the Department of

English Language and Literatures, along with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada (SSHRC), who provide much-needed administrative and financial support to

make this thesis possible.

Thank you to my birth family for introducing me to the potency of ambivalence.

Chosen kin and loving peers have provided soft landings for me throughout the project. I

could never theorize, let alone practice, a mode of critique around erotic mediations or

reciprocity without them. I remain dedicated to: Szu Shen, for your powerful gentleness and rare

heart wisdom. Brook Xiang, for believing in my strength, especially when it is not apparent, and

appreciating my love, especially when I offer it gladly. Andrea Schartner, for being the one who

always calls. Jane Shi, for every poem and dumpling fold. Y Vy Truong, for your generous punk

heart and sage recommendations on everything from lipstick colours to driving instructors.

Oliver, for seeing what is special about all the “silly little things.” Rachel Lau 劉可莉, for

teaching me that there are as many ways to love as there are loved ones. Olivia Lim, for your

radiant companionship in writing and work, and for reminding me that nobody does this work

alone—certainly not without other things worth living for. Huệ Nguyen, for inviting me into the

rooms of your art, and the art that is your laugh. 이금주 Adela Lee, for keeping in touch all

these years. Akos Backwards-Looking Prophetess, for describing what I cannot see. Cassandra

O., for keeping the coven. Phebe M. Ferrer, for carrying the fire. Christy Fong, for shared

conversations about our desire and paranoia around AI technology. Rusaba Alam, for

x

demystifying intellectual labour. Meg Mead, for getting me to shore. Rebecca Peng, for your

velvet aura. Leilan Mei Yin Wong, who appeared in my earliest days at the university. Janice

Liu, for appreciating the adorable and the monstrous alike. Maya Sabina Acharya, for new and

dear friendship. Amila Li, for your astrological wisdom.

My life partner and soulmate, Tray Ma, has my whole heart. Your companionship

reminds me that possibility always exists beyond language, in this lifetime and through the next.

Written within the unceded, occupied, and ancestral lands that have been stewarded by

the xʷməθkʷəy

əm, sḵwxwú7mesh, and sʔəlilwətaʔɬ (Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh)

peoples, this project is inseparable from the multiplicities of empire. While only some of these

multiplicities are addressed within the pages that follow, I hope to orient my writing towards

questions of how relationality might feel without persistent imperialism or authoritarianism.

Thank you to those who take care of all named here. And to all named: thank you for

helping me write through beauty of uncertainty.

xi

Dedication

for all our wayward selves & others

& for Y-Dang Troeung, whose absence is deeply felt

1

Introduction: Ambivalence and the aesthetic materiality of power

loneliness is still time spent

with the world. Here's

the room with everyone in it.

Your dead friends passing

through you like wind

through a wind chime.

…

Yes, here's a room

so warm & blood close,

I swear, you will wake—

& mistake these walls

for skin.

— Ocean Vuong, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” Night Sky with Exit Wounds (82-3)1

We can begin with the end of a poem, since this thesis is about poiesis at the end of

the world—which is to say, aesthetic configurations of time and space that take conditions of

global modernity for granted. This thesis dwells within the realm of impossibility as it attends

to forms of relationality that may be considered illegible within liberal humanist sensibilities

around ethical subjectivity, but can be made palpable for their interplays of power through

erotic modes of critique. Thinking with the “Asian” body as a figure who indexes global

modernity wherein imperial war and subjugation via racialized, gendered, and sexualized

difference are formative conditions, this thesis asks: How can attending to the “Asian” body

for its erotic mediations enable a critical avowal of power as a sensibility, where some

conduct or “speech is understood and another as noise” in a “partitioning of the sensible,

which is the common sense” (Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes 23)? How can critique

centered on erotics enable reconfigurations of power through the very styles and vernaculars

of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference without reproducing the organic human

subject as the privileged figure of ethical subjectivity? Drawing from critical theories of race,

1 Ocean Vuong, excerpt from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” from Night Sky with Exit

Wounds. Copyright © 2016 by Ocean Vuong. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions

Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.

2

queer of colour theory, scholarship on techno-Orientalism, and critical refugee studies, this

thesis turns to ambivalence and erotic mediations because of their potential to respond to, and

engender theories of difference that account for the queasy interrelatedness of pleasure and

violence within the figuration of the human body as site and sign of modern subjectivity.

Erotics enables response to conversations within these fields around how to theorize power

when we are all implicated in the project of modernity via imperialism and global capital,

though in persistently varied ways; and how to reconfigure power in ways that do not return

us over and again to punitive imaginaries of ethical justice, or the pathologization of

abjection as a moral defect. This project suggests that staying with the ambivalence of the

Asian body’s erotic mediations enables reciprocal sociality through—not despite—the

vulnerability that such uncertainty produces. Attending, nevertheless, to how there are

“differences between pleasure in vulnerability and the sensation of racial violation” (Musser

21), this project also suggests that reciprocity is a mode of queerly reproductive labour,

insofar as it turns the epistemological and political ambivalence around what is figured as

in/organic, im/material, or self/other, into an orienting surface for both critique and avowal

around the body itself as always already a relationship with power’s presence.

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. By framing erotics as a

relationship with power, I build upon her language of erotics as one of “many kinds of power,

used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise” where in turn “the erotic is a measure between

the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings” (Lorde 49).

Drawing upon such language as it creates space for asking about the self as a mediation of

power, this thesis asks how erotics confounds binarized conceptions of in/organicity,

im/materiality, and self/other, by foregrounding forms of relationality that are considered

3

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. This thesis does not cohere an Asian/North American subject, but develops a

theory of aesthetics and racial form by turning to the production of the Asian body as an

index of subjectivity. Subjectivity is therefore present within this project, which in turn has

implications for theories of subjectivity; but as Anne Anlin Cheng treats Orientalized

femininity as “a style, which claims specificity but lends itself to promiscuous transferability”

and suggests that “[i]t is an abstraction that materializes” (Cheng 14), I foreground the ways

in which aesthetic figurations of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference can produce

relationality and address between self and other as sensibilities. The erotic mediations that

such sensibilities produce can also enable critique around “circulations of racialised

performance and labour that disrupt postracial posthuman futurity” (Wong, “Dismembered

Asian/American” 36) and assumptions that abandoning the body is the answer to the

corporeal violence of global capitalism. This project asks about the conditions within which

the Asian body might be critiqued as a form of erotic mediation rather than a matter of

ideological dialectic.

Lorde’s proposal that “the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question

of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (49) positions the body itself as an ethical

question. Reading erotic power’s presence within “dancing, building a bookcase, writing a

poem, examining an idea,” and “moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love”

alike (52 and 54), Lorde engenders critique around conditions of embodiment that is

performed through the feeling of embodiment itself. Read in this sense, the archival work of

remembering friends who have died within the sensuality of a “wind / passing through a

windchime” (Night Sky 82) is an aesthetic figuration of the poiesis in mediations of erotic

4

power. And it is in such poetic practice around erotics that ambivalence articulates “a form of

living in our bodies without the constant need to expose, to know, to fight” (Patterson 193),

and ethical subjectivity can become unmoored from moralized binaries between abjection

and domination. As a form of queerly reproductive labour, reciprocity makes possible a mode

of being with bodies inscribed as abject, contradictory, or perverse in their erotic mediations,

since these words are no longer required to function as liberal humanist diagnostics of moral

pathology but could also signify “the pleasure of being objectified in a world where everyone

is expected to be struggling for dignity, the pleasure of being contradictory when the subject

is meant to be a unified whole, the pleasure of feeling disempowered when we are all

supposed to be struggling for power” (Patterson 193). Meanwhile, the reciprocity engendered

through critical and creative avowals of shared erotic power can itself become a practice of

ethical relationality, though not as a guaranteed manifestation of pleasure.

Rather, reciprocity read in terms of erotic mediations can enable questions around

how authoritarian domination carried out through aesthetics of care and intimacy continue to

generate conditions wherein racialized, gendered, sexualized bodies are merely used as

matter for making ethical meaning into futurity. Such a “wayward erotics,” in Martin

Manalansan’s language, enables critique that “does not function as a travel signpost,” but

generates “messy entanglements … with sexual, gendered, familial, national, and

transnational affinities” (Mankekar and Schein 33), including those seemingly unlikely or

impossible to trace. In this vein, and in spite of my own impulse to fixate on the productive

excesses that waywardness affords, Christopher B. Patterson suggests that conceptualizing

the “Asiatic” as a style of dis/embodiment is “not about the excesses of categorization, nor

does it shift a demeaning language into something emboldening, but it is rather about the

inherent instability of naming, the blurriness of racial thinking, and our experiences within

that blur” (Patterson 235, emphasis my own). Therefore, erotics routed through virtuality as a

5

register of techno-Orientalist aesthetics more generally asks the question of how it feels to

dis/embody the “Asiatic” while oriented to the impossibility of either the inorganic or

inorganic to fulfill desires for legibility.

The Asiatic figures within Larissa Lai’s speculative fiction novel The Tiger Flu and

Ocean Vuong’s epistolary novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous variously encounter these

complexities around power and pleasure in their relationality to others. Within these texts, the

eroticization of power is routed variously through stories of corporatization, militarization,

and authoritarianism. Both novels depict the intergenerational resonances of relationships

with power mediated by technologies of memory and embodiment. Variously speculative in

form and genre, these novels do not easily lend themselves to modes of analysis that take

racialized, gendered, and sexualized forms of sociality for granted. They foreground how

“[e]rotics,” as Patterson writes, “does not evade empire by focusing on the body, but through

the body it makes empire’s presence palpable.” Working with Patterson’s suggestion that

erotics “help us recognize what we already know” through practices of sensitization (Open

World Empire 33), this thesis suggests that the ambivalence that erotics surfaces around

ethical relationality can also help us recognize what may already be known, but not by every

body, all the time, because of the conditions in which the ambivalence of erotic power is

engendered. If some forms of erotic power and knowledge are not simply lost, but “secreted”

by institutional archival practices (Vang 10), then this thesis attempts to reckon with how

neither ambivalence nor erotics produce inherently ethical modes of critique. Figuring the

temporality and spatiality of empire’s beginnings and ends therefore reveals critique to be an

ambivalent mode of relationality itself, since, within critique, even what is unknown is

transformed into a surface for orienting perceptivity. Yet, as Sharon Patricia Holland

suggests, the queerness of erotics can be conjured by asking about how “feeling … escapes or

6

releases when bodies collide in pleasure and pain” (Erotic Life of Racism 6). This, too, is the

ambivalence of erotic critique.

The final lines of Ocean Vuong’s poem, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,”

articulates how ambivalence enables address between bodies, through such confoundments of

the boundedness between self and other. As both addressee and subject of the poem, a figure

named Ocean is written into a room where the dead “pass through your body” as with a wind

through a windchime (Night Sky 82). While the musicality of the windchimes is unwritten in

this poem the musicality of the poetry presences the sensuous palpability of loss, even if not

in explicit terms. Together, Ocean’s body and the windchime index the ephemeral

temporality of friends who have died, remembering their corporeal presence without

requiring their appearance as organic embodiments. Both legible and illegible sensuality are

narrativized for their capacity to become modes of address, enabling relational sensibility

through, not despite, the loneliness of loss—which, the narrator assures, is “still time spent

with the world” (Night Sky 82). An articulation around “loss as presence (in place and time)”

(Vang 4), this poetic account of loneliness as an experience of being with enables a reading of

vulnerability to the pain of losing others as itself a continuation of relationality between

bodies. Vulnerability and loneliness are not the antithesis to selfhood, then, but modes of

memory around each body’s capacity to reshape each other's selfhood through their

interrelatedness. As the experience of being with happens in relation to “the world” within the

poem, where the world is a “room with everyone in it” (Night Sky 82), the poem enables

questioning around the liberal humanist ideas of selfhood as an individualizing process. In

this sense the dependence of liberal humanist sensibilities around individual freedom upon

forms of subjection—namely through the enslavement of Black lives—also need to be

reckoned with in aesthetic reconfigurations of ethical subjectivity. As Saidiya Hartman

writes, “the ways in which … freedom fin[ds] its dignity and authority in this ‘prime symbol

7

of corruption’ and slavery transform[s] and extend[s] itself in the limits and subjection of

freedom" can “troubl[e], if not elid[e], any absolute and definitive marker between slavery

and its aftermath” (115).

Hence, a reading of erotic mediations critically oriented to the aesthetic materiality of

ambivalence is a reading of the world and its end, since the conditions of global modernity

have been produced through aesthetic sensibilities around freedom and abjection wherein

race, gender, and sexuality cannot be fetishized as ontologies of embodiment, but as

mediations of power that surface relational capacities. The organic and inorganic assemblage

of “a room / so warm & blood close, / I swear, you will wake— / & mistake these walls / for

skin” (Night Sky 82) contains the mediating potential of uncertainty, as skin and walls are not

resolved into distinctly organic or inorganic modes of embodiment, but instead develop a

poetics around embodiment and memory that unfolds within that continual slippage between

organic and inorganic. Rather than the emergence of a different kind of sovereign speech, this

poetics is enabled by the palpability of what may always be uncertain and yet cannot be

fetishized in its inscrutability. The poem carefully undoes equivocations of the body with

subjectivity by addressing, too, desires for reciprocity and violence that are incommensurable

and yet conditioned by the other—such as when the violence sonically denoted as “gunfire”

registers as “only the sound of people / trying to live a little longer / & failing” (Night Sky

82). Vuong's poem narrativizes textual and sonic resonances of violence as it erupts when

each body’s relationship with power is unacknowledged, and the desire for sociality between

self and other is “satisfied by certain prescribed erotic comings-together … characterized by a

simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a

fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor … And this misnaming of the need and the deed

give rise to that distortion which results in … the abuse of feeling,” as Audre Lorde writes in

her germinal essay, “Uses of the Erotic” (54). Lorde’s attendance to erotic power and the

8

violent interplays of power enabled by its disavowal invites questioning around any impulse

to valorize the body and its pleasures in resistance against violence. Thinking with Lorde’s

theory of the erotic in this way—as mode of inquiry around ethical relationality—enables us

to approach the feeling of being a body as a practice, one that consistently unlearns these

impulses as they have been domesticated through racist, imperialist, Euro-American

sensibilities around embodiment and knowledge. Thinking with erotic power as a practice

and mode of inquiry, too—rather than yet another form of normative ethical subjectivity—

also requires critiquing punitive or moralizing practices of body knowledge that would only

seek to discipline or eliminate what has been named erotic in the sense of being considered

“the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation” or “the pornographic, the

abused, and the absurd” (Lorde 49 and 54), without asking how Euro-American sensibilities

have equated these embodiments with abjection, and in turn abjection with individualized

moral failure or alienation, rather than an effect of the violent manipulation of the self and

other’s erotic power.

Amber Jamilla Musser’s foregrounding of erotic appetite rather than desire in the

production of the body reminds us that the pleasure in power also circulates as the “white

appetite for black sweetness, labor, and sex” materialized by “the reliance of white comfort

on black affective labour” (Musser 32)—the visceral co-constitution of subjectivity and

subjection. Lorde's configuration of the erotic specifically as a form of relational power, read

alongside Musser's configuration of appetite, therefore names that violence can also feel like

pleasure for the bodies enacting it, confounding assumptions that bodies can be universalized

through erotics and feeling. In the same move that erotics enables critique through the body,

attending to such viscera of erotic mediations enables critique and creativity around the

fetishization of the body via styles of embodiment, without necessarily producing the body as

an avatar of universalized difference wherein identity stands in for self. Erotics therefore

9

helps us name the ethical possibilities in building critique as a practice of reconfiguring

power interplays, precisely through the avowal of each body’s capacity for “sensuality as

method” (Musser 17) in ethical relationality.

In relation to such confoundments of critique, both Tiger Flu and On Earth conjure

what Purnima Mankekar and Louisa Schein call a “mediated erotics,” wherein reading

aesthetic productions around “transnational Asia” in terms of “sensoria and … patterns of

intimacy that confound assumptions about propinquity and distance, physicality and

virtuality” can “recast—as well as trouble—normative constructions of the body and of

corporeality” (Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia 2). Thinking with mediation and/as

erotics enables generative theorizing around power not just as a relationship of subjectivity

versus subjection, nor a form of false consciousness that requires mastery over self and other

to transform. By not only troubling, but recasting, fetishizations of corporeality as a stand-in

for the real—and the real as the meaningful—mediation enables modes of memory that

account for the body as it indexes relational sensibilities with self and other. While the novels

can be read through their interrelated mediations and reconfigurations of erotic power, each

chapter is concerned with particular aesthetic figurations of the Asian body, such as the

in/organic bodies of techno-Orientalist speculations or the figure of the

Vietnamese/Vietnamese American refugee.

Turning to techno-Orientalism as an aesthetic that produces erotic mediations, I am

interested in the uncertainty of virtuality and how it feels; not only that, but how the erotic

ambivalence of virtuality can, through aesthetics, help us register forms of dis/embodiment

and sociality that may already exist but are considered illegible when normative narratives of

time and space are not only taken for granted, but assumed to be the only possibility. Within

conversations in Asian Americanist critique, techno-Orientalist discourses, theories around

erotics, affect, and queerness, and interrelated fields asking about the production of

10

difference, virtuality has been a germane concept for theorizing—and troubling—the

conditions that have made self and other legible frameworks for sociality. As a register of

techno-Orientalist aesthetics, virtuality can make palpable the conditions in which

conceptions of self and other are stylized through liberal humanist desires around a bounded,

rational self. By attending to the erotics of virtuality, we can orient the critique enabled by

virtuality towards techno-Orientalist aesthetics’ speculative premises around the in/organic

subjects of globalized modernity. How, then, could virtuality be read in literary productions

not just as a form of alternative narrative representation or convention of speculative fictions,

but rather as a critical production of erotic mediations? Within Larissa Lai’s speculative

fiction novel The Tiger Flu, virtuality troubles liberal humanist binaries of the un/real,

im/material, in/organic, and dis/embodied as iterations of the bounded self and other. What

follows this conception of virtuality is not necessarily an alternate subject—aesthetic, critical,

political, or otherwise—but a critical and creative practice of staying with the ambivalence

virtuality generates around the subject and its capacity for sociality through the stylization of

difference and feeling through aesthetics of racial form.

In doing so, I offer the ambivalence that virtuality generates around the sensibilities

and sensual, sensory dimensions of bounded self and other, as a mode for conceiving of

ethical and reciprocal sociality between in/organic subjects. Although the erotics of virtuality

and its ambivalence do not inherently queer the temporalities of the “here and now” in

service of “a desire for another way of being in both the world and time” (Muñoz 96),

virtuality’s ambivalence can offer a way of feeling out the eroticized power relations

sustaining self and other as conditions for sociality. Turning to erotics further allows us to ask

epistemological questions around how we come to produce social lives out of these feelings,

without taking them as the beginning, end, or even given present of relationality. Following

Muñoz’s distinction between worlds and times, virtuality offers a simultaneous here-and-now

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and yet-to-come, precisely because it gestures to modes of sociality that may already exist but

are considered unlikely or undetermined within conceptions of the bounded self and other.

The ambivalence of erotic interplays of power within Tiger Flu and On Earth alike attends to

such overrepresentation by mediating a techno-Orientalist aesthetic in relation to the crises of

corporatized imperialism and biotechnology. The critical uncertainty of erotic mediation as a

mode of aesthetic inquiry means that the habit of archiving bodies through looping

temporality of global modernity (Wong, “Screen Time”) need not be taken at face value,

regardless of attachments to this work. Instead, virtuality surfaces how the body itself indexes

practices around the sensorial, sensory, and sexual as habits rather than pathological

conditions of difference. That is, practices of sociality are habits insofar as they are “creative

anticipations based on past repetitions” (Chun 3); erotics surfaces the body as the in/organic

medium for these practices.In Chapter One: Virtuality’s ambivalence in The Tiger Flu, I

center techno-Orientalist discourses that figure Asian bodies as inorganic and machinelike in

their incapacity for ethical humanity. Drawing from Patterson’s reframing of Asianness in

terms of the “Asiatic” as a style of embodiment worth dwelling in, I approach techno-

Orientalism as an aesthetic register through which the “Asiatic” body can trouble liberal

humanist sensibilities wherein the un/real, im/material, in/organic, and dis/embodied are

binarized. Besides abounding with techno-Orientalist tropes, the genre of speculative fiction

itself transmutes figurations of human subjectivity via narrative stylization of time and space,

and yet require referents around how time and space are conceptualized in relation to the

ongoing present of modernity. That is, although the speculative is often conflated with the

futural, it does not merely represent the future, but enables questions around futurity to be

figured and circulated as the visual, aural, textural. Hence following existing scholarship that

frames the very in/organicity of the Asiatic as a mode of critique around what is considered

labour under global capitalism, I attend to techno-Orientalist tropes like virtuality, glitchiness,

12

and disembodiment within Tiger Flu to suggest that staying with the ambivalence of Asiatic

in/organicity can offer ways of feeling out the eroticized power relations sustaining self and

other as conditions for sociality. The ambivalence aestheticized in tropes like virtuality can

therefore enable creative and critical practices of registering the body without valorizing

either subjectivity or subjectlessness as modes of selfhood. This chapter plays within the

uncertainties of techno-Orientalist tropes to read relational possibilities that emerge in the

porosity between self and other, particularly within Lai’s depiction of cyborg bodies and

information capital.

Chapter Two: Fugitive erotics and refugee figurations in On Earth We’re Briefly

Gorgeous builds upon the relational possibilities of ambivalence by drawing more explicit

connections between the production of the Asiatic body and imperial war as a condition of

global modernity. Thinking with erotics in relation to Tan Hoang Nguyen’s approach to sex

as a “vernacular” for the power interplays of sexuality, I work with scholarship in critical

refugee studies to ask how the production of the Vietnamese refugee figure is a particular

aesthetic iteration of the Asiatic body that indexes the im/possibilities of ethical subjectivity

within global modernity, particularly through refugee epistemologies around survival and

care in afterwar. Fugitive erotics specifically turns to the work of address via refugee

epistemologies and the interrelated subjection of Blackness within modern subjectivity.

Reading passages for erotic mediations between Vietnamese American refugee figure Little

Dog and his mother, Rose, or white lover, Trevor, I suggest that the work of reciprocal

sociality is a queerly reproductive labour—insofar as “queerly” gestures toward a relational

sensibility that is oriented to the vulnerability between the bodies of self and other, where

care is a form of labour that is racialized, gendered, and sexualized, but not easily conflated

with identitarian categories. While the scholarship I work with centers Vietnamese,

Cambodian, and Hmong refugee lives and their displacements across multiple borders within

13

Southeast Asia, this chapter is not an attempt to consolidate geopolitical difference under

concept of fugitive erotics or the “Asiatic.” Rather, it turns to critique that has been

developed through iterations of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong refugee epistemologies

around loss and care, and in doing so asks how the refugee figure mediates these

epistemologies in ways that enable critique around the sensibilities of imperial war.

Together, these chapters ask how conceiving of the Asian body in terms of its erotic

mediations can enable ethical relationality through vernaculars of race, gender, and sexuality

that reconfigure relationships of power precisely by making power palpable in its aesthetic

materiality. This project’s purpose is to develop a practice of critique and poeisis that is

oriented not just to bodies as sources of erotic power that is already racialized and gendered,

as Lorde suggests—but to the feeling of a being body when racial form mediates the

ambivalent sensoria of erotic power. Reading these novels and scholarship through the

“affective unruliness” (Musser 24) of erotics invites questioning around how it might be

possible to fulfill desires for connection between self and other, when the concept of modern

subjectivity itself is routed through modern empire, global capital, and their conditions of

subjugation and subjection; and how to be practitioners of care, when “care and capture

[are]… intertwined” (Tu 114). As Y-Dang Troeung suggests regarding narrative tropes about

Cambodian refugees like disappearance or self-shattering, the ambiguity of subjectivity

within scenes of quotidian violence are also a “mode of survival … not the liberating free

play of identity celebrated by postmodernism” (“Witnessing Cambodia’s Disappeared”). This

thesis, then, does not necessarily unfold a political consciousness around self and other as

sovereign agents of resistance (although I hope this project will be useful within different

genres of politicized address). And it is not invested in writing from the assumption that “one

has a self to shatter, which is to say a position of already inhabiting sovereign subjectivity”

(Musser 73).

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Rather, if thinking with erotics enables racialized and gendered registers of sex to be

figured as one of many vernaculars produced through the body, then perhaps attending to

erotic mediations can enable vernaculars that avow power and its possibilities around

reciprocal sociality. Critique and poeisis oriented to erotic mediations can therefore also

become a practice of processing body knowledge when it is overwhelming or unbearable,

such as in the case of losing a loved one—which, as figures within Tiger Flu and On Earth

show, can involve trying and failing to address what is deeply felt but cannot be languaged

through words, or through progressivist frameworks of healing. “Instead of shoring up our

sovereignty by conflating agency with mastery,” as Hoang Tan Nguyen writes, staying with

the ambivalence indexed by Asiatic figures can help us feel out each body’s capacity for

erotic power within the “inescapable exposure, vulnerability, and receptiveness in reaching

out to other people” (2)—or, indeed, to other selves.

15

Chapter One: Virtuality’s ambivalence in The Tiger Flu

I dream … / from the call of the colonial remembering not / exactly the wild but the

unexpected child of other cultivations / waving not with or against but relations of listening

undoing / the buttons of history. Rain on me blood, water or milk liquid / silky as the ilk of

connection springs unexpected forms / from the fountain of hope, dope enough to relax all

this thinking.

— Larissa Lai, “35.,” Iron Goddess of Mercy (97-8)2

As a literary production trafficking in techno-Orientalist aesthetics, Tiger Flu

aestheticizes virtuality’s undetermined multiplicity through its characters’ glitchy

dis/embodiments. In this sense the text generatively surfaces an erotic mode of aesthetic

inquiry through virtuality as a register of techno-Orientalist aesthetics, and stages the kinds of

questions virtuality raises without offering their resolution. Rather, through its erotic

mediations, Tiger Flu invites a process of staying with ambivalence. Within this chapter, the

poetics of virtuality’s ambivalence and multiplicity is further signaled by the porous,

forward/slash bordering between concepts of im/materiality, in/organicity, and

dis/embodiment that I develop throughout this project. The porosity that virtuality indexes in

relation to Asiatic styles of dis/embodiment surfaces the sexual, aesthetic, and critical

multiplicity that such porosity produces. Kaleidoscopic in narrative plot and form, Tiger Flu

written through styles from narrative prose to lyric (Tiger Flu 204) to holographic party

invitation (202) to chant (20) to a scream from Kora that intones “the emergence of the

quarantine rings, the first epidemic, the tiger wine craze, the end of oil, the launch of Chang

and Eng, the expulsion of the Grist sisters,” and so on until it becomes “a sideways figure

eight, the loop of infinity screaming the scream of her long history” (275).

Within the novel multiplicity is neither reproduced as an ontological category nor

valorized as a condition for reciprocity. Instead, the novel’s narrative plot and form

speculatively depict the ambivalence of multiplicity around self and other via characters who

2 Larissa Lai, excerpt from “35.” from Iron Goddess of Mercy. Copyright © 2021 by Larissa Lai.

Reprinted with permission of Arsenal Pulp Press, arsenalpulppress.com.

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consistently trouble both organicity and inorganicity. Both primary characters, Kirilow

Groundsel and Kora Ko, are racialized, gendered, and sexualized with reference to humanoid

features, feminized relationalities, or Chinese names, but are otherwise difficult to read

definitively in terms of their subjectivity. Their humanoid bodies are “Asiatic” insofar as the

Asiatic, for Patterson, names the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized

difference as a “style or form recognized as Asianish” and yet “not-Asia” at once, surfacing

the disjunctive pleasures of techno-Orientalist aesthetics beyond identitarian commitments

and ideological critique (Patterson 27 and 28). At the novel’s start, at least, Kora and most

around her believe her to be a human girl who resides in the urban space called Saltwater

Flats. She is a direct descendant of the man who created the tiger wine that allowed the tiger

flu to make the interspecies jump between the now-extinct Caspian tigers to humans.

Meanwhile, Kirilow comes from Grist Village, located in the outer rings of the

militarized quarantine zones of the novel’s geography. Cloned and produced from the same

human woman, Grist sisters were produced by biotechnology corporation Jemini to be work

in factories producing scales (devices that can be implanted into fistulas on one’s body and

chosen for “what they help [Kora] remember, sure, but also for how they look,” visualizing

the aesthetic production of memories and archives around the “time before” (Tiger Flu 87)).

In Grist Village, humanoid clones called Grist sisters live, having fled the tiger flu and

genocidal “Great Grist Purge” (Tiger Flu 268) by humans of Saltwater Flats, three

generations ago. The inhabitants organize their lives around their roles and capacities as

parthenogenetic clones: mother-doubles (Grist sisters who give live birth to other Grist

sisters, also clones), starfish (those who can regenerate organs, limbs, and other body parts

that are harvested for transplantation to mother-doubles), and grooms (who take care of

mother-doubles and starfish respectively). With the corporatization of technologies that have

generated new beings (such as the Grist sisters) solely for the reproductive labour of

17

manufacturing technological interfaces (the scales with which characters can access archived

memories), the “Asiatic” becomes articulated through the temporality of the Grist sisters’

aliveness as it had been reproduced in service of assembling technological parts into an

interface.

Kirilow and Kora come into contact when Kirilow travels to Saltwater Flats after her

entire village is either killed or kidnapped by the Saltwater Flats military, stolen away for the

inventor and CEO of Light Industry Höst Company, Isabelle Chow, to experiment with in

service of technologies such as the Dark Baths. After the kidnapping of her Grist sisters, and

the death of both Peristrophe Halliana and Auntie Radix—Grist Village’s last starfish, and a

mother double, respectively—Kirilow searches Saltwater Flats for a starfish said to live

within a rumoured commune of Grist sisters who had stayed and survived their banishment.

This commune proves to exist, under the name of Cordova Dancing School for Girls, run by a

woman named Madame Dearborn. Here, descendants of Grist sisters live alongside those

who may not be descendants, but have been orphaned and taken in by Madame Dearborn,

who teaches all of them the Grist sisters’ history through particular dances, chants, and

survival practices. Kirilow and Kora meet at the school after Kora is sent there by her

impoverished family in hopes that she has a better chance of survival than Uncle Wai, her

mother Charlotte, and brother K2, all of whom are sickly or at risk of succumbing to the tiger

flu). Kirilow realizes that Kora is a starfish when she amputates Kora’s hand following a

serious wound, and a new mass of tissue begins to regrow in Kora’s arm. After a perilous

journey involving the Pacific Pearl Parkade, a commune of men living with tiger flu, and the

heavily militarized borders of the region’s quarantine rings, the pair arrive at the New Origins

Archive (NOA), a repository of data and seed library. There they are drugged and forced to

participate in a feast where Isabelle Chow publicly launches a nuclear rocket at the

mainframe Chang, explaining to Kirilow that Chang’s deteriorating servers are no longer

18

useful to her as an experiment in uploading those suffering from tiger flu, especially after the

leader of the Pacific Pearl Parkade, Marcus Traskin, has seized control over Chang.

As the NOA crumbles, Kora’s body is crushed in the debris. But having had a

memory scale forcibly implanted into her by Isabelle, Kirilow contains knowledge of how to

upload a body’s consciousness into a mainframe, and uses Isabelle’s technology to upload

Kora into a batterkite (a ship also invented by Isabelle). Escaping back to Grist Village,

Kirilow plants the batterkite into the earth, and over time Kora transmutes into a starfish tree

that regenerates organs for a new village of Grist sisters. At stake for the characters is the

capacity to survive the ongoing afterlives of settler colonial capitalism, manifest as

quarantine rings with heavily militarized borders and the endless precarity around potentially

losing each other to illness, starvation, or—in the case of the Grist sisters—sudden

reclamation (kidnap) by a biotechnological corporation for its experiments. Claiming use

over the “Asiatic” bodies of the Grist sisters, the Jemini corporation nevertheless reproduces

the anti-Blackness of global modernity in its claims over in/organic bodies as matter for its

speculations.

While turning to erotic mediations to conceive of techno-Orientalist aesthetics can

make sociality palpable in excess of modernity’s “yok[ing]” of subjectivity and subjection

(Holland 10), thinking with virtuality helps us feel out sociality within the blur of

dis/embodiments considered unlikely, lost, or made unavailable, without privileging bounded

concepts of self and other as methodologies for relationality. Thinking within this ambivalent

blur presenced by the Asiatic and the uncertainty of its attachments also intervenes in the

desire to recuperate the racialized, gendered, and sexualized body within the conflation of

organicity and the embodied real. This desire is an impulse that Rachel C. Lee has identified

for its salience in Asian Americanists misgivings around biological significations within

racial analysis (Lee 5). As a writer who has named “the malleability of metaphor” as a reason

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for turning to “speculative fiction novels” rather than the literary realism of “identity cards”

(“Familiarizing Grist Village” 25), Larissa Lai has critiqued post-racial and post-gender

discourses of community and ethical subjectivity while responding to ethical responsibilities

to both misgivings and impulses around the question of the Asian body. Herself a writer with

Hong Kong Chinese ancestry who has been based in Treaty 7 territory, Musqueam,

Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories (“Familiarizing Grist Village” 20), Lai develops

upon imagery and references to the Pacific Northwest in Tiger Flu and other speculative

fiction or poetry. Meanwhile, she intervenes in a total reinscription of sociality by drawing,

too, upon the possibility of enduring imperialism and politics that cannot be resolved through

unfolding dialectic over time—as in the reminiscence between the name and geographies of

Saltwater Flats to Saltwater City, the name for Vancouver used by nineteenth-century

Chinese settlers from the Four Counties region in Southern China, gesturing towards histories

of settler colonialism alongside iterations yet to be felt within the readerly present. Grist

Village, as Lai herself has noted, has often been interpreted as a commune of women, queer,

female, and/or lesbian Asian feminists (“Familiarizing Grist Village” )—yet, given the bodily

multiplicities between Kirilow, Kora, and other Grist communes, or even amongst the clones

of Grist Village, for that matter, it could be more generative to read such characters in terms

of sociality around feminized gendering rather than as legible representations of gender.

The erotic mediations of power within virtuality, as an aesthetic trope and framework

for critical theory, are multiple and varied, perhaps fittingly for its implications around what

is real or unreal. In relation to theories around posthumanist information capital, virtuality

can be conceptualized as “a relationship between what might be taken for granted and what is

supposedly unlikely beyond speculation” (Terranova 10). Within Terranova’s language

around virtuality, it is possible to sustain relationality through the very impossibility of being

certain about the world as a sensorium. In Matt Bluemink’s interpretation of Deleuze,

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however, virtuality is a temporal-spatial dimension of reality that may not be accessible

through bodily perception yet co-exists with it; the virtual is therefore a dimension within

which objects and ideas can be generated but must make the movement into actuality in order

to be perceived. Deleuze stages virtuality as a metaphysical question, wherein the difference

between virtuality and human perception is itself creative insofar as the movement of objects

or ideas between them it possible to continue generating meaning (Bluemink, “On

Virtuality”). Yet the condition of empire in the production of the modern world requires

questioning of which bodies are entailed in the human who is capable of perceiving and

therefore making meaning out of the virtual. While still concerned with the ontology of

virtuality, Denise Ferreira da Silva suggests that conception of human perception via “Man’s

exceptionality—his soul, free will, capacity for reasoning” is itself is a “modern text”

elaborated as the violence of “racial grammar and lexicon work as ethical descriptors” (“On

Difference Without Separability” 57). Ferreira da Silva develops an ethical recomposition of

sociality “from without the modern text” that could be enabled by the multiple registers of

legibility within virtuality. With Ferreira da Silva’s example of atoms that can only be seen

by imaging apparatuses including scientific instruments, but also conceptions of intuitive

sensibility, visuality, and scale (59), the “self” implied by liberal humanist sensibilities of the

perceptive human subject and the “other” implied by the temporal-spatial mapping of the

world into planes of reality are both illustrated to be erotic mediations around the experience

of feeling as a body.

Through such discourses of virtuality, then, we can theorize erotic power and

mediation as both experiences and practices of recomposing the body in relation with the

world. It can be generative to read virtuality as a register of techno-Orientalist aesthetics that

enables epistemological uncertainty around the ideas of the bounded, rational individual as

the privileged form of embodied subjectivity and relationality. Discourses of techno-

21

Orientalism also trouble conceptions of political will and agency, since pleasure engendered

through its aesthetics aren’t easily mapped in terms of complicity around racist imagings, nor

are they always categorized as mechanisms of self-expression and empowerment. If techno-

Orientalist logics can be conceived in terms of figurations of West and East wherein the

former is “a project that requires configurations of the East as the very technology with which

to shape it” (Roh, Niu, and Huang 2), the temporal-spatial cartographies of techno-

Orientalism can be figured through the Pacific Northwest as they are within Larissa Lai’s The

Tiger Flu. For Iyko Day, the aesthetic dimensions of the Pacific Northwest in terms of North

American settler colonialism and the Orient manifests as a visual problem, wherein “Asians

give human shape to the abstract circuits of capitalism that have ‘no concrete manifestation,

that are quite literally unrepresentable’” (Day 8). The “principal violence of capitalism,”

then, for Day, is “in the very way it abstracts … highly differentiated gendered and racialized

labor in order to create value” (9). This chapter attends to similar concerns around the

“Asian” body’s relation to abstraction and labour insofar as I ask how it is made to index the

im/materiality of time and capital. However, I diverge slightly from Day’s orientation of

abstraction as the principal violence of capitalism. Instead, I attend to techno-Orientalist

discourses to ask how Asian bodies are produced through aesthetic registers of in/organicity,

and in effect become dis/embodied interfaces for the abstract rather than human

visualizations of what is unrepresentable.

Patterson’s concept of the “virtual other” is helpful for developing upon ambivalence

as a method of critical orientation to the body. The virtual other, for Patterson, is the

unplaceable presence of “other lives between the real and the nonreal, the authentic and the

inauthentic … [it] is the ‘-ic’ of the Asiatic, the unknowability, the blur” (232). In addition to

troubling binaries around in/organic subjectivity, this concept of the virtual other offers a way

to queer our sense of dis/embodied time and space through the erotic playfulness of

22

unknowability. The unknowable, Asiatic, virtual other is also, of course, denoted through

tropes of the inscrutable and unreadable Oriental, whose opacity is imagined as alluring and

mysterious, yet disinterested, and therefore disaffected in the sense of being alienated and

disloyal to aesthetic cultures of white sentiment and fragility (Yao 1). Unknowability, then, is

interrelated yet not the same as ambivalence insofar as critiquing the erotics of the virtual

other through ambivalence gestures towards the erotic and sexual labour that the virtual other

carries out in being projected as an unknowable object of desire whose opacity nonetheless

offers an erotic surface for orienting the knowledge project of the self. Figuring the Asiatic

virtual other in terms of ambivalence, then, also enables reciprocal sociality may be possible

as a wayward form that attends not just to the violence enabled by hatred, but also by

pleasure and desire.

This binarization of in/organicity that haunts both techno-Orientalist aesthetics and its

discourses is further complicated by Danielle Wong’s concept of “inorganic critique,” a

methodology that “straddles the unstable line between techno-Orientalist narratives about the

future, and subversive modes of theorising and enacting posthuman Asianness”

(“Dismembered Asian/American” 49). Through Wong’s articulation of inorganic critique,

both techno-Orientalist narratives around the perverse modernity of the place called “Asia,”

and the possibilities of posthumanism in reconfigurations of Asianness, take critical

significance. Highlighting the long durée of techno-Orientalist configurations around the

Asian as robotic and machinelike, Wong also foregrounds the inorganicity of “liberal human

subjectivity: the imperial and colonial configuration of the human as white and therefore free,

and as free and therefore white” (“Dismembered Asian/American” 36). This poses an

intervention in the taken-for-granted relationship between Asianness and inorganicity, and

whiteness and organicity—or, indeed, between subjectivity and organicity. In conversation,

Patterson and Wong foreground the social life of difference by attending to the production of

23

Asiatic in/organicity and its aesthetic, sexual, and temporal-spatial dimensions around “the

feeling of being a body.” This includes its “inscrutable” pleasures in relation to the

production of both skin and flesh as racial matter (Musser, Sensual Excess 87 and 1), which I

will discuss further in Chapter Two. Virtuality within this project can therefore be

conceptualized as an interface for critique around Asiatic in/organicity, in response to the

liberal humanist style of subjectivity that characterizes epistemological, and ontological,

premises of global modernity. Routing erotics through virtuality as a register of techno-

Orientalist aesthetics more generally asks the question of how it feels to dis/embody the

“Asiatic” while oriented to the impossibility of legibility.

Glitchy dis/embodiments

The multiplicity of the Grist sister as a racialized, gendered, and sexualized form

produces a glitch in the common-sense formulation that subjectivity, at the scale of the whole

body, can stand in for the kinds of sociality the body can generate. The Grist sisters therefore

present something other than a straightforward example of what Kandice Chuh has proposed

a “subjectless discourse,” where the production of difference and subjectivity is foregrounded

and the “Asian American subject” deprivileged as a political project (Imagine Otherwise 9).

Instead, the Grist sisters aestheticize a response to Cheng’s question of what happens when

“one treats oneself like a thing” (19), returning us to the erotic interplays that dis/embodiment

produces despite Asian Americanist critique’s desires around subjectlessness and its

(im)possibile intimacies around discourse. In this sense the in/organic glitchiness of the Grist

sisters do not disavow the residues of liberal humanism, alongside the visions of

posthumanism, by making palpable the virtuality that each figuration carries, and multiplying

the self and other within the body. They deprivilege the human subject as the scale through

which sociality is possible—without taking subjectlessness for granted as another mode for

sociality—as figures who are humanoid and nevertheless disinterested in claiming the human

24

as an originary whole. In its ambivalence, then, the virtuality of self and other that also

multiplies within the figure of “human” can also index the residues of imperial violence that

surface through disgust, distrust, and disinterest in “majoritarian feelings” (Yao 210) stylized

through the figure of the human. Yet a reversal of moralized binaries around the in/human

does not inherently offer reciprocal sociality; rather, it is the playful disobedience of

virtuality’s failure around time that can potentially, if not always, queer (Patterson 30) the

reproduction of in/human binaries as a seamless temporal-spatial interplay of power.

While harvesting herbs one day, Kirilow and Glorybind encounter a figure who

appears in distress and infected with the tiger flu, and who comes from Saltwater Flats.

Distrustful towards this figure, whom she disparagingly calls “Salty,” Kirilow is nonetheless

prompted by Glorybind to treat her severed hand because she seems to be capable of

regenerating body parts, and could therefore become a much-needed starfish for Grist

Village. Kirilow stuns her and the Groundsels take it back to their home. Upon waking, the

“Salty” pleads for a chance to explain her presence, appealing to them with the claim: “I’m

just as human as you are.” To which Glorybind responds, “We aren’t human” (48). Rebuffing

this invitation into “the” human, Kirilow and Glorybind perform a kind of affective

indifference that is nevertheless erotic in its mediations when it registers as coldness towards

the “Salty” (whose name is later revealed to be Carmela Sweetwater). For Xine Yao, coldness

can figure as an apparent unfeeling at the surface that indexes disinterest in taking the

“imbricated fantasy of right feeling, politics, and action” for granted. Following Yao, Kirilow

and Glorybind’s coldness produce the “critical demeanours and ways of being together” that

“emerge when we reclaim unfeeling from its demonization and moral and social annihilation

and consider that its appearance of negation does not obviate or even conceal but rather

enables generative and insurgent capacities” (Yao 209-10).

25

Yet within the novel, Kirilow reproduces the moralization of in/humanity in her

assumption that Carmela Sweetwater is of the humans, despite her potential starfish ability,

because she has arrived from beyond Saltwater Flats, is infected with tiger flu, and does not

have the same appearance as the Grist Village sisters. Neither mere reversal nor mirroring of

the moralizing logics around in/humanity and its vulnerabilities inherently realize reciprocity.

Kirilow’s ambivalence towards the “Salty”—manifest as a mixture of disgust, resentment,

and coldness—reminds us of how virtuality can also index the impossibility of reciprocal

resolution in the wake of “the murderous present and there in the genocidal past” (Tiger Flu

92), which the Grist sisters continually face. In the novel, the violence of this past involves

the rampant tiger flu pandemic that has normalized scarcity and suffering; it also refers to the

murders and forced exile of Grist sisters as they began to mutate from the versions of

themselves forced to work in Light Industry HöST Company factories. This past turns out to

continue into the novel’s present when Kora learns that her brother, K2, is working for Jemini

to produce more tiger wine (which infects people) while, simultaneously, developing

technology that is promised to cure the infected and save the uninfected by uploading them

into the increasingly obsolete Chang (Lai Tiger Flu 229). At time of writing, this narrative

seems eerily prescient: the COVID-19 pandemic continues amidst corporatized imperial

violence and climate disaster that disproportionately incapacitates Black, Indigenous, and

people of colour. This incapacitation seems a rational effect of a global modernity produced

through genocide, enslavement, and colonialism. Despite the analogousness between

contemporary crises and the events of Tiger Flu, however, the ambivalence of virtuality

within the novel interrupts the chronic temporality of crisis by erotically mediating its

im/materialities.

Rather than foreclosing what is unlikely or unimaginable, virtuality in Tiger Flu

disrupts assumptions that the textures of time will feel smooth—that time will flow

26

progressively and seamlessly, uninterrupted by the cosmically devastating violence of a time

before. Within the novel, the concept of “the time before” does not cordon off a paradigm

shift as much as distinguish various im/material manifestations of temporality. At the Pacific

Pearl Parkade of Saltwater Flats, where groups of men infected with tiger flu reside and

separate themselves from the rest of the city, the entrance is a “massive sculpture made of

empty food cans from the time before, variously bolted, screwed, glued, welded, and strung

together to form the shape of a giant tiger’s head with a gaping maw” (Tiger Flu 105). To

enter the parkade, one is consumed by the hunger archived by empty food cans and the open

mouth of the tiger through which the flu has travelled. It is through this same mouth,

however, that “the lineup of people waiting for the upload to Chang … depart[s]” (Tiger Flu

246-7). This erotic, aesthetic avowal of the archival work around “the time before” becomes

an im/material spatiality through which virtuality’s multiplicity can be accessed.

Virtuality therefore puts glitches into the loop by surfacing the conditions around

temporality’s erotic disjunctions and im/possibilities. It indexes and registers the conditions

of temporal-spatial logics (such as the moralized binary between in/human) while failing

them, by surfacing glitches and breakdown in the very desires around the smooth progression

of time. Both Kirilow’s ambivalence towards Carmela Sweetwater, and the mutated

dis/embodiments among the sisters of Grist Village in relation to Cordova Dancing School

for Girls, aestheticize interplays of difference as they produce and foreclose forms of

sociality. The sensorial dimensions of this failing of time can be leaky vile: Kirilow

repeatedly describes her urge to vomit in response to the sickened figure’s snot, tears, and

bile, comparing the figure's hair to a “cockroach antennae” (46). Yet despite its intensity, the

disgust that Kirilow dis/embodies in relation to the “Salty” indexes the potency of

ambivalence in terms of its erotic mediations between self and other. The porous “boundary

confusions” between self and other, made sensible through disgust (Ngai 22), are

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aestheticized through Glorybind’s discursive refusal around the presumed mutuality of

“human” as a mode of subjectivity, alongside Kirilow’s repetitive looping through the

leakiness of the figure's bodily fluids and Kirilow’s nausea. When the flu-ridden figure turns

out to not be human either, and her starfish capabilities indicate her membership in the

rumoured Grist commune called Cordova Dancing School for Girls, the virtuality of

ambivalence itself surfaces: further troubling the “ruse” that “all feelings matter” universally

(Yao 210), it is uncertain whether difference can in itself make matter differently, so to speak.

The failure of the virtuality around “human” in transforming the violent alienation of

genocide into reciprocity also troubles the desire to discipline ambivalence into reciprocity

through avowal alone. As an erotic mediation, the virtuality around in/organic self and other

here are certainly generative, but sometimes in disobedient ways that cannot be resolved

through critique. The glitchiness of virtuality, then, indexes and mediates the erotics of power

in ways that enable reciprocity.

On their travels together, Kirilow and Kora encounter a place called the Dark Baths, a

technology developed as an experimental interface “said to cure the mind of the body” (173).

It does so by separating minds from bodies via elevators called LïFT technology, which

transmute passengers’ bodies into fish and uploads their consciousness into the virtual reality

within its waters. Situated within a place called the New Origins Archive, a repository for

“the blueprints for everything animal, vegetable, and mineral that lived in the time before”

(276), the Dark Baths is just one technology alongside others in the story that index a project

of separating mind and body, a mediation of memory and futurity, based on the assumption

that the relationship between the consciousness and body parallels a binary of virtual and

corporeal. Despite the Dark Bath technology’s explicit conjuration of Cartesian binary logics

via mind and body, there is an erotic disjunction of racialized, gendered, and sexualized

forms in relation to the im/material splitting that the LïFT technology performs. Both the

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restorative promises of the Dark Baths and the ambivalent residues of Asiatic in/organicity

within its depths gesture towards a question of subjectivity critical towards post/humanist

recuperations of the mind/body split.

The Dark Baths iterates Sylvia Wynter’s question of in/human existence “alongside

‘the idea of race’” rather than in reclamation or disavowal of race’s conditions (Ferreira da

Silva, in McKittrick 93). My aim is not to transpose a particular production of race into the

world of Tiger Flu but to attend to how it similarly diverges from “conventional liberal

critique” that sees ‘the idea of race’ as a mistaken, false scientific apprehension of the human

body.” The indeterminacy of the Dark Baths’ promises around splitting mind and body

produces Asiatic in/organicity “in relation to the monumental history of race” (Ferreira da

Silva, in McKittrick 93), rather than as a resolution of difference through a more truthful

iteration of posthuman hybridity. Attending to the racialized, gendered, and sexualized

production of the body can therefore also reconfigure the power mediated through the

“conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it was the human itself”

(Wynter 260). Attending to the erotics of virtuality therefore also makes palpable the ways in

which desire for connection between self and other can produce violent mediations of

difference. In the same moment that Kirilow and Glorybind invite generative questioning

around Carmela Sweetwater’s invocation of shared humanity as a shorthand for reciprocity

and ethical relationality, Kirilow virulently wishes genocide upon what she calls

Sweetwater’s “dirty blood, dirty biomatter,” both out of revenge for the Great Grist Purge of

centuries ago, and out of fear that the already-weakened Peristrophe Halliana will die of

Sweetwater’s tiger flu (Tiger Flu 72). Attending to erotics, then, also means attending to

29

violent acts of mediation between self and other, which are made palpable through

conceptions of racial form (Holland 3).3

The glitchiness of virtuality’s ambivalence does not only disorient liberal humanist

conflations of the organic, material and therefore supposedly real; it reorients the body

towards socialities that are made possible precisely through “sensoria and … patterns of

intimacy that confound assumptions about propinquity and distance, physicality and

virtuality” (Mankekar and Schein 2), and as such cannot be taken for granted in their capacity

for both violence and care. Tiger Flu both aestheticizes and indexes how the eroticism of

virtuality can make the desire for connection between self and other palpable for its

sensualities and sensibilities. Taking place in TAO (Time After Oil), the world of Tiger Flu

could be called post-apocalyptic insofar as its characters travel through the entropic

conditions engendered by the eponymous tiger flu. Yet, these ruins turn out to be more than a

failed order of things conventional of post-apocalypse literature; rather it offers “eruptions of

the unexpected from the initial utopian impulse” (Lai, “Familiarizing Grist Village” 34) of

speculative fiction readings. Kirilow’s practice of creating a whetstone out of crushed

diamond rings from “the time before,” or the Saltwater City practice of creating “inventive

toys made from bits of old blenders, plastic bottles, incandescent lightbulbs” (Tiger Flu 19

and 136), pull multiple temporalities together by transforming the materiality of objects used

3 Of a racist encounter between herself (a Black woman) and a white woman, Holland recalls: “[I]n

my mind, we hover there touching one another with the lie of difference and non-relation balancing

precariously between us … The psychic violation of that moment … haunts me still; it is the intimacy

of that moment that arrests me. That woman expected something from me—one usually does not

expect anything from strangers” (2-3). The lie of difference, within this encounter, refers not to a

universalized dis/embodiment but a production of self and other conjured through the habit of anti-

Blackness. Despite the racialized distance between Blackness and whiteness that the white woman’s

violence seems to produce, the illegible and yet palpable sensations of racism that Holland describes

gesture towards the intimacy that is generated between concepts of Black and white precisely through

these racist habituations. These habituations repeatedly mark whiteness as the self who organize the

matter of the world, and Blackness as the other who simply exists as such matter. Within this scene,

intimacy and difference are simultaneous processes that manifest as eroticized power relations,

demonstrating the ways in which erotic mediations can also multiply the social life of imperial

violence.

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to circulate conceptions of love or play and in turn transforming the sensoria they make

possible. Kirilow’s whetstone—manifest in the multiple, simultaneous sensoria it indexes—

aestheticizes what Wong calls “glitches” in the progressivist temporalities of techno-

Orientalist liberal humanism. Glitches, in Wong’s language, disrupt a more determinist

“process of futurity by recalling the past into the future”—for example, by attending to the

critical significance of race within speculative narratives that fantasize about the future as

postracial (“Dismembered Asian/American” 27). What this temporal recall performs is not

just an accounting for what has been discarded in fantasies about the future of global

modernity, but a foregrounding of “the affective economies of fatigue and deterioration”

signified by entropy’s poetics (Ball 69) within techno-Orientalist productions. The glitchiness

in time, materiality, and sensoria of Kirilow's practice of crushing diamond rings into a

whetstone therefore problematizes what Wong critiques as the “conflation of the posthuman

with the postracial” in the speculative fiction genre (“Dismembered Asian/American” 37).

Instead, glitches enable an indexing of the residual, if transformed, erotics of racial form

within speculative fiction.

Indeed, as some characters are more explicitly racialized by way of names that might

more familiarly register as “Asian” (e.g., Kora Ko, Uncle Wai, Chang and Eng), the

uncertainty of what makes them “Asian” (or even “human”) in the text’s hypermediated

future temporality registers them as figures who aestheticize the in/organicity of both the

“Asiatic/Asian” and the conflation of the body-as-identity or vice versa. Kora believes herself

to be human at the narrative’s opening, already in/organic insofar as her body has fistulas in

which she wears her memory scales. Throughout the narrative, both readers and characters

within the text register that she has starfish capabilities, and is related to the Grist sisters and

their ancestors although she was not raised in either Grist Village or Cordova Dancing School

for Girls. While the in/organicity of the Asiatic is generative through its stylization of

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dis/embodiment, the uncertain capacity for the “Asiatic” to sustain conceptions of humanity

remains. By gesturing towards the im/material labour of the Asiatic as an erotically mediated

style of dis/embodiment, the novel’s uncertain figurations also articulate caution around

reducing the Asian or Asiatic to fragmented, stylistic prostheses that can be attached to a

subject already imagined to be whole. Rather, the virtuality of these figures—that is, the

simultaneous im/material, in/organicity of their Asiatic figurations—suggest that aesthetic

inquiry and sociality is possible precisely through their ambivalence. Attending to the

virtuality of Asiatic figurations through the glitches they produce within liberal humanist

sensibilities can therefore index the conditions that have made the liberal humanist subject

legible as a racial and aesthetic form, as an eroticized interplay of power, and a style of

embodying power.

The doubling of the real

Within the Dark Baths, virtuality reconfigures “phenomenological readings of time

and space” (Holland 11) through its indeterminacies around dis/embodiment and

im/materiality. Following Wong’s orientation towards the conditions of in/organicity, the

virtuality of the Asiatic body, as an in/organic form, makes way for Asian Americanist

critique to orient discourse precisely through the ambivalence around affects of anxiety,

dread, desire, or excitement that are simultaneously aroused by techno-Orientalist

speculations of the world. The psychedelic narrative form around the Dark Baths, and

throughout the novel, turn the feeling of reading Tiger Flu itself into a practice of “releas[ing]

thinking from the grip of certainty and embrac[ing] the imagination’s power to create with

unclear and confused, or uncertain impressions” (Ferreira da Silva 58). The novel does not

guide the reader through the plot so much as offers the potentiality of moving through the

story via emulsified fragments of dance, chant, disease, language, and lyrics, aestheticized

through lists of materials and knowledge that do not clarify the narrative self but index the

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glitchiness of the story’s time and space. Upon hearing an old radio that Carmela Sweetwater

has found in Kirilow, Glorybind, and Peristrophe Halliana’s cave, Kirilow involuntarily feels

memories and archived knowledge in her body through a

dance of nuclear fission, of oil, of coal, of wood and straw. I dance for wheels and

automobiles, when they were like living creatures drunk on the rotted bodies of

species long dead. I dance for the tiger flu, for Ebola, for AIDS, smallpox, measles,

tuberculosis, Black Plague, and death. I dance for stem cells, devilled eggs, cloning,

and mutation. All the long path of chance and science, money and murder that Old

Glorybind taught me was my messy legacy. Although I can’t say I understand it, I

know its songs, its oranges and lemons, its ring around the rosy. My body knows

something that my mind can’t refuse. (Tiger Flu 70-1, emphasis my own)

Formally, this kind of listing that occurs throughout the novel draw out the

ambivalence of ethical relationality as both characters and readers encounter knowledge as a

body feeling, and body feeling as a practice that cannot always be clarified through the mind.

The dance that Kirilow finds herself involuntarily performing to the radio is inscribed

through the poetics of a rambling list that includes species that have died, reproductive

technologies, the “ring around the rosy” vocabulary of Anglophone nursery rhymes, and

extractive resource industries. We can feel out the materiality of such ambivalence in

conversation with Sianne Ngai’s concept of “ugly feelings,” where “dwell[ing] on affective

… illegibilities, dysphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity” alongside

“similarly ambivalent situations of suspended agency” (Ngai 1) produces critical and creative

orientation through the very glitchiness of simultaneous understanding and uncertainty. Such

glitchiness denotes the presence of not just political dissidence against particular sensibilities,

but the production of racial form and aesthetics as a form of erotic mediation.

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In turn, this virtuality (the unlikely, multiple, and yet undeterminable erotic

mediation) of techno-Orientalist aesthetics turns critique around techno-Orientalism itself

into the “politically ambiguous work” which Ngai identifies in affects that may not be

considered attractive or prestigious within a given moment in literary and culture critique (6).

Conceiving of virtuality and its implications through erotics enables attending to the

“mediation between the aesthetic and the political in a nontrivial way” (Ngai 3)—and, as I

will elaborate, in an orientation towards the production of Asiatic in/organicity as a

simultaneously dis/embodied register of subject or object being. At the very same time as the

Dark Baths is facilitated via destructive, and violent practices such as kidnap and coercive

experimentation, what the Dark Baths also promises is a form of virtual reality where

subjects are produced through the very dis/embodiment of their sensations and desires.

Virtuality also establishes an index of the very production of this subject, in Kara

Keeling’s sense of the indexical as not a repository but “the trace of the referent” (“I =

Another” 57). Within the novel, the conditions of pandemic and entropy that make the virtual

reality of the Dark Baths so alluring draws out biotechnology’s failed promises within the

text, while rehearsing both liberal humanist and posthumanist aesthetics that promise to “cure

the mind of the body” by disavowing their interrelatedness—in this case, by forcibly

extracting “Grist sister DNA to feel real” (Tiger Flu 173). At the same time, the Dark Baths’

presence is striking as a technology explicitly developed within the narrative to mediate life

and death via the “dismemberment and dispersal” of body matter that troubles binaries of

in/organicity and features in techno-Orientalist aesthetics of the “Asian” body as machinelike

(Wong, “Dismembered” 36). Cast alongside relationships between humanoid characters

within the novel, the Dark Baths aestheticizes the ambivalence around distinctions between

im/material, in/organic, highlighting the technological function of dis/embodied forms across

these distinctions.

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When she enters the virtual reality of the Dark Baths, Kirilow Groundsel encounters a

palpable specter of her wife Peristrophe Halliana, who had died earlier from the eponymous

tiger flu after being weakened by excessive organ donations. Following her encounter with

Peristrophe Halliana in the Dark Baths, Kirilow is disoriented with grief and longing, and she

asks Glorybind Groundsel—her mother double—whether the experience was real. Prompted

to clarify what she means after stating that the experience was real “in a manner of speaking,”

Glorybind responds succinctly: “There is real, and there is real” (293). In effect Glorybind

conjures both the living Peristrophe Halliana and her dead body “real,” implicitly gesturing

towards spectrality of both as simultaneously im/material and dis/embodied forms. By

doubling the real rather than privileging one dis/embodied form over the other or invoking a

real/immaterial binary, Glorybind conjures up possibilities around sociality that virtuality can

engender as a relationship between, to return to Terranova’s language, what is supposedly

given (Peristrophe Halliana’s death) and what is unlikely (Peristrophe, still alive).

By discursively doubling the “real,” Glorybind also gestures towards the palpability

that signifies both the temporalities of past and present, living and dead, and the in/organicity

of the Asiatic body who mediates the virtuality of these temporalities. The poetic impact of

Glorybind’s doubled “real” in response to Kirilow’s desperate question around the actuality

of Peristrophe Halliana’s specter also performs im/material labour that, in this context, is

reproductive, aesthetic, and erotic labour insofar as it multiplies what could be indexed

through the idea of the “real.” The virtuality of possible dis/embodiments within this passage

do not only enact “the relation between the given and the (allegedly) unlikely” that Tiziana

Terranova identifies within the concept of virtuality, but also the ways in which “immaterial

labour” can be traced through the figuration of precarious workers whose “capacities are

‘virtual,’ that is they are there but still undetermined” (83). Im/material labour tracks this

virtuality that Terranova names alongside the im/materiality of figures whose very bodies,

35

not just their capacities for labour, are undetermined. Through virtuality, we might feel out

the generative in/organicity of the Asiatic as a racialized, gendered, and sexualized

production, while also attending to the labours that are carried out by Asiatic bodies but

difficult to quantify within reductive narratives of the injured subject—for example, erotic,

sexual, aesthetic, and intellectual labour. Therefore, while Kirilow continue to yearn for

another encounter with Peristrophe Halliana in the Dark Baths at the end of the novel, her

painful experience within the Dark Baths foregrounds virtuality without valorizing an

assumption that deeper knowledge between self and other will necessarily guarantee a world

of reciprocity. The erotics of practicing reciprocity via the virtual is itself conditioned by

what the technology of virtuality indexes, and the sensual and sexual labour of “habitual

archival work” (Wong, “Screen Time”), which virtuality and its interfaces, such as the

internet, can enable, whether in relation to sexual performances or the corporeality of desire.

Kirilow, Glorybind, and Peristrophe Halliana all produce sociality in relation to each

other in ways that seem undetermined as im/material labour. As Grist sisters, they are

humanoid clones generated from the biomatter of the same human woman, having become

mutated after generations of repeated cloning via mother doubles. Yet they take roles like

wife, mother, groom, starfish, and, of course, sister—all dis/embodied styles of sociality that

cannot be accounted for via identitarian commitments around race, gender, and sexuality. We

cannot take this for granted—even characters in speculative fiction narratives articulate their

own conventions and assumptions, as I will discuss later when I read a passage wherein

Kirilow expresses visceral disgust with being categorized as “human.” However, what I am

gesturing to is the ways in which erotic registers of relationality, such as sex and desire, are

not easily mapped onto cartographies of affiliation based on pathologized difference (or lack

thereof), since the in/organicity of both self and other in the text are foregrounded by the

Grist sisters’ visual and biological similarities. As aestheticized figures of “Asiatic”

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dis/embodiment, the Grist sisters also index virtuality's erotic presence as an “experience of

disorientation into the way otherness is conceived” (Patterson 261). The virtuality that

Glorybind aestheticizes through her doubling of the “real” is conjured not just in her

discursive utterance, but in the conditions of habitual revision that each Grist sister makes to

the biomatter of the human woman they all share. There is no originary whole in which Grist

sisters can be recuperated in order to be made legible via the privileged narrative of

subjectivity. Indeed, given that even mother doubles rely on regenerated body parts from

their own clones to survive, a reading of the text that “returns the extracted body part to the

violated racialized whole—a move that naturalizes a prior state of organic intactness and

individuality to that racialized body,” identified by Lee as one style of Asian Americanist

critique (Lee 7), is frustrated. Instead, the Grist Sisters are visually, genetically identical, and

yet they configure sociality through difference that is not always legible on the body, but felt

through it, nonetheless. The reproductive capacities the Grist sisters are dispersed through

inorganic processes such as the “nursing surgery,” which turns sisters into “grooms” who can

facilitate live births and nurse newborns; or the “the loving transplant, the sexy suture” that

enables mother doublers to survive birthing multiple litters in a lifetime (Tiger Flu 95 and

21).

Glorybind’s conjuring of virtuality around the “real” therefore makes its possibilities

palpable, but in a way that is responsive to Kirilow’s desire to be with her wife and

companion again. This virtuality does not necessarily multiply Peristrophe Halliana’s

availability for recuperation into the register of recognizable life following the “incorporative

and slow—bit by bit, scar by scar—vivisection” of biopower (Lee 28) surrounding her death.

There is a sociality through erotic mediations that returns us over and again to the (Asiatic)

body, while enabling a mode of address through the very multiplicity of what the body is

made to sign, and the selves or others it is made to stylize.

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Since the Dark Baths figures as a virtual interface composed of uploaded

consciousness within the narrative, Glorybind’s doubling of the “real” also conjures up

ambivalence around distinctions between self and other—that is, between Kirilow and

Peristrophe, who very well might be specters of each other’s consciousness within the Dark

Baths. By turning to Glorybind, yet another Grist Sister and clone, to question reality,

Kirilow also sustains a mode of sociality by reaching out through this very ambivalence

between self and other in order to make meaning. Identical in terms of visual appearance and

DNA, Kirilow, Glorybind, and Peristrophe Halliana nevertheless surface the illegibility that

difference can take, but that can be felt out to multiply various social arrangements through

this ambivalence around how to locate difference in self or other. Rather than privileging

either self or other as dis/embodiments, both Glorybind and Kirilow reach out to each other

through the ambivalence between what is sensible and what is loss. In doing so they make a

mode of address out of the “unknowability” that erotics engenders, which, for Musser,

functions as both “a way around the cleavage of self and Other” and a sign of its excess

beyond these binaries (Sensual Excess 14). Still, the spectral appearance of Peristrophe

Halliana and Kirilow’s “powerful powerlessness” (Ngai 2) in response signifies mediations

between self and other that require each to give up the fantasy of boundedness facilitated by

agency, turning instead to the erotic ambivalence of affects that cannot not be recuperated

into a particular trajectory or body of origin. Dis/embodiment in this sense does refer to

fragmentations within a self, but the illegible mediations through which self and other are

produced in relation to the undetermined, yet-to-come affective responses of each other. By

doubling the “real,” Glorybind establishes a poetics around this erotic mediation of sociality,

wherein the ambivalence of encountering a loved one’s virtual reality cannot be universalized

as another form of difference.

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Rather, Glorybind's response to Kirilow gestures towards the ambivalence that is

present in all affects because of the conditions that have enabled their legibility. Continuing

Ngai’s suggestion that “affective contradictions” produce a “disjunctive logic” around scenes

of ambivalent feeling (Ngai 112), what both Glorybind and Kirilow do is show that [d]espite

the insistent processes of mechanization at work” in the virtual reality of the Dark Baths, “it

is precisely the mechanization” of reality “which makes the disjunctiveness visible” (Ngai

113) in relation to Kirilow’s affective response. Yet in this passage, the dis/embodiment of

these affects are not taken at face value for their production of erotic mediations. Rather they

are accounted for as conditions of erotic mediation’s possibilities for making the

im/materiality of shared vulnerability palpable, as a potential interface for reciprocity. The

sensations that Kirilow is subject to within the Dark Baths do not hinge upon the

confirmation of what is “real.” Yet her question to Glorybind surfaces the presence of

ambivalence around the real. This offers a glitchy queered sense of dis/embodiment in time,

space, and their multiples—insofar as virtual reality cannot register in Tiger Flu as a binary

between the real and unreal.

Yet through the orientation to vulnerability that bottomhood surfaces, the eroticized

power that has produced the Asiatic body through the sensibilities of empire, global

modernity, and imperial war can be reconfigured through the in/organicity of the Asiatic

body. As with Tan Hoang Nguyen, Patterson attends to the hypermediation of the in/organic

Asiatic body in pornography by pointing out that “[t]o receive pleasure, it matters that an

actor is represented not as ‘person’ or ‘body,’ but as white, as man, as stepfather, as boss, as

Asian woman, as pathetic cuckhold, as bratty bottom, etc … The political and social subtext

is crucial to erotic sensation, to masturbatory pleasure (Patterson 205). Stylization around the

pleasures of erotic mediation matter, then, because they are the mechanisms by which the

in/organic Asiatic body might reconfigure self and other in relation to conditions that have

39

made the “Asiatic” legible, including speculative (re)visions of the body within techno-

Orientalist aesthetics. Without disavowing the violence that even resignifying subjectivity

can reproduce, the “surrender and submission” signified through conceptions like critical

bottomhood can illustrate the critical, erotic possibilities of “boundary trespass involved in

being penetrated” (T.H. Nguyen 17). Nguyen and Patterson join Amber Jamilla Musser in

centering reciprocity as a matter of critical importance to the eroticized ambivalence between

self and other, so that we “do not necessarily come toward pleasure, but we come to

something else” when we ask about the “formations of relational selfhood” (Sensual Excess

23). Kirilow’s scene of ambivalence around the Peristrophe Halliana within the Dark Baths’

virtual reality conjures up a mode of erotic mediation where affects are not universalized in

service of reproducing a bounded, liberal humanist subject—nor another kind of subject

realized through a position of domination over the technologies of producing self or other.

Attending to the virtuality of the “real” in response to binary logics between in/organic also

enables a critical ambivalence around dis/embodiment and its erotic potential to make matter,

without simply “expanding possible subject positions” within liberal humanist fantasies of

subjectivity—or otherwise flattening all difference as equivalent forms under a utopic sign of

“Other/non-human” (Liu 5 and 9). The stakes of porosity that are engendered, and indexed,

through erotic mediations of techno-Orientalist aesthetics, therefore include a potential

resignification of power interplays around difference, via the eroticism of virtuality and its

im/material labours.

I potentially risk overdetermining Glorybind’s discursive doubling of the “real” in

terms of Tiger Flu as an aestheticization of virtuality’s erotic mediations. But what this

particular instance of virtuality around the “real” surfaces is the “doubling of Orientalism”

that David S. Roh, Greta Niu, and Betsy A. Huang identify in the logic of techno-

Orientalism. That is, techno-Orientalism does not follow progressivist temporalities of

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development as a form of ideological or political consciousness that simply continues the

racialized, gendered, and sexualized assumptions of Orientalism over time. Rather, techno-

Orientalism establishes the logics of Orientalism in a repetitive loop that reproduces its

temporalities, spatialities, and phenomenologies into a speculative narrative about futurity.

This virtuality that I name in techno-Orientalism is conveyed, for Roh, Niu, and Huang, in

the “techne” of “techno-Orientalism,” wherein technology is a process, rather than a tool, that

“accounts for—and then dismisses—Eastern modernity as both process and product of

dehumanization.” The “speculative narratives of textual and visual media,” they continue,

“are the vehicles through which this disciplinary process travels” (223). That is, aesthetic

productions like Tiger Flu are technologies as well, foundational prostheses to bodies that are

also themselves technologies for “how we matter in this world—mechanisms from which our

futures are carved” (Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures xii). The virtuality aestheticized in

Tiger Flu shows us that configurations of both “East” and “West” index desires around

relative orientation towards “another way of being in the world … a world of romance,

sexuality, and sensuality” where “‘farness’ takes the direction of a wish, or even follows the

line of a wish” (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 114). In other words, virtuality can make the

conditions around difference palpable, but the process of making such conditions palpable

itself betrays a desire to orient one’s body to another—whether this other is the self, the other,

or their virtual multiples. Turning to Tiger Flu and its references to the Pacific Northwest’s

techno-Orientalist temporal-spatial cartographies, this chapter, too, is oriented by the desire to

reconfigure discourses of the self and other through the book as a technology and subject of

critique.

Feeling temporality, failing time

In all its waywardness around the real and unreal, material and immaterial, the erotics

of virtuality’s ambivalence does not necessarily open up a repertoire of time and space that is

41

both endless and available for domestication, even as it can be read in texts through aesthetic

tropes and styles. The ambivalence that virtuality can help us register is not necessarily useful

because it can resolve inexplicable or unlikely socialities through dis/embodiments in time

and space. Rather, the ambivalence is both a sensorium and method of being with, not only

through desire but also failures around domesticating particular temporal and spatial modes

through critique (which includes even the most wayward erotic modes of aesthetic inquiry).

Epistemological ambivalence, in this sense, disrupts racial forms and politics by orienting

critique and poeisis to the very conditions of racial form and subjectivity, not disavowing

their production of erotic power. In this sense, ambivalence is the sensorium of erotic

mediation of power. In Tiger Flu, the “ancient mainframe Chang” and “the backup

mainframe Eng” (12 and 14) help us practice, through our reading of the text, how to move

with such failures around time and space, by registering the failures as yet another iteration of

virtuality’s multiplicities. Chang and Eng are the planetary bodies wherein consciousness can

be uploaded and archived as virtual reality. Having been launched into orbit before the

novel’s events, they set and rise as if the moon and sun, changing the hue and brightness of

the sky in a daily loop. However, at the time of the novel’s events, Chang is at constant risk

of breakdown and failure as it becomes loaded with memory. Chang and Eng are also

gradually expanding their orbit as they travel increasingly, and dangerously, closer to the

planet that the story’s characters inhabit, to the point that their gravitational pull has become

sensible to Kirilow during her visit to the New Origins Archive (310).

Chang and Eng put the simultaneous and multiple temporalities of virtual reality into

motion. Launched by Light Industry HöST Company, Chang and Eng move the corporation’s

extractive technologies into the chronic poetics of the everyday as the two mainframes move

alongside—but not in replacement of—the moon and sun. They are the in/organic bodies by

which virtuality’s multiplicity is launched into a temporal loop, as they become timekeeping

42

mechanisms that archive history by continually receiving uploaded data. As orbiting bodies

containing the virtual realities of uploaded consciousnesses and memories, they make

sensible the multiple fields of gravity that are disjointed from the characters’ home planet, yet

directly connected to the repetitive day and night loop that the characters have become

habituated to. In this sense Chang and Eng gesture towards the possibility of virtuality to fail

time itself, revealing knowledge production to be an erotic process requiring habituation into

the rhythms and gravitational forces of virtual reality. For characters within the novel, the

scales that enable access to the mainframes can be costly and susceptible to infection or lice,

highlighting the in/organic contagiousness, too, of temporality even as a privatized habit. The

multiplicity of time within the virtual reality of Chang and Eng put the finitude and infinitude

of the body’s capacities into a relationship of simultaneity. This opens the possibility of

coming to “exhaustion” when virtuality “defer[s] a future for another future” by multiplying

the “undead” (Chun 91) dis/embodiments that are produced within it, and that surface amidst

a temporality’s breakdown. The failure of virtuality that is aestheticized through the

in/organic bodies that are Chang and Eng therefore gesture towards the undead that remain

after a concept, trope, or register of critique has broken down.

To further think with virtuality as the breakdown of critique, we could read the

mainframes Chang and Eng in relation to their namesakes, conjoined twins Chang and Eng

Bunker. Such a reading could be a project of its own; indeed, Cynthia Wu's scholarly

monograph offers critical historicization of the Bunker brothers and their production as

“fictional characters, literary or visual metaphor, medical specimen, museum artifact, or

venerated ancestors” (Wu 2-3). As Wu demonstrates in her book, reading the figuration of

Chang and Eng can betray the racialized, gendered, and sexualized dimensions of American

imperial imaginaries around modern subjectivity. Figured variously as “freak show”

performers, biomedical spectacles, and historical characters alike, the Bunker brothers

43

demystify binarizations and aestheticize the virtuality between subject/object as figures of

Asiatic in/organicity. However, it is critical to note that their capacity to become figures of

in/organic object virtuality is also made possible from the anti-Blackness of modernity, and

transatlantic slavery’s production of (non-Black) subject and (Black) subjection. The Bunkers

themselves were slaveowners who controlled a tobacco plantation—and were therefore “free”

and “rational” men, in the liberal humanist sense of owning “property” (enslaved Black

people) (Lowe 12). Having been indentured servitude as well (Wu 4), Chang and Eng

frustrate any desires to claim Asiatic in/organicity as an inherently ethical interplay of

power—even as they have been figured in “late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-

century contestations of nonreproductive sex, the conjugal family, and compulsory

heterosexuality” (Wu 10). Indeed, their erotic labour around queering sexuality surfaces in

relation to the production of white femininity and sexuality, as conjoined twins who aroused

moralized anxieties around their incapacity to separately have sex with their white wives (Wu

53). This anxiety surfaces over and above considerations around the sexual violence against

Black people that sustains slavery (Wu 164).

My point is not to privilege Wu’s historicization as the primary mode of aesthetic

inquiry, nor offer a self-flagellating critique of Asiatic in/organicity wherein Blackness

figures as a receptacle of displaced shame. Rather, this is a gesture towards the waywardness

of virtuality that can also surface the ways in which violence (such as that of slavery) can be

simultaneously spectacular and quotidian in their figurations, to the point where they become

reproduced through (re)habituations of the Asiatic body without being apparent. Virtuality’s

disobedience towards time, in its indexing or temporality, can therefore include disobedience

towards the desires of critique. This cannot be resolved by sharper or more vigilant critique

around “what” race reveals, but “how race reveals” (Wong, “Pandemic Racial Visions”) as

erotic mediations of empire and its multiplicities. Given Tiger Flu’s depiction of violent

44

precarity and the looping violence of global modernity, could there be pleasure in such

failure, without domesticating the waywardness of virtuality? If virtuality’s ambivalence can

help us sensorially register the conditions of temporal-spatial modes around sociality through

in/organic bodies like Chang and Eng, then might the same erotic mediations habituate

practitioners of critique to the feeling of being undone by an uncertainty whose resolution

may never arrive, submitting to ambivalence in the process of staying with it? If we

“foreground the interplay of power” in critically attending to submission (T.H. Nguyen 17),

might the erotic waywardness of virtuality also enable pleasure in avowing the critical, erotic,

and aesthetic vulnerability that can come with not knowing each self and other that virtuality

produces? While feeling out power as an eroticized interplay complicates the conditions of

pleasure in relation to reciprocity, Tan Hoang Nguyen reminds us that “[i]nstead of an

aggressive fortifying of our psychic and corporeal armor,” the vulnerability of in/organic self

and other opened up by virtuality’s failing of time can resignify both submission and

subjection. The stakes and possibilities are modes of feeling out the erotic mediations of

power (T.H. Nguyen 18 and 17) that might reconfigure the self and other through the

im/materiality of their eroticized relationships with power.

With such reconfigurations comes the invitation to distinguish the troubling erotic

ambivalence that is possible between suffering and pain as a practice of pleasure. When the

virtual reality produced by New Origins Archive becomes indistinguishable from that of

Kora’s waking life, she becomes overwhelmed with “rumbling dread” as she begins to hear

the bleating of her dead goat, Delphine, and the footsteps of her mother, Charlotte, all while

being pulled by the multiple gravitational fields of the planet she is on, alongside that of

Chang and Eng (Tiger Flu 272). It is this dread that she has been “taught to slide into” (272)

by Madame Dearborn, who teaches dances at Cordova Dancing School for Girls as one way

of (re)habituating knowledge production through its im/materiality. Yet her suffering,

45

differentiated from pain, bursts forth when she “screams and can’t stop screaming”; “she

becomes the scream” as her body becomes dismembered by the New Origins Archive,

transformed into fragments by other fragments (such as the feeling of knives and blades)

within its virtual reality (274, emphasis my own). As she becomes forcibly multiplied in a

way that dismembers her, and in the process becomes uploaded into the mainframe, she

experiences the feeling of being “pure pain without a body” (Tiger Flu 275), forcibly subject

to the sharp clarity of being fragmented while conscious and without the blur of ambivalence.

The body’s virtuality, then, is a technology of sociality that cannot be claimed as

either inorganic object to be wielded towards an endless possibility ex machina, nor organic

subject of universalized feeling and difference. The technology of the Asiatic body, and its

techno-Orientalist aesthetics that produce it, is an erotic mediation that comes with

(re)habitual practice. The ambivalence of virtuality (re)habituates us to conceptions of

im/materiality, in/organicity, and dis/embodiment, along with the deeply eroticized interplays

of power that sustain these iterations of sociality. While virtuality can make multiple and

simultaneous modes of sociality sensible precisely through its ambivalence, its waywardness

means that virtuality’s possibilities around reciprocity or shared vulnerability cannot be taken

for granted; the erotic is not inherently queer and can indeed reproduce the conflation of

suffering and pain. Yet, as techno-Orientalist aesthetics continue to resonate through

speculative texts like Tiger Flu, virtuality’s cosmic possibilities—registered as the

im/material, in/organic, and dis/embodied—endure through the erotic ambivalence for which

the “Asiatic” body is multiply reproduced as interface.

46

Chapter Two: Fugitive erotics and refugee figurations in On Earth

We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Your hand under my shirt as static

intensifies on the radio.

Your other hand pointing

your daddy’s revolver

to the sky. Stars falling one

by one in the cross hairs.

This means I won’t be

afraid if we’re already

here. Already more

than skin can hold. That a body

beside a body

must make a field

full of ticking. That your name

is only the sound of clocks

being set back another hour

& morning

finds our clothes

on your mother’s front porch, shed

like week-old lilies.

— Ocean Vuong, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” Night Sky with Exit Wounds (43-6)

If the Asiatic body is figured through speculative visions around in/organicity, its

erotic mediations index the Asiatic body as aesthetic site and matter of racialized, gendered,

and sexualized difference within globalized modernity. Where conceiving of techno-

Orientalism as an aesthetic has surfaced the simultaneous im/possibility of ethical

subjectivity within such conditions, this chapter moves us from techno-Orientalist

discourse—and its critiques around the spectral labour of in/organic bodies that are circulated

as forms of globalized capital—to similarly erotic inquiry around the Asiatic body’s capacity

for critically aestheticizing ethical relationality. Given the formative role of imperial war in

generating liberal humanist desires for global community, I orient our reading of the Asiatic

body’s erotic mediations towards the figure of the refugee. In Ocean Vuong’s epistolary

novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the production of the Vietnamese/Vietnamese

American refugee figure traces the ways in which reciprocal sociality is possible through

47

refugee practices of archival memory and afterwar survival, read here as forms of queerly

reproductive labour. Whereas in Chapter One I foregrounded techno-Orientalist aesthetics as

a framework for reckoning with the erotic ambivalence that the Asiatic figure poses in its

bodily in/organicity, here I turn to the refugee figure for the eroticized interplays of power

and knowledge that it indexes as an Asiatic body in the afterlives of Cold War geopolitics.

Chapter One’s focus on techno-Orientalist tropes positions the “Asiatic” body within the

globalized geopolitics of hypo- and hypermodernity, through speculative narratives around

the ends of global capitalism and its subjects. Building upon such spectral circulations,

Chapter Two attends to the production of the refugee figure as an iteration of the “Asiatic”

body that circulates in the geopolitics of afterwar—in particular, within U.S. empire in

relation to the Vietnam War.

By turning to the aesthetic registers of refugee archives, which index the presence of

the immaterial and lost, I ask how the erotic mediations of the “Asiatic” body also produces

modes of address. Rather than reanimating self-expression as a sign of subjectivity, this

chapter asks how the aesthetic production of the refugee figure enables orientation towards

the eroticized interplays of power conditioning the capacity for communication and care.

Here we reckon with what I call a fugitive erotics, which gestures to the aestheticization of

Vietnamese and Vietnamese American characters in Vuong’s novel, and the erotics of

refugee epistemologies around loss and care that they practice. Fugitive erotics specifically

turns to the work of address via refugee epistemologies and the interrelated subjection of

Blackness within modern subjectivity. Dina Al-Kassim writes, thinking with relationality in

terms of address coheres “against the humanist assumptions of sovereign speech that enable

speaking truth to power” (On Pain of Speech 2). Seemingly unimaginable and yet-to-come

habits of survival around imperial war may have already arrived, but they cannot be

registered if the sociality of refugee figures is only accounted for in terms of sovereign

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subjectivity. Foregrounding address attends to how refugees have also been made to be the

vehicle for analyzing subjecthood's problematics. How can address produced through the

fugitivity of the refugee archive enable ethical relationality oriented to interplays of power—

while honouring the ways in which practices of grief and loss are often out of time with the

teleology of healing and justice, and as such cannot always be articulated through genres of

postwar international human rights discourse?

Fugitive erotics foregrounds the simultaneously material and immaterial relationality

of discourse and remains critically curious about how the body mediates sociality—without

taking the body to stand in for the self, or embodied intimacy to stand in for relationality.

Fugitive erotics follows Ma Vang’s conception of “fugitive knowledge” or “history on the

run” (Vang 8 and 4), wherein the refugee is both “critical idea and social actor” who

articulates the ways in which “refugee histories are not really lost, they are secreted” (10).

Fugitive erotics is therefore less a question of what refugee figures reveal, but how their

figurations enable sociality, regardless of their legibility as configurations relationality or

care. Here emerges the desire of this chapter: to attend to the elusiveness within the refugee

archive, without seeking to capture the Vietnamese refugee figure as its resolution; and to

orient a critique around Asiatic in/organicity in relation to the erotics of knowledge

production around the Vietnam War, which have produced that very figure of the Vietnamese

refugee through genres of “organized forgetting” (Espiritu 20).

My use of the term “fugitive erotics” is also informed by the genealogy of fugitivity.

This genealogy, as I will discuss further, has been developed within critical Black studies as a

theoretical and aesthetic critique around the mutual production of subjectivity and subjection

as projects of modernity. The project of modernity, and its use of Asiatic racial forms to make

meaning out of temporality and spatiality in hypo- or hypermodern terms, does not only

include a history around the enslavement and continued subjection of Black people in life and

49

death—anti-Blackness is precisely that door of no return (Brand, qtd. in Sharpe 1) with its

“blood-stained gates” (Douglas, qtd. in Sharpe 6) through which bodies are figured as

subjects against “[b]lack and blackened bodies,” who “become the bearers (through violence,

regulation, transmission, etc.) of the knowledge of certain subject as well as the placeholders

of freedom for those who would claim freedom as their rightful yield” (Sharpe 4).

This chapter is not, then, an archive of refugee subjectivity that consolidates a

particular poetics, so much as an orientation towards “the ways that subjugated histories are

told ‘quietly’ or told without words or sometimes safeguarded for future tellings, whether or

not I grasp the reasons behind these decisions” within the refugee archive (Espiritu 20). We

are invited to feel the contours of the refugee archive in ways that honour their layered

opacity. In On Earth, such layered opacity features as a helpful mode for thinking with the

refugee as a figure with erotic sensibilities and styles, rather than identitarian terms. This is

not to disavow sensibilities nor attachments to identity in the work of critique; we could say

ambivalence is itself a form of discursive attachment as well. But if we read the text for its

fugitive erotics, we might be able to develop critique that follows On Earth’s affirmation of

the poiesis in refugee practices around survival—which take both the quotidian and cosmic as

aesthetic materiality. The refugee archive that On Earth produces around fugitive erotics

enables critique of erotic associations between mastery and domination as a mode of

sovereign power over self and other. In this sense fugitive erotics continues the work of what

Tan Hoang Nguyen calls the “bottom archive,” which takes “bottomhood capaciously, as a

sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form” that “complicates

[gendered] links between the bottom position and Oriental passivity” (T.H. Nguyen 2). The

fugitive erotics of refugee figures and their queerly reproductive labour intimates the

im/material conditions of knowledge production, which have made the Asiatic body sensible

as a mechanism for making meaning out of difference.

50

Continuing to think with the fugitive erotics of the refugee figure therefore requires

consideration around gendering as a form of knowledge production through the racialized

body. Critical race discourses have developed questions around skin, for example, as

experiments around the racialized surfaces and depths of the Vietnam War, which feminizes

the refugee figure in terms of the erotic and aesthetic labour it is made to do for the sake of

knowledge production. For Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, skin indexes desires around knowledge of

self and other, knowledge that in turn produces skin as an interface for the ambivalence

between self and other. “It is no accident,” Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu writes, “that we have come

to understand human skin as both a thing and not a thing” (5). It is this uncertainty around

human skin with which Tu theorizes skin's materiality as a metaphor—“the final boundary

between self and other”—and index, as “the record of our collective imbrication” (Tu 9).

This collective imbrication is far from universal as Tu attends to institutionally

archived materials of experiments conducted through the US Military Dermatology Research

Program by dermatologist Arthur Kligman, on “U.S. and allied soldiers, Vietnamese

prisoners of war, and Vietnamese civilians” throughout the Vietnam War (Tu 11). Such

speculations around skin as a racial matter persist though the globalization of a “universe of

the possible—a universe … deeply informed by imperial networks, colonial domination, and

race science” (Tu 56). A seemingly “counterintuitive figure” of knowledge because of the

losses it indexes, the refugee figure indeed makes the “colonial excess” of knowledge

production palpable (Vang 26).4 To turn this counterintuitive figuration into an analytic of

4 Drawing from Hmong epistemologies around the “open secret” of U.S. war in Laos during the Cold

War, Vang gestures towards the multiple counterintuitive figures that arise within the refugee archive

itself: as part of its strategy against Vietnam, the U.S. military waged war in Laos while conscripting

Hmong and other Indigenous peoples like Kha, Khmer, Mien, and Brao people as proxy soldiers

(Vang 58 and 5). The open secrecy of this war in Laos was a strategic workaround to the 1954

Geneva Accords, which formally declared Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam independent from France,

neutral, and free come military intervention—therefore inscribing their formal decolonization in terms

of international human rights discourses around global community. What is counterintuitive about

loss as a form of presence within Hmong epistemology cannot be folded into universal conceptions of

cultural difference. Rather, the aesthetics of the refugee as a counterintuitive figure of knowledge is

51

agency or self-expression discounts the ways in which the refugee figure carries out the

creatively aesthetic and reproductive labour of survival, in ways that may be political, but do

not always speak through the politics of identititarian solidarity.

Attending to what is considered fugitive, lost, and elusive within the refugee archive

is therefore a process that takes the aestheticization of the refugee itself as a subject of

critique. Fugitivity within the refugee archive also traces the conditions of anti-Blackness in

the aestheticization of the Asian body as a figure of hypo- and hypermodernity. Arthur

Kligman’s use of captive skin—that is, the skin of Vietnamese prisoners of war, civilians,

alongside that of incarcerated Black and white men in Holmesburgh Prison near Philadelphia,

USA (Tu 50—produces a sense of fugitivity wherein “care and capture were … intertwined”

through the martial science of dermatology (Tu 114). In terms of the skin itself as a

technology of the “chemical war” (Tu 131) that was the Vietnam War, dermatological

experiments during the Vietnam War have also saturated white skin with significance “not

just as an absence of colour, but a condition of vulnerability” (Tu 13) in need of protective

technological intervention; meanwhile, Black skin was narrated as insensible to the pain and

suffering of lethal labour, yet inevitably inferior in surviving disease (58). This

dermatological production of fugitivity through the skin produces a modern “viewing public,”

in Simone Browne’s words, which is organized around a visual culture of “biometric

consciousness” around Blackness as a source of knowledge (Browne 27)—particularly, in the

case of the Vietnam War, about supposed racial vulnerability or lack thereof. Further,

fugitivity through the skin is a persistently erotic mediation of Blackness insofar as Blackness

is produced as the matter through which the queasy pleasure of domination is processed—

that is, in life and death, Black people are made to labour through the inscription of

conditioned through particular forms of imperial strategy, which have capitalized on conceptions of

national difference formed in the process of decolonization, while encompassing them within a

persistent coloniality around “Indo-China.”

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surveillance and carcerality as modern methodologies for speculating about the meaning of

race, upon the surface and beyond the visible. Fugitive erotics, then, does not necessarily

clarify processes of racialization, gendering, and sexualization but asks how they are

produced as ways of processing the deeply erotic desire to know by learning how to touch

and feel the depths of the body through the surface of the skin. It is not just histories or bodies

that are disappeared within the refugee archive in the discourse of secret warfare, but the

erotic labour that fugitive figures are made to do in fulfilling fantasies of pleasuring the self

by feeling the other.

Reading On Earth in terms of fugitive erotics further unfolds the ways in which the

refugee figure materializes, through aesthetic productions, reciprocity as a form of queerly

reproductive labour. “Queerly,” here, operates in a similar way to the “Asiatic” insofar as it is

a relational sensibility oriented to the sensual and epistemological blurriness of erotic

mediation. The particularity of the refugee archive as one of survival through loss, and the

dispersal of the archive itself through time and space, emphasizes the significance of

queerness and racialization as “techniques of gender dissidence” that “enabl[e] a refutation of

the equation of masculinity with social recognition and legitimacy” (T.H. Nguyen 194). What

is queer about the queerly reproductive labour of On Earth’s Vietnamese American narrator

Little Dog and his mother, Rose, is not so much in the expression of gender or sexuality as

nodes of recognition between self and other (although I will later discuss the power in

sexuality through the sex scenes between Little Dog and his white lover Trevor). Rather,

fantasy as an epistemological aspect of fugitive erotics enables something like solidarity

between Little Dog and Rose in terms of “feminized genders” that enable a “strategic

rejoining of gender presentation and sexual practice” when also oriented to the eroticized

53

power interplays of race and empire (T.H. Nguyen 194). On Earth’s particular emulsion5 of

the loss and vulnerability within fantasy’s epistemological porosity that configures Little Dog

and Rose’s feminized gendering in in terms of relational receptivity and power. Their shared

feminized gendering contest associations of feminized receptivity with abject subjectivity,

and critical disavowals of Orientalized femininity, through On Earth's “insistence on keeping

the other at the center of projects of selfhood and intimacy.” Conceiving of “the mother [as]

the first provider of care (regardless of gender), who introduces the child into sociality”

(Musser, Sensual Excess 168) can help us feel out the contours of relationality that take place

between Little Dog and Rose through feminized gendering, particularly in the erotic labour

they perform with lovers, nail salon patrons, or each other.

The phantom limb: Vulnerability in fantasy

In a passage depicting Little Dog, Rose, and an unnamed patron of the nail salon

where the two work, reciprocity figures as a possibility of sociality within fugitive erotics.

Little Dog recalls how the patron removes her prosthetic limb during a pedicure, and requests

a leg massage for the space it leaves:

“When you’re almost done rinsing the soap off, she asks you, gently, almost pleading,

to go lower. ‘If it’s the same price anyway,’ she says. ‘I can still feel it down there.

It’s silly, but I can. I can’ … Without a word, you slide the towel under the phantom

limb, pad down the air, the muscle memory in your arms firing the familiar efficient

5 I borrow Geeta Patel’s language of “emulsion” as a phrase that critiques tropings of hybridity,

minority/majority, or original homeland as they are made to stand in for racialized embodiment within

diaspora. Directly relating narrative tropes of racialized diaspora to colonial empire’s capacity to

displace or connect bodies in proximity, Patel orients readers to the ways in which “[d]iasporas

themselves begin undoing fluency” (Patel 69, emphasis my own) around colonial narratives of global

community, because they are not easily translated as stories of coherent origin or agential movement.

Patel suggests that critiquing empire through such epistemological ambiguity can do queering work—

insofar as queerness troubles fantasies of “purified sexual subjects” whose “representatives must be

found to speak their own positions” in identitarian appeals to critical usefulness (74). If we read On

Earth as an aesthetic and narrative emulsion of loss and vulnerability, then, we can also ask how the

refugee figure enables critique around the interplays of power generated by empire without distilling

refugeeness into a pathological condition signified through conceptions of race, gender, or sexuality.

54

motions, revealing what’s not there, the way a conductor’s movements make the

music somehow more real.” (On Earth 83)

Rose responds to the woman’s feeling that her limb is there with a sense of feeling enacted

through muscle memory, an intensely corporeal aesthetic production analogous to that of a

conductor animating the music. And like a conductor, who responds to musicians and sonic

reverberations to animate and translate their movements into a form of address, Rose conjures

up care through response to that of the patron; the two make contact—not just literally upon

the skin, but through fantasy as an orienting affective material, and the woman’s phantom

limb as a sign of both debility6 and the capacity to be cared for. Producing precise

vernaculars of learned muscle memory, Rose fulfills the desire for connection between self

and other through orientation to fugitivity as a form of survival within vulnerability.

While Rose’s muscle memory indexes her habituation into the efficiency required of

labour routed through global capitalism, interfacing with the patron’s own muscle memory

around her phantom limb enables both bodies to conjure multiple sensibilities around care,

sharing the labour of sociality through habituation. As alluded to earlier, Tu’s scholarship on

U.S. military dermatological experiments by Albert M. Kligman during the Vietnam War

highlights how the Vietnamese body in afterwar has been produced in terms of feminized

fugitivity within the textures, surfaces, and depths of skin, which are circulated as both site

6 Jasbir K. Puar develops the concept of debility in response to discourses that frame disability as a

linear gradation of human subjectivity, and in relation to juridical terms of nation-state citizenship.

Puar does not relegate either debility or disability as inherently more or less prone to becoming

calcified through narratives of citizenship, juridical subjectivity, difference, or liberal humanism.

Instead, distinctions occur where disability signals a form of arrival, if incompletely or ostensibly so,

at being through legibility and recognition; meanwhile the “calculus of debilitation” (Puar xiv)

involves not only a gradual wearing down of capacity but also increased and non-consensual

proximity to death alongside being inscribed as embodying risk and violence. Thus, as Puar notes,

one’s body can be both disabled and capacitated (because of institutional legibility) and one can be

targeted for becoming debilitated but not targeted for death or because of identification as “being”

disabled. Disability, debility, and capacity are co-constitutive and operate under a logic of power as

multiple and bodies as permeable, which means they can be analyzed through bio/necropolitics and

prisms of assemblage, ritual, spectacle, body mapping, dissolution. See The Right to Maim: Debility,

Capacity, Disability.

55

and matter of speculations around racialized, sexual, and gendered embodiment. Routing

their habitual movements through each other’s feminized bodies, Rose and the patron

produce possibilities of relationality in relation to the eroticized interplays of power that

condition their encounter in the context of the nail salon. The very skin of Rose’s hands

materializes, in the epidermal, the “wreck and reckoning of a dream” for the refugee figure

and subject (Vuong 79), where the scaly skin of Rose’s chronically pained hands materialize

the relentless physical toil of factory and nail salon work upon the surface. The imaginary of

“the entire country” of Vietnam itself “as a vast laboratory” for martial science (Tu 113)

produces a geography in which knowledge about Vietnamese bodies is made to represent a

map of knowledge about the self and other, ostensibly making sensible difference via race,

gender, and sexuality through its epidermal porosity, eruptions, or latent capacities. The

“calficifed knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones—with or without

citizenship—aching, toxic, and underpaid” (On Earth 80-1) is not merely an abjection that

Rose overcomes towards a sovereign self, but a form of erotic power that enables address

between Rose, the patron, and Little Dog throughout the vast temporal-spatial distances

within the refugee archive.

Little Dog’s interpellation of Rose through a letter that she will never read

underscores how, as he writes, “even here, writing you, the physical fact of your body resists

my moving it” (On Earth 85), whether in the address produced by his prose or the massage

that he gives her after long days labouring in the nail salon. The queerly reproductive labour

of maternality within On Earth’s refugee archive does not, then, exceed the “traces of a

stubborn nonknowing of Asian women” that, for Laura Hyun Yi Kang, haunt the U.S.

empire’s memory of the Vietnam War and discourses of transpacific redress alike (30). Yet

this impossibility around knowing the self or other through the body of the refugee mother

reroutes readers’ desires away from merely using the refugee figure as a boundless resource

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for care via moral education, instead emphasizing the reciprocity that is practiced between

Little Dog and Rose within their unknowability to each other. The capacity for “you” to

become a way of reaching out to Rose becomes potent in its very failure to capture the other

in the process of conjuring a self.

Much like the sexual “prosthetic” of the strap-on dildo, which Amber Jamilla Musser

has theorized as a queer technology of deep listening rather than mimesis of the phallus or

Oedipal penis-envy (Musser 80), the in/organic touch between patron’s phantom limb and

Rose’s hands materialize the spectrality of relationality between self and other. The

spectrality of fugitivity is continually reconjured through the sensuality of Rose’s hands slide

through motions such as "rub[bing],” “cupping,” “pinching,” “stretching,” and “knead[ing]”

the invisible leg (On Earth 83). Little Dog’s narrativization of these motions mediates them

in a way that portrays Rose’s erotic orientation towards the “imperial remains” of the

Vietnam War (M.T. Nguyen 25), figured in this passage as a phantom limb. Rose’s “skin

literacy—the ability to read skin for signs of social life” (Tu 38)—does not only touch but

addresses the phantom limb as a material that is corporeal in its unavailability. In doing so,

Rose practices feeling out the intertwined legacies of beauty work and militarized science in

afterlives of the Vietnam War. Yet readers are reminded by the epistolary form that this

passage is a depiction of Rose feeling out what is not visible—not an instructional narrative

on how to do so. Where refuge within the U.S. empire is “premised on devastating violence,

but also emanate[s] through beauty, through love, through hope—in short, the promise to

life,” the refugee figure is made to circulate, endlessly, the im/material excesses that the

Vietnam War has produced. These excesses are cohered as unpayable debt, whether through

imperatives to perform affective modes like gratitude towards the state (M.T. Nguyen 19),

labour within the loop of 24/7time (see Attewell and Wong), or the feminized labour of

beautifying the public body by working the skin towards “the possibility of a clean, smooth,

57

new surface … as evidence of having become modern” (Tu 26). Within this emulsion, the

temporal-spatial configuration of the nail salon archives a relationality sensibility

aestheticized through “folklore, rumors, tall tales, and jokes from the old country [Vietnam],”

where the smell and taste of phở broth being cooked in the staff rooms are constantly “mixing

with formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-Sol, and bleach” (On Earth 80). The porosity of

these materials configure the nail salon where Little Dog and Rose work as “more than a

place of work and workshop for beauty”; it is also a place of ongoing and intergenerational

labour around nourishment (the phở also feeds the children that those working at the nail

salon take care of while they work) and pedagogy (“[i]t’s a makeshift classroom where we …

bend over workbooks at manicure desks, finishing homework for nighttime ESL classes that

cost a quarter of our wages”) (On Earth 80).

This emulsion of nourishment, intergenerational relationality, and toxicity in the nail

salon of Little Dog’s memory casts the refugee figure’s queerly reproductive labours in terms

of sensorial habituation between the in/organic circulations of self and other. In the same

space that Little Dog’s cousin becomes afflicted with asthma “from years of breathing the

noxious fumes into … still-developing lungs” (79), Rose transforms the patron's phantom

limb into yet prosthesis—but one of relief and catharsis—by touching its very immateriality.

This ambivalence does not romanticize or overdetermine the refugee body as an object of

discourse whose significance is in alternative enlightenment towards ethical subjectivity—

doing so would displace the refugee figure's significance onto its infinite capacity to labour.

Rather, Little Dog’s mediation of this encounter between Rose and the patron unfolds

fugitive erotics as a sensibility around the immaterial, and feminized labour that goes into

surviving as a “counterintuitive figure” (Vang 26) of knowledge. The erotic cadences of the

patron’s request to go “lower” also accentuates Rose’s “bodily knowledge” around the ethical

relationality that is oriented towards interplays of power through vulnerability, rather than

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domination or mastery. Rose’s movement downward at the patron’s request unfolds an

“erotics of bottomhood” (T.H. Nguyen x) wherein self and other are produced through

sensing and touching the interplays of power conditioning their encounter.

Little Dog’s inclusion of this scene in his letter attends to his mother’s erotic labour as

life-giving—regardless of its capacity serve critique. In doing so, his letter remediates

interplays of power that have produced colonial excess through the Vietnam War; but it does

not necessarily turn these excesses into legible, or even alternative, narratives of the war.7

The letter’s own mediation of spectrality that facilitates address between Rose and the patron

foregrounds the in/organic “life cycle of memories and their industrial production, how they

are fashioned and forgotten, how they evolve and change” (V.T. Nguyen 12). The queerly

reproductive labours of fugitive erotics engender an archive composed of muscle memory

shared between Rose and Little Dog, who finds that his “hands moved on their own” when he

massages her back after work. “Having done this hundreds of times by now” (On Earth 84),

the muscle memory of his hands engages in care work that reciprocates Rose’s own muscle

memory around care work in the nail salon. In this intergenerational circulation of refugee

memory between Rose and Little Dog, queerly reproductive labour engenders value around

the body in labour that is not limited to capital accumulation nor social mobility. Stopping

Rose before she can get to the cash register to ring up the total cost, the patron places a

hundred-dollar bill directly into her hands, after which Rose slips the bill into her bra rather

than the register (84). The habitual muscle memory of monetary exchange, too, become

rearticulated and rerouted, turning to a gendered piece of clothing (the bra) rather than the

cash register as an archival container of Rose’s labour. The signification of the bill as a token

7 For Troeung, Global North figurations of the Cambodian refugee flatten the temporal-spatial

capacities of refugee lifeworlds into a frame within which “whiteness enters … as an adjudicator of

the refugee’s humanity” and refugee “lives [are] blank slates before” their experiences in refugee

camps (Refugee Lifeworlds ix). Feeling out the spectrality of Cold War colonial excesses, then,

requires reconfiguring critical sensibilities wherein the aesthetics of refugee lifeworlds are confined to

the refugee camp as imagined through Global North styles of knowledge production.

59

of financial speculation is interrupted and transformed into a nominal payment, an

acknowledgement that the cost of Rose’s labour cannot be tracked in the path between salon

chair and cash register. Between the coin that Little Dog dips in Vicks VapoRub and scrapes

across his mother’s back for pain relief, or the hundred-dollar bill that the patron with the

phantom limb places into Rose’s hands instead of the cash register (84), signifiers of capital

and value remain in their materiality—but are reinvested as momentary extensions of hands

reaching out to each other, offering forms of care that are not predicated on a sense of pity or

humanitarian obligation towards “phenomenological forms of graduated sovereignty and

differential humanity” (M.T. Nguyen 4), but on recognition around the intertwined labour of

beauty, care, and sociality.

Dear Ma: Erotics of the epistolary and queerly reproductive labour

Written as a letter from Little Dog to Rose, On Earth’s epistolary form presents a

form of “Vietnamese exilic remembrance” (Espiritu 20). The temporal-spatial elusiveness of

such exilic remembrance appears not only through Little Dog’s characterization as a son of

Vietnamese refugees, but in his remark that “I am writing to reach you—even if each word I

put down is one word further from where you are,” since Rose was never taught to read in

English (On Earth 3 and 5). This elusiveness does not foreclose relationality between Little

Dog and Rose, but recasts the gendered and racialized care they share in terms of shared

sensibility around loss and its illegible, yet felt, resonances. Little Dog’s letter traces the

refugee archive's wayward articulations around violent displacements that produce exilic

remembrance. Letting go of a progressivist teleology around healing, his epistolary form

reckons with the aesthetic potency that Viet Thanh Nguyen identifies in both remembrance

and forgetting as processes of memory (Nothing Ever Dies 12). As a figure that confounds

yet indexes the conditions of these uncertainties, the refugee figure offers a specific iteration

of the Asiatic body in relation to these enduring afterlives of the Vietnam War, which “turn

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out to be no afterlives at all” (Troeung). The erotics of the refugee figure indexes this

enduring temporality of afterwar, wherein fugitivity is a response to globalized modernity. In

direct relation to the history of fugitive slave laws in the U.S., the technologization of race in

the making of modernity consolidates anti-Blackness into a style of liberal humanist

subjectivity produced through the subjection of Blackness and the criminalization of

fugitivity.

By routing her figuration of queer maternality through the transformation of

Blackness into a signifier of embodiment via enfleshment, Musser highlights the

impossibility of theorizing queer maternality without attending to the racialized feminization

of its labours and conjurations alike. Musser therefore enables critique around the erotics of

care and poeisis as directly materialized through empire’s production of Blackness in the

trans-Atlantic slave trade. The connection between Black enfleshment and Asiatic skin are

highlighted in the geopolitics of “the global north” that is traced, if not through nation-state

boundary in the transnational spatialization of imperial war, through the racialized and

gendered geographies of the skin, such as in “dermatological atlases—understood as maps of

the skin” (Tu 5). What Saidiya Hartman phrases the “calculation of black humanity into slave

law” (Seduction and the Ruses of Power 537) condition the production of racial form as a

mediation of difference. Fugitivity within U.S. empire is therefore conditioned by the

development of surveillance technology and capital, linking the trans-Atlantic slave trade

with militarized imperialism as projects that compose the modern subject via the

transformation of “surveillance as a scientifically acceptable and socially necessary practice”

and technique for materializing “the good of modern state power” onto Black and otherwise

racialized bodies (Browne 11). Racial form, read in this way, is also an inscription of

maternality as a kind of erotic power, erotic, sexual, and aesthetic labour, and sensorium for

practicing ethical relationality in relation to sociality as an interplay of power.

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In addition to being a figured as a body that always exceeds nation-state borders

because of its fugitivity, the refugee figure has been employed to critique those very borders

and their claims to ethical subjectivity. These borders and their logics around citizenship

(national or globalized) can be imagined as “imperial networks” within which “[t]echniques

of rule, representation, sexual regulation, and morality, in addition to colonial bureaucrats

themselves, travel” (Mikdashi and Puar 217). The figuration of the refugee, then, is not

necessarily a question of alternative subjectivity or “a relentless story about the coercions of

the visible” wrought by colonial speculative fictions. Rather, this figure poses a version of

questions like “how is it we know we are seeing what we think we are seeing?” and “[w]hat

are the conditions under which we see” race, gender, and sexuality as the bodily matter of

difference (Cheng, Second Skin 3)? This is the “how” of relationality in afterwar, which can

be surfaced through a turn to the queerly reproductive labour of Vietnamese refugee figures.

Foregrounding imperialist conceptions of difference through skin, I revise this question, here,

turning from a focus on aesthetic around the visual to those of the erotic, following

Patterson’s suggestion that “elusive forms of erotic interaction that forego distinctions

between player and machine … make us aware of our bodies in the moment of interaction”

(Patterson 161). This ludic dimension of erotics that Patterson unfolds enables the difficult

question of pleasure in the production of the Vietnamese refugee figure. That is, the refugee

figure indexes desires for relationality between self and other in the quotidian catastrophe of

imperial war—along with the ambivalent pleasures of beauty, sex, or care conditioned by the

afterlives of the Vietnam War.

Rather than necessarily issuing a corrective to such figurations of the Vietnamese

refugee in America, reading the figure for its erotic mediations within Vuong’s novel enables

critical orientation to the poiesis in refugee practices of survival, and its queerly reproductive

labour around sociality. The long durée of afterwar itself as a condition for discourses of

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refugee figurations that the refugee, as figure and subject cannot be reduced to political

“lessonification”—though they have been imaged as such in media attempts to make sense of

the suffering caused by U.S. military occupation and withdrawal (Troeung, “On Refugee

Worldmaking”). Letting go of lessonification as a relational practice means that what might

be considered elusive within the refugee archive need not enact “ethical currency for the

shoring up of white liberal personhood” (Troeung, Refugee Lifeworlds xix) in order to

materialize its presence. By conjuring aesthetic materiality out of both pleasure and pain

between Little Dog and Rose or Trevor, On Earth enables an erotic mode of reading that is

centered on habituating ourselves to the ambivalent feeling of “exposure, vulnerability, and

receptiveness in our reaching out to other people” that Tan Hoang Nguyen describes as a

“bottom archive,” composed of erotic vulnerability and the power in powerlessness (T.H.

Nguyen 2). Whether in Little Dog’s sexual positioning as a bottom to Trevor’s top, or in the

uncanny debris of mourning and shame within their scenes of sexual intimacy, the porousness

between pleasure and pain are wrought by vulnerability.

Through the erotics of the epistolary form, the novel aestheticizes questions around

how it could feel to dwell in the refugee archive and, in doing so, honours the erotic labour

that the refugee figure does in speculating otherwise. Little Dog’s letter to Rose does not

merely represent the ambivalence of their relationality through the epistolary form; rather, in

the uncertain address of a letter that will never be read by its addressee, the epistolary

becomes conducive to feeling what is immaterial within the archive, speculating what may

seem impossible to imagine. Seemingly written in a confessional mode, the letter itself

practices a speculative form of refugee archiving; for while Little Dog notes that Rose cannot

read the letter, he gestures towards different kinds of readability, such as muscle memory or

skin stories. Composing his letter with the ambivalent sensoria of memory, then, Little Dog

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turns the epistolary form into a speculative genre, and a way of practicing the poetics of

uncertainty.

As Tu’s work suggests, skin indexes empire’s concerns around vulnerability and

militarized defense, which are not only projected upon the skin, but infused and injected

through its pores, so that the body’s supposed phenotypical materiality is not only betrayed

by the skin but its capacities around vulnerability in relation to social life. Through aesthetic

registers on the skin, the refugee figure erotically indexes a “refugee epistemology” that

“articulates loss as presence (in place and time)” (Vang 4). To this extent, skin composes an

in/organic materiality insofar as it has been formulated simultaneously as racialized,

gendered, and sexualized biological matter, and as a metaphorical boundary whose porosity

poses both an eroticized threat and potential for military technology towards imperial war.

While Tu orients us to “skin as a repository, as an alternative archive through which we

might grasp how history becomes embodied” (9), thinking with the erotic mediations of skin

can also enable conceptualizing skin as an interface through which self and other are not only

produced, but oriented to each other upon the porosity of their surfaces. In this sense skin is

not only a repository but the very “‘stuff’ of archives,” composed by “the seemingly trashy,

dirty, disgusting, and untidy disorganization of bodies, things, and emotions” that the skin

supposedly binds, and the “mess, clutter, and muddled entanglements” that are “historical

memory, aberrant desires, and the archive” (Manalansan 94). Tracing the refugee figure

through the presence of absence, Vang proposes that “[r]ather than a repository, the refugee

archive is a key method with which to emphasize the embodied and material aspects of

histories that run and the spiritual dimensions of forced displacement without recovering the

loss” (Vang 10). If we attend to the fugitive erotics of the refugee archive, then we can ask

how the refugee figure gestures towards the conception of war as an “altered sensibility” or

“habit of mind” rather than a time and space (Tu 19). The counterintuitive figure of the

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refugee reconfigures sociality with self and other, by indexing the body itself as the erotic

mediator of relational sensibility.

Indeed, the novel opens with a corpse as the uncanny presencing of a body visibly

arrested in the temporality of death: Rose, encountering a taxidermy buck at a roadside rest

stop, asks Little Dog: “Can’t they see it’s a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck

forever like that” (On Earth 3). Rose gestures towards the ways in which a “genealogy of the

afterlife of the Cold War” confounds a temporal-spatial separation of life and death, present

and past, as “archival scraps” that are “partial and incomplete” (Troeung, Refugee Lifeworlds

xi) can be deeply unsettling as they are transformative around relations of power in the

ambivalence they present for survivors of the war. By interweaving scenes of the Vietnam

War amongst shared memories with Rose, his grandmother Lan, and his white lover Trevor,

Little Dog conjures the pleasures and pains of such ambivalence, in relation to sex work,

chosen kinship, debilitation, familial abuse, and substance use. All these forms of

relationality within the text produce a “genealogy of the afterlife” that indexes the

im/materiality of labour around sociality.

Formally, the epistolary novel unfolds through spectral fragments where “the subject

is dispersed in the scene setting of the fantasy rather than represented in a single element or

character,” as Dina Al-Kassim writes of fantasy as a phantasmic mode of relationality

(“Scenes of Self-Conduct” 14). The novel begins with “Dear Ma,” as many of its sections do.

But even before this, it opens with “Let me begin again” (On Earth 3). Preceding “Dear Ma”

with an invocation towards the letter’s multiple beginnings and temporalities, the novel's

epistolary form intertwines with its contents towards fantasy as address. Fantasy, conjured

and reconfigured through address, offers something that may feel like care or solidarity, but

does not take epistemological clarity as a stand-in for meaning.

65

Arriving at love: Sex, pain, pleasures in power

If beauty, care, and sociality make up the labours of Little Dog’s and Rose’s

feminized gendering, how does body’s habituation to shame and pleasure figure in such

bodily mediations? How might mediations of shame and pleasure within the refugee archive

of On Earth also enable erotic vocabularies around the feeling of subjection, where “[t]o

arrive at love ... is to arrive through obliteration” (On Earth 119)? Tan Hoang Nguyen's

inscription of sexual practice as a “vernacular,” rather than direct representation, for sexuality

(T.H. Nguyen 3), is critical for enabling questions around On Earth’s sex scenes between

Little Dog and his white lover, Trevor, wherein Little Dog articulates the interplays of power

that inscribe their bodies in terms of Trevor’s body as an embodiment of white American

masculinity, and Little Dog’s feminized gendering and racialization as a form of subjugated

masculinity. The sexual intimacy between them turn readers to the complexities of pleasure

and pain in power, surfacing “the critical force of bottomhood” as an erotic mode for

“[a]ffirming bottomhood, femininity, and race” as intertwined configurations of power that

can “rewrite abject masculinity without writing off femininity and the feminine, thus enabling

a new mode of social recognition” (T.H. Nguyen 27 and 19). Trevor’s whiteness manifests as

the power of conjuring the time and space needed for the two to have sex at all: as Little Dog

remarks

He was always white. And I knew this was why there was a space for us: a farm, a

field, a barn, a house, an hour, two. A space I never found in the city, where the

tenement apartments we lived in were so cramped one could tell when a neighbour

had a stomach flu in the middle of the night. To hide here, in a room in a broken-

down mobile home, was, somehow, a privilege, a chance. (On Earth 111-2)

The power of reciprocity in the fugitive therefore depends on shared avowal between Little

Dog and Trevor around the racialized, gendered, and sexualized inscriptions of their bodies.

66

Whether or not this avowal is realized is unclear and perhaps not the point so much as Little

Dog’s critical sensibility around the temporal-spatial iterations of power, which condition

refugee captivity within U.S. empire (Troeung, Refugee Lifeworlds 16).

Yet Little Dog’s sexual position as bottom, with Trevor on top, does not simply

represent scenes of total domination or surrender of power. As Musser suggests in relation to

Tan Hoang Nguyen’s theorization of bottomhood, conceiving of “topping as deep listening”

can enable “an investment in the opacity of the other’s pleasure, while also illuminating

dimensions of racialized abjection and care” (Musser 22). Such intermingling of pleasure and

pain is articulated when Trevor grabs Little Dog’s hair while topping him and pulls it, hard.

Hesitating after Little Dog involuntarily yelps, he keeps going when Little Dog asks him to

grab more hair and keep going. Through his letter, Little Dog meditates on his endurance of

violence intertwined with care that have made suffering mundane but that also, in response to

Trevor's touch, moment, make pleasure available in pain:

To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. Eviscerate me, we mean to

say, and I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll say yes. ‘Keep going,’ I begged. ‘Fuck me up, fuck

me up.’ By then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately,

of love. Fuck. Me. Up. It felt good to name what was already happening to me all my

life. I was being fucked up, at last, by choice. In Trevor’s grip, I had a say in how I

would be taken apart. (On Earth 119)

Having been “fucked up” so often by the spectral presence of both violence and

beauty that saturates his relationship with love, Little Dog finds pleasure within the erotics of

bottoming and topping as they enable sensorially relational modes. He accesses fugitivity

within the vernacular of sex through his eroticized surrender—not necessarily to the

conditions of abjection, but to the possibility of pleasure in vulnerability. This process of

bottoming and topping affords Little Dog an erotic vocabulary for a sensibility of care and

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pleasure oriented towards the violence he has experienced as a queer, Vietnamese American

son of refugees—precisely through that “feeling of being a body” that has been made to

signify total abjection (Musser 87). The erotics of racialized, gendered, and sexualized power

are also articulated through Little Dog’s use of the word “fucking” to invoke the layered

processes of having sex with someone, fucking them up, or fucking them over. Sensorially,

this layered process registers as anticipation, too, of bodily feeling, such as when Trevor’s

hand moves “lower, toward the waistband’s elastic resistance, the snap never coming, the

fabric’s rustle at my [Little Dog’s] ankles, my cock, the bead of moisture at its tip the coldest

thing between us” (111). The erotic power interplays between Trevor and Little Dog—which

the erotic sensibility of racialized bottomhood depends on to make pleasure palpable in

pain—are not inherently transformative, as bottomhood presences unreciprocated

vulnerability: “I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the

world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong. The rules, they were already

inside us” (On Earth 120). The conditions of sex as a vernacular are emphasized here, as

habituation cannot be reduced to rational disavowals around the power in pleasure and pain.

To the extent that being topped by Trevor enables Little Dog to orient himself in relation to

vulnerability to violence, this same erotic sensibility enables Little Dog to name the body's

remarkable capacity to perpetuate violence through intimacy. This is perhaps what Little Dog

narrativizes when he “flicker[s], like a bulb in a storm, seeking myself in his steering” as he

loses himself to the pleasure of Trevor yanking his hair while topping him, finding an erotic

vocabulary to take his “pain gathered to a breaking point” and offer it as a condition of

pleasure with the “rare agency to stop” (111). Reciprocal sociality becomes a possibility in

the erotic sensibilities around arriving at love. Yet, as the refugee figure of Little Dog shows,

reciprocity and violence alike cannot always be contained by making the self and other

palpable, nor universalized conceptions of love. Rather, love, too, is revealed to be a process

68

mediated by erotic habituation around power interplays that may not be inevitable, but can be

transformed through address around the conditions of self and other within fugitive erotics.

Love, then, is an uneasy, but capacious, point of arrival for this chapter, which asks

how the aesthetic production of the Vietnamese refugee figure in On Earth enables the

queerly reproductive labour of reciprocity, in ways that enable address between in/organic

bodies through the intermingling of pleasure and pain, shame and beauty. Thinking with

erotic mediations that refugee figures make palpable within the novel also disrupts liberal

humanist desires to disavow the production of self and other as projects of modern

subjectivity. The fugitive erotics enabled by the refugee figure, instead, invites questions like:

“[i]s it possible to know something that is itself constantly slipping away?” (Vang 25) And is

it possible to arrive at an ethical sensibility between self and other within the unknowable,

one that we could call love? In response to such questions, the fugitive erotics in On Earth

We’re Briefly Gorgeous affirms the reciprocal sensibilities that refugee figures enable

between self and other—without demanding that intergenerational losses of the Vietnam War

be figured in certain terms.

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Coda

The possibilities of reciprocity are difficult to write through despite their emphasis

within these pages. Especially when, as Mimi Thi Nguyen writes of refugee figurations,

imperial power does not only manifest as violence, but “also emanate[s] through beauty,

through love, through hope—in short, the promise to life” (5). Through such emanations of

power, the desire to reach out for another self, another other, can reproduce the trope of

needing to know the body in order to love it as an unyielding limitation on each body’s

capacity to liberate another.

Yet, following Audre Lorde, conceiving of knowledge in relation to each body’s

capacity for erotic power shows that love need not be discarded as an elaboration of captivity,

even as it may be inscribed through systemic cycles of use, abandonment, and disavowal. The

body itself becomes a question that only becomes more palpable in its immateriality—such as

when Little Dog comes across a wake in Saigon wherein mourning is practiced with karaoke-

singing drag performers, intergenerational communal feasts, and sound of weeping from

mourners who watch over the body of a neighbour who has died in the middle of the night

(On Earth 224-6); or when, over 165 years after the death of her lover Peristrophe Halliana,

Kirilow Groundsel wistfully ruminates about the virtual space of the Dark Baths as the most

recent moment in each other’s presence (Tiger Flu 329).

Throughout this thesis, I have suggested that Tiger Flu and On Earth are not simply

representative affirmations of such theoretical aims. They, as texts do the queerly

reproductive labour of turning what is both opaque and spectral about the Asian body into an

orienting surface for reconfiguring aesthetic figurations of self and other. Figures of racial

form within these novels help us reckon with the ways in which speculating about ethical

relationality or self and other is made possible through erotic labours that are not honoured

through moralizing politics of subjectivity, such as sex work or the work of making life worth

70

living. If we conceive of power as an erotic interplay rather than a totalizing erasure of love,

then the at times uncanny capacity for the body to dwell in grief and suffering (or joy and

pleasure, for that matter) might be multiplied and dispersed. Love might then become a

shared practice of honouring vulnerability, and of avowal that, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs

notes, “[i]t's not more important that you be familiar to me than that you are free”

(“Possibilities of Divine Love” 34). Within this thesis, the erotic registers of refugee

epistemologies and techno-Orientalist tropes index the queerness of the “not-yet-here”

(Muñoz 12) as a continuation of time and space that can be destructive. Yet, through erotic

vernaculars of bodily feeling such as sex, or scholarly critique, love has already arrived, if in

ways that cannot always be registered.

71

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Erotic mediations of Queer Asian in/organicity in The Tiger Flu and On Earth We’re

Briefly Gorgeous

by

Amanda Wan

B.A. Hon., University of British Columbia, 2020

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

in

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

(English)

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

(Vancouver)

December 2022

© Amanda Wan, 2022

ii

The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate

and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled:

Erotic mediations of Queer Asian in/organicity in The Tiger Flu and On Earth We’re

Briefly Gorgeous

in partial fulfilment of the requirements

for

submitted by Amanda Wan

the degree of Master of Arts

in English

Examining Committee:

Dr. Danielle Wong, Assistant Professor, English Language and Literatures, UBC

Supervisor

Dr. Christopher B. Patterson, Assistant Professor, Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice,

UBC

Supervisory Committee Member

iii

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

iv

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.

v

Lay Summary

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 race, gender, and sexuality. Following Audre Lorde, I think

with erotics as a relationship with power that each body has the capacity to engender, offering a

conception of ethical relationality that critiques liberal humanist aesthetics around subjectivity.

Erotics can foreground what might be felt in the body but isn't necessarily legible. This

ambivalence troubles binarized distinctions between in/organic, im/material, and self/other.

Working with critical theories of race, queer theory, techno-Orientalism, critical refugee studies,

and critical Black studies, I read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Larissa

Lai’s The Tiger Flu for figurations of the Asian body that depict, and enable, ambivalence

around power and relationality within conditions of post-Cold War global capitalism.

vi

Preface

This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Amanda Wan. An

earlier version of Chapter One was presented as “Melancholic capital and postures of kinship in

Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu” at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in 2021. In

2022, an earlier version of Chapter Two was presented as “Fugitive erotics and textures of

intimacy in Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous” at FLESH: Embodying Praxis, the

annual symposium organized by UBC Art History, Visual Art, and Theory (AHVA) graduate

students.

Epigraphs for Chapter One and Two feature excerpts from Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with

Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press) and Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of Mercy (Arsenal Pulp

Press). Permission has been granted, by the copyright holders and publishers, for use of these

excerpts in this thesis and in all copies to meet university requirements, including

ProQuest/University Microfilms edition and other thesis/dissertation repositories and archives.

Standard acknowledgement is included with each epigraph.

vi

i

Table of Contents

Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... iii

Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... v

Preface .......................................................................................................................................... vi

Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... vii

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... viii

Dedication .................................................................................................................................... xi

Introduction: Ambivalence and the aesthetic materiality of power ….................................... 1

Chapter One: Virtuality’s ambivalence in The Tiger Flu ...................................................... 15

Glitchy dis/embodiments ................................................................................................. 23

The doubling of the real ................................................................................................... 31

Feeling temporality, failing time ...................................................................................... 40

Chapter Two: Fugitive erotics and refugee figurations in On Earth We’re Briefly

Gorgeous ..................................................................................................................................... 46

The phantom limb: Vulnerability in fantasy .................................................................... 53

Dear Ma: Erotics of the epistolary and queerly reproductive labour ............................... 59

Arriving at love: Sex, pain, pleasures in power ............................................................... 65

Coda ............................................................................................................................................ 69

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 71

vi

i

i

Acknowledgements

Abundant generosity sustains this body of work. I’m deeply grateful for my supervisor

and mentor, Dr. Danielle Wong, for always saying what needs to be said, always with care and

thoughtful intensity. Our conversations throughout the process have been restorative, whether I

was feeling excited about a concept or incredibly alienated by the conditions of academic

scholarship. I am also exceedingly thankful for my reader, Dr. Chris Patterson, whose own

writing and stories enable me to sit with the queasy complexities of pleasure, and who offered

“gutsy” as a remark I continue to cherish. Thank you both for being you.

Many others have supported me over the years as caring teachers and mentors. Gratitude

goes to Drs. Chris Lee, JP Catungal, Phanuel Antwi, and Dina Al-Kassim for your formative

encouragements and gorgeous sense of humour. And thank you to Dr. Y-Dang Troeung, whose

profoundly kind, caring, and visionary presence in life and in scholarship and are deeply missed.

Appreciations also to Drs. Kimberly Bain and Christine Kim, whose counsel has been much

appreciated. This first-generation student could not have arrived at graduate school without all of

these incomparable guides.

Fellow staff members at the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM)

program have made all the difference through both my undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Thank you to the ACAM team, including members from then and now, who have shared their

unique tenderness with me through a nearly decade-long period of my life.

All those cited have created space for me to enter my own questions. Ocean Vuong and

Larissa Lai, your artistry moves me to become a wiser student and poet of both life and death.

Thank you to facilitators and participants of the American Studies Association Annual Meeting

2021, and the 45th Annual AHVA Symposium 2022, who generously received earlier versions

ix

of Chapters One and Two, respectively. Threads of Chapter Two also began in seminars on

queer theory (taught by Dr. Chris Patterson) and on critical refugee studies (taught by Dr. Y-

Dang Troeung, with Dr. Chris Patterson). Thank you to classmates alongside Drs. Patterson and

Troeung for being the loveliest teachers. Appreciations also to the staff at the Department of

English Language and Literatures, along with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada (SSHRC), who provide much-needed administrative and financial support to

make this thesis possible.

Thank you to my birth family for introducing me to the potency of ambivalence.

Chosen kin and loving peers have provided soft landings for me throughout the project. I

could never theorize, let alone practice, a mode of critique around erotic mediations or

reciprocity without them. I remain dedicated to: Szu Shen, for your powerful gentleness and rare

heart wisdom. Brook Xiang, for believing in my strength, especially when it is not apparent, and

appreciating my love, especially when I offer it gladly. Andrea Schartner, for being the one who

always calls. Jane Shi, for every poem and dumpling fold. Y Vy Truong, for your generous punk

heart and sage recommendations on everything from lipstick colours to driving instructors.

Oliver, for seeing what is special about all the “silly little things.” Rachel Lau 劉可莉, for

teaching me that there are as many ways to love as there are loved ones. Olivia Lim, for your

radiant companionship in writing and work, and for reminding me that nobody does this work

alone—certainly not without other things worth living for. Huệ Nguyen, for inviting me into the

rooms of your art, and the art that is your laugh. 이금주 Adela Lee, for keeping in touch all

these years. Akos Backwards-Looking Prophetess, for describing what I cannot see. Cassandra

O., for keeping the coven. Phebe M. Ferrer, for carrying the fire. Christy Fong, for shared

conversations about our desire and paranoia around AI technology. Rusaba Alam, for

x

demystifying intellectual labour. Meg Mead, for getting me to shore. Rebecca Peng, for your

velvet aura. Leilan Mei Yin Wong, who appeared in my earliest days at the university. Janice

Liu, for appreciating the adorable and the monstrous alike. Maya Sabina Acharya, for new and

dear friendship. Amila Li, for your astrological wisdom.

My life partner and soulmate, Tray Ma, has my whole heart. Your companionship

reminds me that possibility always exists beyond language, in this lifetime and through the next.

Written within the unceded, occupied, and ancestral lands that have been stewarded by

the xʷməθkʷəy

əm, sḵwxwú7mesh, and sʔəlilwətaʔɬ (Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh)

peoples, this project is inseparable from the multiplicities of empire. While only some of these

multiplicities are addressed within the pages that follow, I hope to orient my writing towards

questions of how relationality might feel without persistent imperialism or authoritarianism.

Thank you to those who take care of all named here. And to all named: thank you for

helping me write through beauty of uncertainty.

xi

Dedication

for all our wayward selves & others

& for Y-Dang Troeung, whose absence is deeply felt

1

Introduction: Ambivalence and the aesthetic materiality of power

loneliness is still time spent

with the world. Here's

the room with everyone in it.

Your dead friends passing

through you like wind

through a wind chime.

…

Yes, here's a room

so warm & blood close,

I swear, you will wake—

& mistake these walls

for skin.

— Ocean Vuong, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” Night Sky with Exit Wounds (82-3)1

We can begin with the end of a poem, since this thesis is about poiesis at the end of

the world—which is to say, aesthetic configurations of time and space that take conditions of

global modernity for granted. This thesis dwells within the realm of impossibility as it attends

to forms of relationality that may be considered illegible within liberal humanist sensibilities

around ethical subjectivity, but can be made palpable for their interplays of power through

erotic modes of critique. Thinking with the “Asian” body as a figure who indexes global

modernity wherein imperial war and subjugation via racialized, gendered, and sexualized

difference are formative conditions, this thesis asks: How can attending to the “Asian” body

for its erotic mediations enable a critical avowal of power as a sensibility, where some

conduct or “speech is understood and another as noise” in a “partitioning of the sensible,

which is the common sense” (Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes 23)? How can critique

centered on erotics enable reconfigurations of power through the very styles and vernaculars

of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference without reproducing the organic human

subject as the privileged figure of ethical subjectivity? Drawing from critical theories of race,

1 Ocean Vuong, excerpt from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” from Night Sky with Exit

Wounds. Copyright © 2016 by Ocean Vuong. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions

Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.

2

queer of colour theory, scholarship on techno-Orientalism, and critical refugee studies, this

thesis turns to ambivalence and erotic mediations because of their potential to respond to, and

engender theories of difference that account for the queasy interrelatedness of pleasure and

violence within the figuration of the human body as site and sign of modern subjectivity.

Erotics enables response to conversations within these fields around how to theorize power

when we are all implicated in the project of modernity via imperialism and global capital,

though in persistently varied ways; and how to reconfigure power in ways that do not return

us over and again to punitive imaginaries of ethical justice, or the pathologization of

abjection as a moral defect. This project suggests that staying with the ambivalence of the

Asian body’s erotic mediations enables reciprocal sociality through—not despite—the

vulnerability that such uncertainty produces. Attending, nevertheless, to how there are

“differences between pleasure in vulnerability and the sensation of racial violation” (Musser

21), this project also suggests that reciprocity is a mode of queerly reproductive labour,

insofar as it turns the epistemological and political ambivalence around what is figured as

in/organic, im/material, or self/other, into an orienting surface for both critique and avowal

around the body itself as always already a relationship with power’s presence.

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. By framing erotics as a

relationship with power, I build upon her language of erotics as one of “many kinds of power,

used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise” where in turn “the erotic is a measure between

the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings” (Lorde 49).

Drawing upon such language as it creates space for asking about the self as a mediation of

power, this thesis asks how erotics confounds binarized conceptions of in/organicity,

im/materiality, and self/other, by foregrounding forms of relationality that are considered

3

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. This thesis does not cohere an Asian/North American subject, but develops a

theory of aesthetics and racial form by turning to the production of the Asian body as an

index of subjectivity. Subjectivity is therefore present within this project, which in turn has

implications for theories of subjectivity; but as Anne Anlin Cheng treats Orientalized

femininity as “a style, which claims specificity but lends itself to promiscuous transferability”

and suggests that “[i]t is an abstraction that materializes” (Cheng 14), I foreground the ways

in which aesthetic figurations of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference can produce

relationality and address between self and other as sensibilities. The erotic mediations that

such sensibilities produce can also enable critique around “circulations of racialised

performance and labour that disrupt postracial posthuman futurity” (Wong, “Dismembered

Asian/American” 36) and assumptions that abandoning the body is the answer to the

corporeal violence of global capitalism. This project asks about the conditions within which

the Asian body might be critiqued as a form of erotic mediation rather than a matter of

ideological dialectic.

Lorde’s proposal that “the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question

of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (49) positions the body itself as an ethical

question. Reading erotic power’s presence within “dancing, building a bookcase, writing a

poem, examining an idea,” and “moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love”

alike (52 and 54), Lorde engenders critique around conditions of embodiment that is

performed through the feeling of embodiment itself. Read in this sense, the archival work of

remembering friends who have died within the sensuality of a “wind / passing through a

windchime” (Night Sky 82) is an aesthetic figuration of the poiesis in mediations of erotic

4

power. And it is in such poetic practice around erotics that ambivalence articulates “a form of

living in our bodies without the constant need to expose, to know, to fight” (Patterson 193),

and ethical subjectivity can become unmoored from moralized binaries between abjection

and domination. As a form of queerly reproductive labour, reciprocity makes possible a mode

of being with bodies inscribed as abject, contradictory, or perverse in their erotic mediations,

since these words are no longer required to function as liberal humanist diagnostics of moral

pathology but could also signify “the pleasure of being objectified in a world where everyone

is expected to be struggling for dignity, the pleasure of being contradictory when the subject

is meant to be a unified whole, the pleasure of feeling disempowered when we are all

supposed to be struggling for power” (Patterson 193). Meanwhile, the reciprocity engendered

through critical and creative avowals of shared erotic power can itself become a practice of

ethical relationality, though not as a guaranteed manifestation of pleasure.

Rather, reciprocity read in terms of erotic mediations can enable questions around

how authoritarian domination carried out through aesthetics of care and intimacy continue to

generate conditions wherein racialized, gendered, sexualized bodies are merely used as

matter for making ethical meaning into futurity. Such a “wayward erotics,” in Martin

Manalansan’s language, enables critique that “does not function as a travel signpost,” but

generates “messy entanglements … with sexual, gendered, familial, national, and

transnational affinities” (Mankekar and Schein 33), including those seemingly unlikely or

impossible to trace. In this vein, and in spite of my own impulse to fixate on the productive

excesses that waywardness affords, Christopher B. Patterson suggests that conceptualizing

the “Asiatic” as a style of dis/embodiment is “not about the excesses of categorization, nor

does it shift a demeaning language into something emboldening, but it is rather about the

inherent instability of naming, the blurriness of racial thinking, and our experiences within

that blur” (Patterson 235, emphasis my own). Therefore, erotics routed through virtuality as a

5

register of techno-Orientalist aesthetics more generally asks the question of how it feels to

dis/embody the “Asiatic” while oriented to the impossibility of either the inorganic or

inorganic to fulfill desires for legibility.

The Asiatic figures within Larissa Lai’s speculative fiction novel The Tiger Flu and

Ocean Vuong’s epistolary novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous variously encounter these

complexities around power and pleasure in their relationality to others. Within these texts, the

eroticization of power is routed variously through stories of corporatization, militarization,

and authoritarianism. Both novels depict the intergenerational resonances of relationships

with power mediated by technologies of memory and embodiment. Variously speculative in

form and genre, these novels do not easily lend themselves to modes of analysis that take

racialized, gendered, and sexualized forms of sociality for granted. They foreground how

“[e]rotics,” as Patterson writes, “does not evade empire by focusing on the body, but through

the body it makes empire’s presence palpable.” Working with Patterson’s suggestion that

erotics “help us recognize what we already know” through practices of sensitization (Open

World Empire 33), this thesis suggests that the ambivalence that erotics surfaces around

ethical relationality can also help us recognize what may already be known, but not by every

body, all the time, because of the conditions in which the ambivalence of erotic power is

engendered. If some forms of erotic power and knowledge are not simply lost, but “secreted”

by institutional archival practices (Vang 10), then this thesis attempts to reckon with how

neither ambivalence nor erotics produce inherently ethical modes of critique. Figuring the

temporality and spatiality of empire’s beginnings and ends therefore reveals critique to be an

ambivalent mode of relationality itself, since, within critique, even what is unknown is

transformed into a surface for orienting perceptivity. Yet, as Sharon Patricia Holland

suggests, the queerness of erotics can be conjured by asking about how “feeling … escapes or

6

releases when bodies collide in pleasure and pain” (Erotic Life of Racism 6). This, too, is the

ambivalence of erotic critique.

The final lines of Ocean Vuong’s poem, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,”

articulates how ambivalence enables address between bodies, through such confoundments of

the boundedness between self and other. As both addressee and subject of the poem, a figure

named Ocean is written into a room where the dead “pass through your body” as with a wind

through a windchime (Night Sky 82). While the musicality of the windchimes is unwritten in

this poem the musicality of the poetry presences the sensuous palpability of loss, even if not

in explicit terms. Together, Ocean’s body and the windchime index the ephemeral

temporality of friends who have died, remembering their corporeal presence without

requiring their appearance as organic embodiments. Both legible and illegible sensuality are

narrativized for their capacity to become modes of address, enabling relational sensibility

through, not despite, the loneliness of loss—which, the narrator assures, is “still time spent

with the world” (Night Sky 82). An articulation around “loss as presence (in place and time)”

(Vang 4), this poetic account of loneliness as an experience of being with enables a reading of

vulnerability to the pain of losing others as itself a continuation of relationality between

bodies. Vulnerability and loneliness are not the antithesis to selfhood, then, but modes of

memory around each body’s capacity to reshape each other's selfhood through their

interrelatedness. As the experience of being with happens in relation to “the world” within the

poem, where the world is a “room with everyone in it” (Night Sky 82), the poem enables

questioning around the liberal humanist ideas of selfhood as an individualizing process. In

this sense the dependence of liberal humanist sensibilities around individual freedom upon

forms of subjection—namely through the enslavement of Black lives—also need to be

reckoned with in aesthetic reconfigurations of ethical subjectivity. As Saidiya Hartman

writes, “the ways in which … freedom fin[ds] its dignity and authority in this ‘prime symbol

7

of corruption’ and slavery transform[s] and extend[s] itself in the limits and subjection of

freedom" can “troubl[e], if not elid[e], any absolute and definitive marker between slavery

and its aftermath” (115).

Hence, a reading of erotic mediations critically oriented to the aesthetic materiality of

ambivalence is a reading of the world and its end, since the conditions of global modernity

have been produced through aesthetic sensibilities around freedom and abjection wherein

race, gender, and sexuality cannot be fetishized as ontologies of embodiment, but as

mediations of power that surface relational capacities. The organic and inorganic assemblage

of “a room / so warm & blood close, / I swear, you will wake— / & mistake these walls / for

skin” (Night Sky 82) contains the mediating potential of uncertainty, as skin and walls are not

resolved into distinctly organic or inorganic modes of embodiment, but instead develop a

poetics around embodiment and memory that unfolds within that continual slippage between

organic and inorganic. Rather than the emergence of a different kind of sovereign speech, this

poetics is enabled by the palpability of what may always be uncertain and yet cannot be

fetishized in its inscrutability. The poem carefully undoes equivocations of the body with

subjectivity by addressing, too, desires for reciprocity and violence that are incommensurable

and yet conditioned by the other—such as when the violence sonically denoted as “gunfire”

registers as “only the sound of people / trying to live a little longer / & failing” (Night Sky

82). Vuong's poem narrativizes textual and sonic resonances of violence as it erupts when

each body’s relationship with power is unacknowledged, and the desire for sociality between

self and other is “satisfied by certain prescribed erotic comings-together … characterized by a

simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a

fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor … And this misnaming of the need and the deed

give rise to that distortion which results in … the abuse of feeling,” as Audre Lorde writes in

her germinal essay, “Uses of the Erotic” (54). Lorde’s attendance to erotic power and the

8

violent interplays of power enabled by its disavowal invites questioning around any impulse

to valorize the body and its pleasures in resistance against violence. Thinking with Lorde’s

theory of the erotic in this way—as mode of inquiry around ethical relationality—enables us

to approach the feeling of being a body as a practice, one that consistently unlearns these

impulses as they have been domesticated through racist, imperialist, Euro-American

sensibilities around embodiment and knowledge. Thinking with erotic power as a practice

and mode of inquiry, too—rather than yet another form of normative ethical subjectivity—

also requires critiquing punitive or moralizing practices of body knowledge that would only

seek to discipline or eliminate what has been named erotic in the sense of being considered

“the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation” or “the pornographic, the

abused, and the absurd” (Lorde 49 and 54), without asking how Euro-American sensibilities

have equated these embodiments with abjection, and in turn abjection with individualized

moral failure or alienation, rather than an effect of the violent manipulation of the self and

other’s erotic power.

Amber Jamilla Musser’s foregrounding of erotic appetite rather than desire in the

production of the body reminds us that the pleasure in power also circulates as the “white

appetite for black sweetness, labor, and sex” materialized by “the reliance of white comfort

on black affective labour” (Musser 32)—the visceral co-constitution of subjectivity and

subjection. Lorde's configuration of the erotic specifically as a form of relational power, read

alongside Musser's configuration of appetite, therefore names that violence can also feel like

pleasure for the bodies enacting it, confounding assumptions that bodies can be universalized

through erotics and feeling. In the same move that erotics enables critique through the body,

attending to such viscera of erotic mediations enables critique and creativity around the

fetishization of the body via styles of embodiment, without necessarily producing the body as

an avatar of universalized difference wherein identity stands in for self. Erotics therefore

9

helps us name the ethical possibilities in building critique as a practice of reconfiguring

power interplays, precisely through the avowal of each body’s capacity for “sensuality as

method” (Musser 17) in ethical relationality.

In relation to such confoundments of critique, both Tiger Flu and On Earth conjure

what Purnima Mankekar and Louisa Schein call a “mediated erotics,” wherein reading

aesthetic productions around “transnational Asia” in terms of “sensoria and … patterns of

intimacy that confound assumptions about propinquity and distance, physicality and

virtuality” can “recast—as well as trouble—normative constructions of the body and of

corporeality” (Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia 2). Thinking with mediation and/as

erotics enables generative theorizing around power not just as a relationship of subjectivity

versus subjection, nor a form of false consciousness that requires mastery over self and other

to transform. By not only troubling, but recasting, fetishizations of corporeality as a stand-in

for the real—and the real as the meaningful—mediation enables modes of memory that

account for the body as it indexes relational sensibilities with self and other. While the novels

can be read through their interrelated mediations and reconfigurations of erotic power, each

chapter is concerned with particular aesthetic figurations of the Asian body, such as the

in/organic bodies of techno-Orientalist speculations or the figure of the

Vietnamese/Vietnamese American refugee.

Turning to techno-Orientalism as an aesthetic that produces erotic mediations, I am

interested in the uncertainty of virtuality and how it feels; not only that, but how the erotic

ambivalence of virtuality can, through aesthetics, help us register forms of dis/embodiment

and sociality that may already exist but are considered illegible when normative narratives of

time and space are not only taken for granted, but assumed to be the only possibility. Within

conversations in Asian Americanist critique, techno-Orientalist discourses, theories around

erotics, affect, and queerness, and interrelated fields asking about the production of

10

difference, virtuality has been a germane concept for theorizing—and troubling—the

conditions that have made self and other legible frameworks for sociality. As a register of

techno-Orientalist aesthetics, virtuality can make palpable the conditions in which

conceptions of self and other are stylized through liberal humanist desires around a bounded,

rational self. By attending to the erotics of virtuality, we can orient the critique enabled by

virtuality towards techno-Orientalist aesthetics’ speculative premises around the in/organic

subjects of globalized modernity. How, then, could virtuality be read in literary productions

not just as a form of alternative narrative representation or convention of speculative fictions,

but rather as a critical production of erotic mediations? Within Larissa Lai’s speculative

fiction novel The Tiger Flu, virtuality troubles liberal humanist binaries of the un/real,

im/material, in/organic, and dis/embodied as iterations of the bounded self and other. What

follows this conception of virtuality is not necessarily an alternate subject—aesthetic, critical,

political, or otherwise—but a critical and creative practice of staying with the ambivalence

virtuality generates around the subject and its capacity for sociality through the stylization of

difference and feeling through aesthetics of racial form.

In doing so, I offer the ambivalence that virtuality generates around the sensibilities

and sensual, sensory dimensions of bounded self and other, as a mode for conceiving of

ethical and reciprocal sociality between in/organic subjects. Although the erotics of virtuality

and its ambivalence do not inherently queer the temporalities of the “here and now” in

service of “a desire for another way of being in both the world and time” (Muñoz 96),

virtuality’s ambivalence can offer a way of feeling out the eroticized power relations

sustaining self and other as conditions for sociality. Turning to erotics further allows us to ask

epistemological questions around how we come to produce social lives out of these feelings,

without taking them as the beginning, end, or even given present of relationality. Following

Muñoz’s distinction between worlds and times, virtuality offers a simultaneous here-and-now

11

and yet-to-come, precisely because it gestures to modes of sociality that may already exist but

are considered unlikely or undetermined within conceptions of the bounded self and other.

The ambivalence of erotic interplays of power within Tiger Flu and On Earth alike attends to

such overrepresentation by mediating a techno-Orientalist aesthetic in relation to the crises of

corporatized imperialism and biotechnology. The critical uncertainty of erotic mediation as a

mode of aesthetic inquiry means that the habit of archiving bodies through looping

temporality of global modernity (Wong, “Screen Time”) need not be taken at face value,

regardless of attachments to this work. Instead, virtuality surfaces how the body itself indexes

practices around the sensorial, sensory, and sexual as habits rather than pathological

conditions of difference. That is, practices of sociality are habits insofar as they are “creative

anticipations based on past repetitions” (Chun 3); erotics surfaces the body as the in/organic

medium for these practices.In Chapter One: Virtuality’s ambivalence in The Tiger Flu, I

center techno-Orientalist discourses that figure Asian bodies as inorganic and machinelike in

their incapacity for ethical humanity. Drawing from Patterson’s reframing of Asianness in

terms of the “Asiatic” as a style of embodiment worth dwelling in, I approach techno-

Orientalism as an aesthetic register through which the “Asiatic” body can trouble liberal

humanist sensibilities wherein the un/real, im/material, in/organic, and dis/embodied are

binarized. Besides abounding with techno-Orientalist tropes, the genre of speculative fiction

itself transmutes figurations of human subjectivity via narrative stylization of time and space,

and yet require referents around how time and space are conceptualized in relation to the

ongoing present of modernity. That is, although the speculative is often conflated with the

futural, it does not merely represent the future, but enables questions around futurity to be

figured and circulated as the visual, aural, textural. Hence following existing scholarship that

frames the very in/organicity of the Asiatic as a mode of critique around what is considered

labour under global capitalism, I attend to techno-Orientalist tropes like virtuality, glitchiness,

12

and disembodiment within Tiger Flu to suggest that staying with the ambivalence of Asiatic

in/organicity can offer ways of feeling out the eroticized power relations sustaining self and

other as conditions for sociality. The ambivalence aestheticized in tropes like virtuality can

therefore enable creative and critical practices of registering the body without valorizing

either subjectivity or subjectlessness as modes of selfhood. This chapter plays within the

uncertainties of techno-Orientalist tropes to read relational possibilities that emerge in the

porosity between self and other, particularly within Lai’s depiction of cyborg bodies and

information capital.

Chapter Two: Fugitive erotics and refugee figurations in On Earth We’re Briefly

Gorgeous builds upon the relational possibilities of ambivalence by drawing more explicit

connections between the production of the Asiatic body and imperial war as a condition of

global modernity. Thinking with erotics in relation to Tan Hoang Nguyen’s approach to sex

as a “vernacular” for the power interplays of sexuality, I work with scholarship in critical

refugee studies to ask how the production of the Vietnamese refugee figure is a particular

aesthetic iteration of the Asiatic body that indexes the im/possibilities of ethical subjectivity

within global modernity, particularly through refugee epistemologies around survival and

care in afterwar. Fugitive erotics specifically turns to the work of address via refugee

epistemologies and the interrelated subjection of Blackness within modern subjectivity.

Reading passages for erotic mediations between Vietnamese American refugee figure Little

Dog and his mother, Rose, or white lover, Trevor, I suggest that the work of reciprocal

sociality is a queerly reproductive labour—insofar as “queerly” gestures toward a relational

sensibility that is oriented to the vulnerability between the bodies of self and other, where

care is a form of labour that is racialized, gendered, and sexualized, but not easily conflated

with identitarian categories. While the scholarship I work with centers Vietnamese,

Cambodian, and Hmong refugee lives and their displacements across multiple borders within

13

Southeast Asia, this chapter is not an attempt to consolidate geopolitical difference under

concept of fugitive erotics or the “Asiatic.” Rather, it turns to critique that has been

developed through iterations of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong refugee epistemologies

around loss and care, and in doing so asks how the refugee figure mediates these

epistemologies in ways that enable critique around the sensibilities of imperial war.

Together, these chapters ask how conceiving of the Asian body in terms of its erotic

mediations can enable ethical relationality through vernaculars of race, gender, and sexuality

that reconfigure relationships of power precisely by making power palpable in its aesthetic

materiality. This project’s purpose is to develop a practice of critique and poeisis that is

oriented not just to bodies as sources of erotic power that is already racialized and gendered,

as Lorde suggests—but to the feeling of a being body when racial form mediates the

ambivalent sensoria of erotic power. Reading these novels and scholarship through the

“affective unruliness” (Musser 24) of erotics invites questioning around how it might be

possible to fulfill desires for connection between self and other, when the concept of modern

subjectivity itself is routed through modern empire, global capital, and their conditions of

subjugation and subjection; and how to be practitioners of care, when “care and capture

[are]… intertwined” (Tu 114). As Y-Dang Troeung suggests regarding narrative tropes about

Cambodian refugees like disappearance or self-shattering, the ambiguity of subjectivity

within scenes of quotidian violence are also a “mode of survival … not the liberating free

play of identity celebrated by postmodernism” (“Witnessing Cambodia’s Disappeared”). This

thesis, then, does not necessarily unfold a political consciousness around self and other as

sovereign agents of resistance (although I hope this project will be useful within different

genres of politicized address). And it is not invested in writing from the assumption that “one

has a self to shatter, which is to say a position of already inhabiting sovereign subjectivity”

(Musser 73).

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Rather, if thinking with erotics enables racialized and gendered registers of sex to be

figured as one of many vernaculars produced through the body, then perhaps attending to

erotic mediations can enable vernaculars that avow power and its possibilities around

reciprocal sociality. Critique and poeisis oriented to erotic mediations can therefore also

become a practice of processing body knowledge when it is overwhelming or unbearable,

such as in the case of losing a loved one—which, as figures within Tiger Flu and On Earth

show, can involve trying and failing to address what is deeply felt but cannot be languaged

through words, or through progressivist frameworks of healing. “Instead of shoring up our

sovereignty by conflating agency with mastery,” as Hoang Tan Nguyen writes, staying with

the ambivalence indexed by Asiatic figures can help us feel out each body’s capacity for

erotic power within the “inescapable exposure, vulnerability, and receptiveness in reaching

out to other people” (2)—or, indeed, to other selves.

15

Chapter One: Virtuality’s ambivalence in The Tiger Flu

I dream … / from the call of the colonial remembering not / exactly the wild but the

unexpected child of other cultivations / waving not with or against but relations of listening

undoing / the buttons of history. Rain on me blood, water or milk liquid / silky as the ilk of

connection springs unexpected forms / from the fountain of hope, dope enough to relax all

this thinking.

— Larissa Lai, “35.,” Iron Goddess of Mercy (97-8)2

As a literary production trafficking in techno-Orientalist aesthetics, Tiger Flu

aestheticizes virtuality’s undetermined multiplicity through its characters’ glitchy

dis/embodiments. In this sense the text generatively surfaces an erotic mode of aesthetic

inquiry through virtuality as a register of techno-Orientalist aesthetics, and stages the kinds of

questions virtuality raises without offering their resolution. Rather, through its erotic

mediations, Tiger Flu invites a process of staying with ambivalence. Within this chapter, the

poetics of virtuality’s ambivalence and multiplicity is further signaled by the porous,

forward/slash bordering between concepts of im/materiality, in/organicity, and

dis/embodiment that I develop throughout this project. The porosity that virtuality indexes in

relation to Asiatic styles of dis/embodiment surfaces the sexual, aesthetic, and critical

multiplicity that such porosity produces. Kaleidoscopic in narrative plot and form, Tiger Flu

written through styles from narrative prose to lyric (Tiger Flu 204) to holographic party

invitation (202) to chant (20) to a scream from Kora that intones “the emergence of the

quarantine rings, the first epidemic, the tiger wine craze, the end of oil, the launch of Chang

and Eng, the expulsion of the Grist sisters,” and so on until it becomes “a sideways figure

eight, the loop of infinity screaming the scream of her long history” (275).

Within the novel multiplicity is neither reproduced as an ontological category nor

valorized as a condition for reciprocity. Instead, the novel’s narrative plot and form

speculatively depict the ambivalence of multiplicity around self and other via characters who

2 Larissa Lai, excerpt from “35.” from Iron Goddess of Mercy. Copyright © 2021 by Larissa Lai.

Reprinted with permission of Arsenal Pulp Press, arsenalpulppress.com.

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consistently trouble both organicity and inorganicity. Both primary characters, Kirilow

Groundsel and Kora Ko, are racialized, gendered, and sexualized with reference to humanoid

features, feminized relationalities, or Chinese names, but are otherwise difficult to read

definitively in terms of their subjectivity. Their humanoid bodies are “Asiatic” insofar as the

Asiatic, for Patterson, names the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized

difference as a “style or form recognized as Asianish” and yet “not-Asia” at once, surfacing

the disjunctive pleasures of techno-Orientalist aesthetics beyond identitarian commitments

and ideological critique (Patterson 27 and 28). At the novel’s start, at least, Kora and most

around her believe her to be a human girl who resides in the urban space called Saltwater

Flats. She is a direct descendant of the man who created the tiger wine that allowed the tiger

flu to make the interspecies jump between the now-extinct Caspian tigers to humans.

Meanwhile, Kirilow comes from Grist Village, located in the outer rings of the

militarized quarantine zones of the novel’s geography. Cloned and produced from the same

human woman, Grist sisters were produced by biotechnology corporation Jemini to be work

in factories producing scales (devices that can be implanted into fistulas on one’s body and

chosen for “what they help [Kora] remember, sure, but also for how they look,” visualizing

the aesthetic production of memories and archives around the “time before” (Tiger Flu 87)).

In Grist Village, humanoid clones called Grist sisters live, having fled the tiger flu and

genocidal “Great Grist Purge” (Tiger Flu 268) by humans of Saltwater Flats, three

generations ago. The inhabitants organize their lives around their roles and capacities as

parthenogenetic clones: mother-doubles (Grist sisters who give live birth to other Grist

sisters, also clones), starfish (those who can regenerate organs, limbs, and other body parts

that are harvested for transplantation to mother-doubles), and grooms (who take care of

mother-doubles and starfish respectively). With the corporatization of technologies that have

generated new beings (such as the Grist sisters) solely for the reproductive labour of

17

manufacturing technological interfaces (the scales with which characters can access archived

memories), the “Asiatic” becomes articulated through the temporality of the Grist sisters’

aliveness as it had been reproduced in service of assembling technological parts into an

interface.

Kirilow and Kora come into contact when Kirilow travels to Saltwater Flats after her

entire village is either killed or kidnapped by the Saltwater Flats military, stolen away for the

inventor and CEO of Light Industry Höst Company, Isabelle Chow, to experiment with in

service of technologies such as the Dark Baths. After the kidnapping of her Grist sisters, and

the death of both Peristrophe Halliana and Auntie Radix—Grist Village’s last starfish, and a

mother double, respectively—Kirilow searches Saltwater Flats for a starfish said to live

within a rumoured commune of Grist sisters who had stayed and survived their banishment.

This commune proves to exist, under the name of Cordova Dancing School for Girls, run by a

woman named Madame Dearborn. Here, descendants of Grist sisters live alongside those

who may not be descendants, but have been orphaned and taken in by Madame Dearborn,

who teaches all of them the Grist sisters’ history through particular dances, chants, and

survival practices. Kirilow and Kora meet at the school after Kora is sent there by her

impoverished family in hopes that she has a better chance of survival than Uncle Wai, her

mother Charlotte, and brother K2, all of whom are sickly or at risk of succumbing to the tiger

flu). Kirilow realizes that Kora is a starfish when she amputates Kora’s hand following a

serious wound, and a new mass of tissue begins to regrow in Kora’s arm. After a perilous

journey involving the Pacific Pearl Parkade, a commune of men living with tiger flu, and the

heavily militarized borders of the region’s quarantine rings, the pair arrive at the New Origins

Archive (NOA), a repository of data and seed library. There they are drugged and forced to

participate in a feast where Isabelle Chow publicly launches a nuclear rocket at the

mainframe Chang, explaining to Kirilow that Chang’s deteriorating servers are no longer

18

useful to her as an experiment in uploading those suffering from tiger flu, especially after the

leader of the Pacific Pearl Parkade, Marcus Traskin, has seized control over Chang.

As the NOA crumbles, Kora’s body is crushed in the debris. But having had a

memory scale forcibly implanted into her by Isabelle, Kirilow contains knowledge of how to

upload a body’s consciousness into a mainframe, and uses Isabelle’s technology to upload

Kora into a batterkite (a ship also invented by Isabelle). Escaping back to Grist Village,

Kirilow plants the batterkite into the earth, and over time Kora transmutes into a starfish tree

that regenerates organs for a new village of Grist sisters. At stake for the characters is the

capacity to survive the ongoing afterlives of settler colonial capitalism, manifest as

quarantine rings with heavily militarized borders and the endless precarity around potentially

losing each other to illness, starvation, or—in the case of the Grist sisters—sudden

reclamation (kidnap) by a biotechnological corporation for its experiments. Claiming use

over the “Asiatic” bodies of the Grist sisters, the Jemini corporation nevertheless reproduces

the anti-Blackness of global modernity in its claims over in/organic bodies as matter for its

speculations.

While turning to erotic mediations to conceive of techno-Orientalist aesthetics can

make sociality palpable in excess of modernity’s “yok[ing]” of subjectivity and subjection

(Holland 10), thinking with virtuality helps us feel out sociality within the blur of

dis/embodiments considered unlikely, lost, or made unavailable, without privileging bounded

concepts of self and other as methodologies for relationality. Thinking within this ambivalent

blur presenced by the Asiatic and the uncertainty of its attachments also intervenes in the

desire to recuperate the racialized, gendered, and sexualized body within the conflation of

organicity and the embodied real. This desire is an impulse that Rachel C. Lee has identified

for its salience in Asian Americanists misgivings around biological significations within

racial analysis (Lee 5). As a writer who has named “the malleability of metaphor” as a reason

19

for turning to “speculative fiction novels” rather than the literary realism of “identity cards”

(“Familiarizing Grist Village” 25), Larissa Lai has critiqued post-racial and post-gender

discourses of community and ethical subjectivity while responding to ethical responsibilities

to both misgivings and impulses around the question of the Asian body. Herself a writer with

Hong Kong Chinese ancestry who has been based in Treaty 7 territory, Musqueam,

Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories (“Familiarizing Grist Village” 20), Lai develops

upon imagery and references to the Pacific Northwest in Tiger Flu and other speculative

fiction or poetry. Meanwhile, she intervenes in a total reinscription of sociality by drawing,

too, upon the possibility of enduring imperialism and politics that cannot be resolved through

unfolding dialectic over time—as in the reminiscence between the name and geographies of

Saltwater Flats to Saltwater City, the name for Vancouver used by nineteenth-century

Chinese settlers from the Four Counties region in Southern China, gesturing towards histories

of settler colonialism alongside iterations yet to be felt within the readerly present. Grist

Village, as Lai herself has noted, has often been interpreted as a commune of women, queer,

female, and/or lesbian Asian feminists (“Familiarizing Grist Village” )—yet, given the bodily

multiplicities between Kirilow, Kora, and other Grist communes, or even amongst the clones

of Grist Village, for that matter, it could be more generative to read such characters in terms

of sociality around feminized gendering rather than as legible representations of gender.

The erotic mediations of power within virtuality, as an aesthetic trope and framework

for critical theory, are multiple and varied, perhaps fittingly for its implications around what

is real or unreal. In relation to theories around posthumanist information capital, virtuality

can be conceptualized as “a relationship between what might be taken for granted and what is

supposedly unlikely beyond speculation” (Terranova 10). Within Terranova’s language

around virtuality, it is possible to sustain relationality through the very impossibility of being

certain about the world as a sensorium. In Matt Bluemink’s interpretation of Deleuze,

20

however, virtuality is a temporal-spatial dimension of reality that may not be accessible

through bodily perception yet co-exists with it; the virtual is therefore a dimension within

which objects and ideas can be generated but must make the movement into actuality in order

to be perceived. Deleuze stages virtuality as a metaphysical question, wherein the difference

between virtuality and human perception is itself creative insofar as the movement of objects

or ideas between them it possible to continue generating meaning (Bluemink, “On

Virtuality”). Yet the condition of empire in the production of the modern world requires

questioning of which bodies are entailed in the human who is capable of perceiving and

therefore making meaning out of the virtual. While still concerned with the ontology of

virtuality, Denise Ferreira da Silva suggests that conception of human perception via “Man’s

exceptionality—his soul, free will, capacity for reasoning” is itself is a “modern text”

elaborated as the violence of “racial grammar and lexicon work as ethical descriptors” (“On

Difference Without Separability” 57). Ferreira da Silva develops an ethical recomposition of

sociality “from without the modern text” that could be enabled by the multiple registers of

legibility within virtuality. With Ferreira da Silva’s example of atoms that can only be seen

by imaging apparatuses including scientific instruments, but also conceptions of intuitive

sensibility, visuality, and scale (59), the “self” implied by liberal humanist sensibilities of the

perceptive human subject and the “other” implied by the temporal-spatial mapping of the

world into planes of reality are both illustrated to be erotic mediations around the experience

of feeling as a body.

Through such discourses of virtuality, then, we can theorize erotic power and

mediation as both experiences and practices of recomposing the body in relation with the

world. It can be generative to read virtuality as a register of techno-Orientalist aesthetics that

enables epistemological uncertainty around the ideas of the bounded, rational individual as

the privileged form of embodied subjectivity and relationality. Discourses of techno-

21

Orientalism also trouble conceptions of political will and agency, since pleasure engendered

through its aesthetics aren’t easily mapped in terms of complicity around racist imagings, nor

are they always categorized as mechanisms of self-expression and empowerment. If techno-

Orientalist logics can be conceived in terms of figurations of West and East wherein the

former is “a project that requires configurations of the East as the very technology with which

to shape it” (Roh, Niu, and Huang 2), the temporal-spatial cartographies of techno-

Orientalism can be figured through the Pacific Northwest as they are within Larissa Lai’s The

Tiger Flu. For Iyko Day, the aesthetic dimensions of the Pacific Northwest in terms of North

American settler colonialism and the Orient manifests as a visual problem, wherein “Asians

give human shape to the abstract circuits of capitalism that have ‘no concrete manifestation,

that are quite literally unrepresentable’” (Day 8). The “principal violence of capitalism,”

then, for Day, is “in the very way it abstracts … highly differentiated gendered and racialized

labor in order to create value” (9). This chapter attends to similar concerns around the

“Asian” body’s relation to abstraction and labour insofar as I ask how it is made to index the

im/materiality of time and capital. However, I diverge slightly from Day’s orientation of

abstraction as the principal violence of capitalism. Instead, I attend to techno-Orientalist

discourses to ask how Asian bodies are produced through aesthetic registers of in/organicity,

and in effect become dis/embodied interfaces for the abstract rather than human

visualizations of what is unrepresentable.

Patterson’s concept of the “virtual other” is helpful for developing upon ambivalence

as a method of critical orientation to the body. The virtual other, for Patterson, is the

unplaceable presence of “other lives between the real and the nonreal, the authentic and the

inauthentic … [it] is the ‘-ic’ of the Asiatic, the unknowability, the blur” (232). In addition to

troubling binaries around in/organic subjectivity, this concept of the virtual other offers a way

to queer our sense of dis/embodied time and space through the erotic playfulness of

22

unknowability. The unknowable, Asiatic, virtual other is also, of course, denoted through

tropes of the inscrutable and unreadable Oriental, whose opacity is imagined as alluring and

mysterious, yet disinterested, and therefore disaffected in the sense of being alienated and

disloyal to aesthetic cultures of white sentiment and fragility (Yao 1). Unknowability, then, is

interrelated yet not the same as ambivalence insofar as critiquing the erotics of the virtual

other through ambivalence gestures towards the erotic and sexual labour that the virtual other

carries out in being projected as an unknowable object of desire whose opacity nonetheless

offers an erotic surface for orienting the knowledge project of the self. Figuring the Asiatic

virtual other in terms of ambivalence, then, also enables reciprocal sociality may be possible

as a wayward form that attends not just to the violence enabled by hatred, but also by

pleasure and desire.

This binarization of in/organicity that haunts both techno-Orientalist aesthetics and its

discourses is further complicated by Danielle Wong’s concept of “inorganic critique,” a

methodology that “straddles the unstable line between techno-Orientalist narratives about the

future, and subversive modes of theorising and enacting posthuman Asianness”

(“Dismembered Asian/American” 49). Through Wong’s articulation of inorganic critique,

both techno-Orientalist narratives around the perverse modernity of the place called “Asia,”

and the possibilities of posthumanism in reconfigurations of Asianness, take critical

significance. Highlighting the long durée of techno-Orientalist configurations around the

Asian as robotic and machinelike, Wong also foregrounds the inorganicity of “liberal human

subjectivity: the imperial and colonial configuration of the human as white and therefore free,

and as free and therefore white” (“Dismembered Asian/American” 36). This poses an

intervention in the taken-for-granted relationship between Asianness and inorganicity, and

whiteness and organicity—or, indeed, between subjectivity and organicity. In conversation,

Patterson and Wong foreground the social life of difference by attending to the production of

23

Asiatic in/organicity and its aesthetic, sexual, and temporal-spatial dimensions around “the

feeling of being a body.” This includes its “inscrutable” pleasures in relation to the

production of both skin and flesh as racial matter (Musser, Sensual Excess 87 and 1), which I

will discuss further in Chapter Two. Virtuality within this project can therefore be

conceptualized as an interface for critique around Asiatic in/organicity, in response to the

liberal humanist style of subjectivity that characterizes epistemological, and ontological,

premises of global modernity. Routing erotics through virtuality as a register of techno-

Orientalist aesthetics more generally asks the question of how it feels to dis/embody the

“Asiatic” while oriented to the impossibility of legibility.

Glitchy dis/embodiments

The multiplicity of the Grist sister as a racialized, gendered, and sexualized form

produces a glitch in the common-sense formulation that subjectivity, at the scale of the whole

body, can stand in for the kinds of sociality the body can generate. The Grist sisters therefore

present something other than a straightforward example of what Kandice Chuh has proposed

a “subjectless discourse,” where the production of difference and subjectivity is foregrounded

and the “Asian American subject” deprivileged as a political project (Imagine Otherwise 9).

Instead, the Grist sisters aestheticize a response to Cheng’s question of what happens when

“one treats oneself like a thing” (19), returning us to the erotic interplays that dis/embodiment

produces despite Asian Americanist critique’s desires around subjectlessness and its

(im)possibile intimacies around discourse. In this sense the in/organic glitchiness of the Grist

sisters do not disavow the residues of liberal humanism, alongside the visions of

posthumanism, by making palpable the virtuality that each figuration carries, and multiplying

the self and other within the body. They deprivilege the human subject as the scale through

which sociality is possible—without taking subjectlessness for granted as another mode for

sociality—as figures who are humanoid and nevertheless disinterested in claiming the human

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as an originary whole. In its ambivalence, then, the virtuality of self and other that also

multiplies within the figure of “human” can also index the residues of imperial violence that

surface through disgust, distrust, and disinterest in “majoritarian feelings” (Yao 210) stylized

through the figure of the human. Yet a reversal of moralized binaries around the in/human

does not inherently offer reciprocal sociality; rather, it is the playful disobedience of

virtuality’s failure around time that can potentially, if not always, queer (Patterson 30) the

reproduction of in/human binaries as a seamless temporal-spatial interplay of power.

While harvesting herbs one day, Kirilow and Glorybind encounter a figure who

appears in distress and infected with the tiger flu, and who comes from Saltwater Flats.

Distrustful towards this figure, whom she disparagingly calls “Salty,” Kirilow is nonetheless

prompted by Glorybind to treat her severed hand because she seems to be capable of

regenerating body parts, and could therefore become a much-needed starfish for Grist

Village. Kirilow stuns her and the Groundsels take it back to their home. Upon waking, the

“Salty” pleads for a chance to explain her presence, appealing to them with the claim: “I’m

just as human as you are.” To which Glorybind responds, “We aren’t human” (48). Rebuffing

this invitation into “the” human, Kirilow and Glorybind perform a kind of affective

indifference that is nevertheless erotic in its mediations when it registers as coldness towards

the “Salty” (whose name is later revealed to be Carmela Sweetwater). For Xine Yao, coldness

can figure as an apparent unfeeling at the surface that indexes disinterest in taking the

“imbricated fantasy of right feeling, politics, and action” for granted. Following Yao, Kirilow

and Glorybind’s coldness produce the “critical demeanours and ways of being together” that

“emerge when we reclaim unfeeling from its demonization and moral and social annihilation

and consider that its appearance of negation does not obviate or even conceal but rather

enables generative and insurgent capacities” (Yao 209-10).

25

Yet within the novel, Kirilow reproduces the moralization of in/humanity in her

assumption that Carmela Sweetwater is of the humans, despite her potential starfish ability,

because she has arrived from beyond Saltwater Flats, is infected with tiger flu, and does not

have the same appearance as the Grist Village sisters. Neither mere reversal nor mirroring of

the moralizing logics around in/humanity and its vulnerabilities inherently realize reciprocity.

Kirilow’s ambivalence towards the “Salty”—manifest as a mixture of disgust, resentment,

and coldness—reminds us of how virtuality can also index the impossibility of reciprocal

resolution in the wake of “the murderous present and there in the genocidal past” (Tiger Flu

92), which the Grist sisters continually face. In the novel, the violence of this past involves

the rampant tiger flu pandemic that has normalized scarcity and suffering; it also refers to the

murders and forced exile of Grist sisters as they began to mutate from the versions of

themselves forced to work in Light Industry HöST Company factories. This past turns out to

continue into the novel’s present when Kora learns that her brother, K2, is working for Jemini

to produce more tiger wine (which infects people) while, simultaneously, developing

technology that is promised to cure the infected and save the uninfected by uploading them

into the increasingly obsolete Chang (Lai Tiger Flu 229). At time of writing, this narrative

seems eerily prescient: the COVID-19 pandemic continues amidst corporatized imperial

violence and climate disaster that disproportionately incapacitates Black, Indigenous, and

people of colour. This incapacitation seems a rational effect of a global modernity produced

through genocide, enslavement, and colonialism. Despite the analogousness between

contemporary crises and the events of Tiger Flu, however, the ambivalence of virtuality

within the novel interrupts the chronic temporality of crisis by erotically mediating its

im/materialities.

Rather than foreclosing what is unlikely or unimaginable, virtuality in Tiger Flu

disrupts assumptions that the textures of time will feel smooth—that time will flow

26

progressively and seamlessly, uninterrupted by the cosmically devastating violence of a time

before. Within the novel, the concept of “the time before” does not cordon off a paradigm

shift as much as distinguish various im/material manifestations of temporality. At the Pacific

Pearl Parkade of Saltwater Flats, where groups of men infected with tiger flu reside and

separate themselves from the rest of the city, the entrance is a “massive sculpture made of

empty food cans from the time before, variously bolted, screwed, glued, welded, and strung

together to form the shape of a giant tiger’s head with a gaping maw” (Tiger Flu 105). To

enter the parkade, one is consumed by the hunger archived by empty food cans and the open

mouth of the tiger through which the flu has travelled. It is through this same mouth,

however, that “the lineup of people waiting for the upload to Chang … depart[s]” (Tiger Flu

246-7). This erotic, aesthetic avowal of the archival work around “the time before” becomes

an im/material spatiality through which virtuality’s multiplicity can be accessed.

Virtuality therefore puts glitches into the loop by surfacing the conditions around

temporality’s erotic disjunctions and im/possibilities. It indexes and registers the conditions

of temporal-spatial logics (such as the moralized binary between in/human) while failing

them, by surfacing glitches and breakdown in the very desires around the smooth progression

of time. Both Kirilow’s ambivalence towards Carmela Sweetwater, and the mutated

dis/embodiments among the sisters of Grist Village in relation to Cordova Dancing School

for Girls, aestheticize interplays of difference as they produce and foreclose forms of

sociality. The sensorial dimensions of this failing of time can be leaky vile: Kirilow

repeatedly describes her urge to vomit in response to the sickened figure’s snot, tears, and

bile, comparing the figure's hair to a “cockroach antennae” (46). Yet despite its intensity, the

disgust that Kirilow dis/embodies in relation to the “Salty” indexes the potency of

ambivalence in terms of its erotic mediations between self and other. The porous “boundary

confusions” between self and other, made sensible through disgust (Ngai 22), are

27

aestheticized through Glorybind’s discursive refusal around the presumed mutuality of

“human” as a mode of subjectivity, alongside Kirilow’s repetitive looping through the

leakiness of the figure's bodily fluids and Kirilow’s nausea. When the flu-ridden figure turns

out to not be human either, and her starfish capabilities indicate her membership in the

rumoured Grist commune called Cordova Dancing School for Girls, the virtuality of

ambivalence itself surfaces: further troubling the “ruse” that “all feelings matter” universally

(Yao 210), it is uncertain whether difference can in itself make matter differently, so to speak.

The failure of the virtuality around “human” in transforming the violent alienation of

genocide into reciprocity also troubles the desire to discipline ambivalence into reciprocity

through avowal alone. As an erotic mediation, the virtuality around in/organic self and other

here are certainly generative, but sometimes in disobedient ways that cannot be resolved

through critique. The glitchiness of virtuality, then, indexes and mediates the erotics of power

in ways that enable reciprocity.

On their travels together, Kirilow and Kora encounter a place called the Dark Baths, a

technology developed as an experimental interface “said to cure the mind of the body” (173).

It does so by separating minds from bodies via elevators called LïFT technology, which

transmute passengers’ bodies into fish and uploads their consciousness into the virtual reality

within its waters. Situated within a place called the New Origins Archive, a repository for

“the blueprints for everything animal, vegetable, and mineral that lived in the time before”

(276), the Dark Baths is just one technology alongside others in the story that index a project

of separating mind and body, a mediation of memory and futurity, based on the assumption

that the relationship between the consciousness and body parallels a binary of virtual and

corporeal. Despite the Dark Bath technology’s explicit conjuration of Cartesian binary logics

via mind and body, there is an erotic disjunction of racialized, gendered, and sexualized

forms in relation to the im/material splitting that the LïFT technology performs. Both the

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restorative promises of the Dark Baths and the ambivalent residues of Asiatic in/organicity

within its depths gesture towards a question of subjectivity critical towards post/humanist

recuperations of the mind/body split.

The Dark Baths iterates Sylvia Wynter’s question of in/human existence “alongside

‘the idea of race’” rather than in reclamation or disavowal of race’s conditions (Ferreira da

Silva, in McKittrick 93). My aim is not to transpose a particular production of race into the

world of Tiger Flu but to attend to how it similarly diverges from “conventional liberal

critique” that sees ‘the idea of race’ as a mistaken, false scientific apprehension of the human

body.” The indeterminacy of the Dark Baths’ promises around splitting mind and body

produces Asiatic in/organicity “in relation to the monumental history of race” (Ferreira da

Silva, in McKittrick 93), rather than as a resolution of difference through a more truthful

iteration of posthuman hybridity. Attending to the racialized, gendered, and sexualized

production of the body can therefore also reconfigure the power mediated through the

“conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it was the human itself”

(Wynter 260). Attending to the erotics of virtuality therefore also makes palpable the ways in

which desire for connection between self and other can produce violent mediations of

difference. In the same moment that Kirilow and Glorybind invite generative questioning

around Carmela Sweetwater’s invocation of shared humanity as a shorthand for reciprocity

and ethical relationality, Kirilow virulently wishes genocide upon what she calls

Sweetwater’s “dirty blood, dirty biomatter,” both out of revenge for the Great Grist Purge of

centuries ago, and out of fear that the already-weakened Peristrophe Halliana will die of

Sweetwater’s tiger flu (Tiger Flu 72). Attending to erotics, then, also means attending to

29

violent acts of mediation between self and other, which are made palpable through

conceptions of racial form (Holland 3).3

The glitchiness of virtuality’s ambivalence does not only disorient liberal humanist

conflations of the organic, material and therefore supposedly real; it reorients the body

towards socialities that are made possible precisely through “sensoria and … patterns of

intimacy that confound assumptions about propinquity and distance, physicality and

virtuality” (Mankekar and Schein 2), and as such cannot be taken for granted in their capacity

for both violence and care. Tiger Flu both aestheticizes and indexes how the eroticism of

virtuality can make the desire for connection between self and other palpable for its

sensualities and sensibilities. Taking place in TAO (Time After Oil), the world of Tiger Flu

could be called post-apocalyptic insofar as its characters travel through the entropic

conditions engendered by the eponymous tiger flu. Yet, these ruins turn out to be more than a

failed order of things conventional of post-apocalypse literature; rather it offers “eruptions of

the unexpected from the initial utopian impulse” (Lai, “Familiarizing Grist Village” 34) of

speculative fiction readings. Kirilow’s practice of creating a whetstone out of crushed

diamond rings from “the time before,” or the Saltwater City practice of creating “inventive

toys made from bits of old blenders, plastic bottles, incandescent lightbulbs” (Tiger Flu 19

and 136), pull multiple temporalities together by transforming the materiality of objects used

3 Of a racist encounter between herself (a Black woman) and a white woman, Holland recalls: “[I]n

my mind, we hover there touching one another with the lie of difference and non-relation balancing

precariously between us … The psychic violation of that moment … haunts me still; it is the intimacy

of that moment that arrests me. That woman expected something from me—one usually does not

expect anything from strangers” (2-3). The lie of difference, within this encounter, refers not to a

universalized dis/embodiment but a production of self and other conjured through the habit of anti-

Blackness. Despite the racialized distance between Blackness and whiteness that the white woman’s

violence seems to produce, the illegible and yet palpable sensations of racism that Holland describes

gesture towards the intimacy that is generated between concepts of Black and white precisely through

these racist habituations. These habituations repeatedly mark whiteness as the self who organize the

matter of the world, and Blackness as the other who simply exists as such matter. Within this scene,

intimacy and difference are simultaneous processes that manifest as eroticized power relations,

demonstrating the ways in which erotic mediations can also multiply the social life of imperial

violence.

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to circulate conceptions of love or play and in turn transforming the sensoria they make

possible. Kirilow’s whetstone—manifest in the multiple, simultaneous sensoria it indexes—

aestheticizes what Wong calls “glitches” in the progressivist temporalities of techno-

Orientalist liberal humanism. Glitches, in Wong’s language, disrupt a more determinist

“process of futurity by recalling the past into the future”—for example, by attending to the

critical significance of race within speculative narratives that fantasize about the future as

postracial (“Dismembered Asian/American” 27). What this temporal recall performs is not

just an accounting for what has been discarded in fantasies about the future of global

modernity, but a foregrounding of “the affective economies of fatigue and deterioration”

signified by entropy’s poetics (Ball 69) within techno-Orientalist productions. The glitchiness

in time, materiality, and sensoria of Kirilow's practice of crushing diamond rings into a

whetstone therefore problematizes what Wong critiques as the “conflation of the posthuman

with the postracial” in the speculative fiction genre (“Dismembered Asian/American” 37).

Instead, glitches enable an indexing of the residual, if transformed, erotics of racial form

within speculative fiction.

Indeed, as some characters are more explicitly racialized by way of names that might

more familiarly register as “Asian” (e.g., Kora Ko, Uncle Wai, Chang and Eng), the

uncertainty of what makes them “Asian” (or even “human”) in the text’s hypermediated

future temporality registers them as figures who aestheticize the in/organicity of both the

“Asiatic/Asian” and the conflation of the body-as-identity or vice versa. Kora believes herself

to be human at the narrative’s opening, already in/organic insofar as her body has fistulas in

which she wears her memory scales. Throughout the narrative, both readers and characters

within the text register that she has starfish capabilities, and is related to the Grist sisters and

their ancestors although she was not raised in either Grist Village or Cordova Dancing School

for Girls. While the in/organicity of the Asiatic is generative through its stylization of

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dis/embodiment, the uncertain capacity for the “Asiatic” to sustain conceptions of humanity

remains. By gesturing towards the im/material labour of the Asiatic as an erotically mediated

style of dis/embodiment, the novel’s uncertain figurations also articulate caution around

reducing the Asian or Asiatic to fragmented, stylistic prostheses that can be attached to a

subject already imagined to be whole. Rather, the virtuality of these figures—that is, the

simultaneous im/material, in/organicity of their Asiatic figurations—suggest that aesthetic

inquiry and sociality is possible precisely through their ambivalence. Attending to the

virtuality of Asiatic figurations through the glitches they produce within liberal humanist

sensibilities can therefore index the conditions that have made the liberal humanist subject

legible as a racial and aesthetic form, as an eroticized interplay of power, and a style of

embodying power.

The doubling of the real

Within the Dark Baths, virtuality reconfigures “phenomenological readings of time

and space” (Holland 11) through its indeterminacies around dis/embodiment and

im/materiality. Following Wong’s orientation towards the conditions of in/organicity, the

virtuality of the Asiatic body, as an in/organic form, makes way for Asian Americanist

critique to orient discourse precisely through the ambivalence around affects of anxiety,

dread, desire, or excitement that are simultaneously aroused by techno-Orientalist

speculations of the world. The psychedelic narrative form around the Dark Baths, and

throughout the novel, turn the feeling of reading Tiger Flu itself into a practice of “releas[ing]

thinking from the grip of certainty and embrac[ing] the imagination’s power to create with

unclear and confused, or uncertain impressions” (Ferreira da Silva 58). The novel does not

guide the reader through the plot so much as offers the potentiality of moving through the

story via emulsified fragments of dance, chant, disease, language, and lyrics, aestheticized

through lists of materials and knowledge that do not clarify the narrative self but index the

32

glitchiness of the story’s time and space. Upon hearing an old radio that Carmela Sweetwater

has found in Kirilow, Glorybind, and Peristrophe Halliana’s cave, Kirilow involuntarily feels

memories and archived knowledge in her body through a

dance of nuclear fission, of oil, of coal, of wood and straw. I dance for wheels and

automobiles, when they were like living creatures drunk on the rotted bodies of

species long dead. I dance for the tiger flu, for Ebola, for AIDS, smallpox, measles,

tuberculosis, Black Plague, and death. I dance for stem cells, devilled eggs, cloning,

and mutation. All the long path of chance and science, money and murder that Old

Glorybind taught me was my messy legacy. Although I can’t say I understand it, I

know its songs, its oranges and lemons, its ring around the rosy. My body knows

something that my mind can’t refuse. (Tiger Flu 70-1, emphasis my own)

Formally, this kind of listing that occurs throughout the novel draw out the

ambivalence of ethical relationality as both characters and readers encounter knowledge as a

body feeling, and body feeling as a practice that cannot always be clarified through the mind.

The dance that Kirilow finds herself involuntarily performing to the radio is inscribed

through the poetics of a rambling list that includes species that have died, reproductive

technologies, the “ring around the rosy” vocabulary of Anglophone nursery rhymes, and

extractive resource industries. We can feel out the materiality of such ambivalence in

conversation with Sianne Ngai’s concept of “ugly feelings,” where “dwell[ing] on affective

… illegibilities, dysphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity” alongside

“similarly ambivalent situations of suspended agency” (Ngai 1) produces critical and creative

orientation through the very glitchiness of simultaneous understanding and uncertainty. Such

glitchiness denotes the presence of not just political dissidence against particular sensibilities,

but the production of racial form and aesthetics as a form of erotic mediation.

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In turn, this virtuality (the unlikely, multiple, and yet undeterminable erotic

mediation) of techno-Orientalist aesthetics turns critique around techno-Orientalism itself

into the “politically ambiguous work” which Ngai identifies in affects that may not be

considered attractive or prestigious within a given moment in literary and culture critique (6).

Conceiving of virtuality and its implications through erotics enables attending to the

“mediation between the aesthetic and the political in a nontrivial way” (Ngai 3)—and, as I

will elaborate, in an orientation towards the production of Asiatic in/organicity as a

simultaneously dis/embodied register of subject or object being. At the very same time as the

Dark Baths is facilitated via destructive, and violent practices such as kidnap and coercive

experimentation, what the Dark Baths also promises is a form of virtual reality where

subjects are produced through the very dis/embodiment of their sensations and desires.

Virtuality also establishes an index of the very production of this subject, in Kara

Keeling’s sense of the indexical as not a repository but “the trace of the referent” (“I =

Another” 57). Within the novel, the conditions of pandemic and entropy that make the virtual

reality of the Dark Baths so alluring draws out biotechnology’s failed promises within the

text, while rehearsing both liberal humanist and posthumanist aesthetics that promise to “cure

the mind of the body” by disavowing their interrelatedness—in this case, by forcibly

extracting “Grist sister DNA to feel real” (Tiger Flu 173). At the same time, the Dark Baths’

presence is striking as a technology explicitly developed within the narrative to mediate life

and death via the “dismemberment and dispersal” of body matter that troubles binaries of

in/organicity and features in techno-Orientalist aesthetics of the “Asian” body as machinelike

(Wong, “Dismembered” 36). Cast alongside relationships between humanoid characters

within the novel, the Dark Baths aestheticizes the ambivalence around distinctions between

im/material, in/organic, highlighting the technological function of dis/embodied forms across

these distinctions.

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When she enters the virtual reality of the Dark Baths, Kirilow Groundsel encounters a

palpable specter of her wife Peristrophe Halliana, who had died earlier from the eponymous

tiger flu after being weakened by excessive organ donations. Following her encounter with

Peristrophe Halliana in the Dark Baths, Kirilow is disoriented with grief and longing, and she

asks Glorybind Groundsel—her mother double—whether the experience was real. Prompted

to clarify what she means after stating that the experience was real “in a manner of speaking,”

Glorybind responds succinctly: “There is real, and there is real” (293). In effect Glorybind

conjures both the living Peristrophe Halliana and her dead body “real,” implicitly gesturing

towards spectrality of both as simultaneously im/material and dis/embodied forms. By

doubling the real rather than privileging one dis/embodied form over the other or invoking a

real/immaterial binary, Glorybind conjures up possibilities around sociality that virtuality can

engender as a relationship between, to return to Terranova’s language, what is supposedly

given (Peristrophe Halliana’s death) and what is unlikely (Peristrophe, still alive).

By discursively doubling the “real,” Glorybind also gestures towards the palpability

that signifies both the temporalities of past and present, living and dead, and the in/organicity

of the Asiatic body who mediates the virtuality of these temporalities. The poetic impact of

Glorybind’s doubled “real” in response to Kirilow’s desperate question around the actuality

of Peristrophe Halliana’s specter also performs im/material labour that, in this context, is

reproductive, aesthetic, and erotic labour insofar as it multiplies what could be indexed

through the idea of the “real.” The virtuality of possible dis/embodiments within this passage

do not only enact “the relation between the given and the (allegedly) unlikely” that Tiziana

Terranova identifies within the concept of virtuality, but also the ways in which “immaterial

labour” can be traced through the figuration of precarious workers whose “capacities are

‘virtual,’ that is they are there but still undetermined” (83). Im/material labour tracks this

virtuality that Terranova names alongside the im/materiality of figures whose very bodies,

35

not just their capacities for labour, are undetermined. Through virtuality, we might feel out

the generative in/organicity of the Asiatic as a racialized, gendered, and sexualized

production, while also attending to the labours that are carried out by Asiatic bodies but

difficult to quantify within reductive narratives of the injured subject—for example, erotic,

sexual, aesthetic, and intellectual labour. Therefore, while Kirilow continue to yearn for

another encounter with Peristrophe Halliana in the Dark Baths at the end of the novel, her

painful experience within the Dark Baths foregrounds virtuality without valorizing an

assumption that deeper knowledge between self and other will necessarily guarantee a world

of reciprocity. The erotics of practicing reciprocity via the virtual is itself conditioned by

what the technology of virtuality indexes, and the sensual and sexual labour of “habitual

archival work” (Wong, “Screen Time”), which virtuality and its interfaces, such as the

internet, can enable, whether in relation to sexual performances or the corporeality of desire.

Kirilow, Glorybind, and Peristrophe Halliana all produce sociality in relation to each

other in ways that seem undetermined as im/material labour. As Grist sisters, they are

humanoid clones generated from the biomatter of the same human woman, having become

mutated after generations of repeated cloning via mother doubles. Yet they take roles like

wife, mother, groom, starfish, and, of course, sister—all dis/embodied styles of sociality that

cannot be accounted for via identitarian commitments around race, gender, and sexuality. We

cannot take this for granted—even characters in speculative fiction narratives articulate their

own conventions and assumptions, as I will discuss later when I read a passage wherein

Kirilow expresses visceral disgust with being categorized as “human.” However, what I am

gesturing to is the ways in which erotic registers of relationality, such as sex and desire, are

not easily mapped onto cartographies of affiliation based on pathologized difference (or lack

thereof), since the in/organicity of both self and other in the text are foregrounded by the

Grist sisters’ visual and biological similarities. As aestheticized figures of “Asiatic”

36

dis/embodiment, the Grist sisters also index virtuality's erotic presence as an “experience of

disorientation into the way otherness is conceived” (Patterson 261). The virtuality that

Glorybind aestheticizes through her doubling of the “real” is conjured not just in her

discursive utterance, but in the conditions of habitual revision that each Grist sister makes to

the biomatter of the human woman they all share. There is no originary whole in which Grist

sisters can be recuperated in order to be made legible via the privileged narrative of

subjectivity. Indeed, given that even mother doubles rely on regenerated body parts from

their own clones to survive, a reading of the text that “returns the extracted body part to the

violated racialized whole—a move that naturalizes a prior state of organic intactness and

individuality to that racialized body,” identified by Lee as one style of Asian Americanist

critique (Lee 7), is frustrated. Instead, the Grist Sisters are visually, genetically identical, and

yet they configure sociality through difference that is not always legible on the body, but felt

through it, nonetheless. The reproductive capacities the Grist sisters are dispersed through

inorganic processes such as the “nursing surgery,” which turns sisters into “grooms” who can

facilitate live births and nurse newborns; or the “the loving transplant, the sexy suture” that

enables mother doublers to survive birthing multiple litters in a lifetime (Tiger Flu 95 and

21).

Glorybind’s conjuring of virtuality around the “real” therefore makes its possibilities

palpable, but in a way that is responsive to Kirilow’s desire to be with her wife and

companion again. This virtuality does not necessarily multiply Peristrophe Halliana’s

availability for recuperation into the register of recognizable life following the “incorporative

and slow—bit by bit, scar by scar—vivisection” of biopower (Lee 28) surrounding her death.

There is a sociality through erotic mediations that returns us over and again to the (Asiatic)

body, while enabling a mode of address through the very multiplicity of what the body is

made to sign, and the selves or others it is made to stylize.

37

Since the Dark Baths figures as a virtual interface composed of uploaded

consciousness within the narrative, Glorybind’s doubling of the “real” also conjures up

ambivalence around distinctions between self and other—that is, between Kirilow and

Peristrophe, who very well might be specters of each other’s consciousness within the Dark

Baths. By turning to Glorybind, yet another Grist Sister and clone, to question reality,

Kirilow also sustains a mode of sociality by reaching out through this very ambivalence

between self and other in order to make meaning. Identical in terms of visual appearance and

DNA, Kirilow, Glorybind, and Peristrophe Halliana nevertheless surface the illegibility that

difference can take, but that can be felt out to multiply various social arrangements through

this ambivalence around how to locate difference in self or other. Rather than privileging

either self or other as dis/embodiments, both Glorybind and Kirilow reach out to each other

through the ambivalence between what is sensible and what is loss. In doing so they make a

mode of address out of the “unknowability” that erotics engenders, which, for Musser,

functions as both “a way around the cleavage of self and Other” and a sign of its excess

beyond these binaries (Sensual Excess 14). Still, the spectral appearance of Peristrophe

Halliana and Kirilow’s “powerful powerlessness” (Ngai 2) in response signifies mediations

between self and other that require each to give up the fantasy of boundedness facilitated by

agency, turning instead to the erotic ambivalence of affects that cannot not be recuperated

into a particular trajectory or body of origin. Dis/embodiment in this sense does refer to

fragmentations within a self, but the illegible mediations through which self and other are

produced in relation to the undetermined, yet-to-come affective responses of each other. By

doubling the “real,” Glorybind establishes a poetics around this erotic mediation of sociality,

wherein the ambivalence of encountering a loved one’s virtual reality cannot be universalized

as another form of difference.

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Rather, Glorybind's response to Kirilow gestures towards the ambivalence that is

present in all affects because of the conditions that have enabled their legibility. Continuing

Ngai’s suggestion that “affective contradictions” produce a “disjunctive logic” around scenes

of ambivalent feeling (Ngai 112), what both Glorybind and Kirilow do is show that [d]espite

the insistent processes of mechanization at work” in the virtual reality of the Dark Baths, “it

is precisely the mechanization” of reality “which makes the disjunctiveness visible” (Ngai

113) in relation to Kirilow’s affective response. Yet in this passage, the dis/embodiment of

these affects are not taken at face value for their production of erotic mediations. Rather they

are accounted for as conditions of erotic mediation’s possibilities for making the

im/materiality of shared vulnerability palpable, as a potential interface for reciprocity. The

sensations that Kirilow is subject to within the Dark Baths do not hinge upon the

confirmation of what is “real.” Yet her question to Glorybind surfaces the presence of

ambivalence around the real. This offers a glitchy queered sense of dis/embodiment in time,

space, and their multiples—insofar as virtual reality cannot register in Tiger Flu as a binary

between the real and unreal.

Yet through the orientation to vulnerability that bottomhood surfaces, the eroticized

power that has produced the Asiatic body through the sensibilities of empire, global

modernity, and imperial war can be reconfigured through the in/organicity of the Asiatic

body. As with Tan Hoang Nguyen, Patterson attends to the hypermediation of the in/organic

Asiatic body in pornography by pointing out that “[t]o receive pleasure, it matters that an

actor is represented not as ‘person’ or ‘body,’ but as white, as man, as stepfather, as boss, as

Asian woman, as pathetic cuckhold, as bratty bottom, etc … The political and social subtext

is crucial to erotic sensation, to masturbatory pleasure (Patterson 205). Stylization around the

pleasures of erotic mediation matter, then, because they are the mechanisms by which the

in/organic Asiatic body might reconfigure self and other in relation to conditions that have

39

made the “Asiatic” legible, including speculative (re)visions of the body within techno-

Orientalist aesthetics. Without disavowing the violence that even resignifying subjectivity

can reproduce, the “surrender and submission” signified through conceptions like critical

bottomhood can illustrate the critical, erotic possibilities of “boundary trespass involved in

being penetrated” (T.H. Nguyen 17). Nguyen and Patterson join Amber Jamilla Musser in

centering reciprocity as a matter of critical importance to the eroticized ambivalence between

self and other, so that we “do not necessarily come toward pleasure, but we come to

something else” when we ask about the “formations of relational selfhood” (Sensual Excess

23). Kirilow’s scene of ambivalence around the Peristrophe Halliana within the Dark Baths’

virtual reality conjures up a mode of erotic mediation where affects are not universalized in

service of reproducing a bounded, liberal humanist subject—nor another kind of subject

realized through a position of domination over the technologies of producing self or other.

Attending to the virtuality of the “real” in response to binary logics between in/organic also

enables a critical ambivalence around dis/embodiment and its erotic potential to make matter,

without simply “expanding possible subject positions” within liberal humanist fantasies of

subjectivity—or otherwise flattening all difference as equivalent forms under a utopic sign of

“Other/non-human” (Liu 5 and 9). The stakes of porosity that are engendered, and indexed,

through erotic mediations of techno-Orientalist aesthetics, therefore include a potential

resignification of power interplays around difference, via the eroticism of virtuality and its

im/material labours.

I potentially risk overdetermining Glorybind’s discursive doubling of the “real” in

terms of Tiger Flu as an aestheticization of virtuality’s erotic mediations. But what this

particular instance of virtuality around the “real” surfaces is the “doubling of Orientalism”

that David S. Roh, Greta Niu, and Betsy A. Huang identify in the logic of techno-

Orientalism. That is, techno-Orientalism does not follow progressivist temporalities of

40

development as a form of ideological or political consciousness that simply continues the

racialized, gendered, and sexualized assumptions of Orientalism over time. Rather, techno-

Orientalism establishes the logics of Orientalism in a repetitive loop that reproduces its

temporalities, spatialities, and phenomenologies into a speculative narrative about futurity.

This virtuality that I name in techno-Orientalism is conveyed, for Roh, Niu, and Huang, in

the “techne” of “techno-Orientalism,” wherein technology is a process, rather than a tool, that

“accounts for—and then dismisses—Eastern modernity as both process and product of

dehumanization.” The “speculative narratives of textual and visual media,” they continue,

“are the vehicles through which this disciplinary process travels” (223). That is, aesthetic

productions like Tiger Flu are technologies as well, foundational prostheses to bodies that are

also themselves technologies for “how we matter in this world—mechanisms from which our

futures are carved” (Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures xii). The virtuality aestheticized in

Tiger Flu shows us that configurations of both “East” and “West” index desires around

relative orientation towards “another way of being in the world … a world of romance,

sexuality, and sensuality” where “‘farness’ takes the direction of a wish, or even follows the

line of a wish” (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 114). In other words, virtuality can make the

conditions around difference palpable, but the process of making such conditions palpable

itself betrays a desire to orient one’s body to another—whether this other is the self, the other,

or their virtual multiples. Turning to Tiger Flu and its references to the Pacific Northwest’s

techno-Orientalist temporal-spatial cartographies, this chapter, too, is oriented by the desire to

reconfigure discourses of the self and other through the book as a technology and subject of

critique.

Feeling temporality, failing time

In all its waywardness around the real and unreal, material and immaterial, the erotics

of virtuality’s ambivalence does not necessarily open up a repertoire of time and space that is

41

both endless and available for domestication, even as it can be read in texts through aesthetic

tropes and styles. The ambivalence that virtuality can help us register is not necessarily useful

because it can resolve inexplicable or unlikely socialities through dis/embodiments in time

and space. Rather, the ambivalence is both a sensorium and method of being with, not only

through desire but also failures around domesticating particular temporal and spatial modes

through critique (which includes even the most wayward erotic modes of aesthetic inquiry).

Epistemological ambivalence, in this sense, disrupts racial forms and politics by orienting

critique and poeisis to the very conditions of racial form and subjectivity, not disavowing

their production of erotic power. In this sense, ambivalence is the sensorium of erotic

mediation of power. In Tiger Flu, the “ancient mainframe Chang” and “the backup

mainframe Eng” (12 and 14) help us practice, through our reading of the text, how to move

with such failures around time and space, by registering the failures as yet another iteration of

virtuality’s multiplicities. Chang and Eng are the planetary bodies wherein consciousness can

be uploaded and archived as virtual reality. Having been launched into orbit before the

novel’s events, they set and rise as if the moon and sun, changing the hue and brightness of

the sky in a daily loop. However, at the time of the novel’s events, Chang is at constant risk

of breakdown and failure as it becomes loaded with memory. Chang and Eng are also

gradually expanding their orbit as they travel increasingly, and dangerously, closer to the

planet that the story’s characters inhabit, to the point that their gravitational pull has become

sensible to Kirilow during her visit to the New Origins Archive (310).

Chang and Eng put the simultaneous and multiple temporalities of virtual reality into

motion. Launched by Light Industry HöST Company, Chang and Eng move the corporation’s

extractive technologies into the chronic poetics of the everyday as the two mainframes move

alongside—but not in replacement of—the moon and sun. They are the in/organic bodies by

which virtuality’s multiplicity is launched into a temporal loop, as they become timekeeping

42

mechanisms that archive history by continually receiving uploaded data. As orbiting bodies

containing the virtual realities of uploaded consciousnesses and memories, they make

sensible the multiple fields of gravity that are disjointed from the characters’ home planet, yet

directly connected to the repetitive day and night loop that the characters have become

habituated to. In this sense Chang and Eng gesture towards the possibility of virtuality to fail

time itself, revealing knowledge production to be an erotic process requiring habituation into

the rhythms and gravitational forces of virtual reality. For characters within the novel, the

scales that enable access to the mainframes can be costly and susceptible to infection or lice,

highlighting the in/organic contagiousness, too, of temporality even as a privatized habit. The

multiplicity of time within the virtual reality of Chang and Eng put the finitude and infinitude

of the body’s capacities into a relationship of simultaneity. This opens the possibility of

coming to “exhaustion” when virtuality “defer[s] a future for another future” by multiplying

the “undead” (Chun 91) dis/embodiments that are produced within it, and that surface amidst

a temporality’s breakdown. The failure of virtuality that is aestheticized through the

in/organic bodies that are Chang and Eng therefore gesture towards the undead that remain

after a concept, trope, or register of critique has broken down.

To further think with virtuality as the breakdown of critique, we could read the

mainframes Chang and Eng in relation to their namesakes, conjoined twins Chang and Eng

Bunker. Such a reading could be a project of its own; indeed, Cynthia Wu's scholarly

monograph offers critical historicization of the Bunker brothers and their production as

“fictional characters, literary or visual metaphor, medical specimen, museum artifact, or

venerated ancestors” (Wu 2-3). As Wu demonstrates in her book, reading the figuration of

Chang and Eng can betray the racialized, gendered, and sexualized dimensions of American

imperial imaginaries around modern subjectivity. Figured variously as “freak show”

performers, biomedical spectacles, and historical characters alike, the Bunker brothers

43

demystify binarizations and aestheticize the virtuality between subject/object as figures of

Asiatic in/organicity. However, it is critical to note that their capacity to become figures of

in/organic object virtuality is also made possible from the anti-Blackness of modernity, and

transatlantic slavery’s production of (non-Black) subject and (Black) subjection. The Bunkers

themselves were slaveowners who controlled a tobacco plantation—and were therefore “free”

and “rational” men, in the liberal humanist sense of owning “property” (enslaved Black

people) (Lowe 12). Having been indentured servitude as well (Wu 4), Chang and Eng

frustrate any desires to claim Asiatic in/organicity as an inherently ethical interplay of

power—even as they have been figured in “late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-

century contestations of nonreproductive sex, the conjugal family, and compulsory

heterosexuality” (Wu 10). Indeed, their erotic labour around queering sexuality surfaces in

relation to the production of white femininity and sexuality, as conjoined twins who aroused

moralized anxieties around their incapacity to separately have sex with their white wives (Wu

53). This anxiety surfaces over and above considerations around the sexual violence against

Black people that sustains slavery (Wu 164).

My point is not to privilege Wu’s historicization as the primary mode of aesthetic

inquiry, nor offer a self-flagellating critique of Asiatic in/organicity wherein Blackness

figures as a receptacle of displaced shame. Rather, this is a gesture towards the waywardness

of virtuality that can also surface the ways in which violence (such as that of slavery) can be

simultaneously spectacular and quotidian in their figurations, to the point where they become

reproduced through (re)habituations of the Asiatic body without being apparent. Virtuality’s

disobedience towards time, in its indexing or temporality, can therefore include disobedience

towards the desires of critique. This cannot be resolved by sharper or more vigilant critique

around “what” race reveals, but “how race reveals” (Wong, “Pandemic Racial Visions”) as

erotic mediations of empire and its multiplicities. Given Tiger Flu’s depiction of violent

44

precarity and the looping violence of global modernity, could there be pleasure in such

failure, without domesticating the waywardness of virtuality? If virtuality’s ambivalence can

help us sensorially register the conditions of temporal-spatial modes around sociality through

in/organic bodies like Chang and Eng, then might the same erotic mediations habituate

practitioners of critique to the feeling of being undone by an uncertainty whose resolution

may never arrive, submitting to ambivalence in the process of staying with it? If we

“foreground the interplay of power” in critically attending to submission (T.H. Nguyen 17),

might the erotic waywardness of virtuality also enable pleasure in avowing the critical, erotic,

and aesthetic vulnerability that can come with not knowing each self and other that virtuality

produces? While feeling out power as an eroticized interplay complicates the conditions of

pleasure in relation to reciprocity, Tan Hoang Nguyen reminds us that “[i]nstead of an

aggressive fortifying of our psychic and corporeal armor,” the vulnerability of in/organic self

and other opened up by virtuality’s failing of time can resignify both submission and

subjection. The stakes and possibilities are modes of feeling out the erotic mediations of

power (T.H. Nguyen 18 and 17) that might reconfigure the self and other through the

im/materiality of their eroticized relationships with power.

With such reconfigurations comes the invitation to distinguish the troubling erotic

ambivalence that is possible between suffering and pain as a practice of pleasure. When the

virtual reality produced by New Origins Archive becomes indistinguishable from that of

Kora’s waking life, she becomes overwhelmed with “rumbling dread” as she begins to hear

the bleating of her dead goat, Delphine, and the footsteps of her mother, Charlotte, all while

being pulled by the multiple gravitational fields of the planet she is on, alongside that of

Chang and Eng (Tiger Flu 272). It is this dread that she has been “taught to slide into” (272)

by Madame Dearborn, who teaches dances at Cordova Dancing School for Girls as one way

of (re)habituating knowledge production through its im/materiality. Yet her suffering,

45

differentiated from pain, bursts forth when she “screams and can’t stop screaming”; “she

becomes the scream” as her body becomes dismembered by the New Origins Archive,

transformed into fragments by other fragments (such as the feeling of knives and blades)

within its virtual reality (274, emphasis my own). As she becomes forcibly multiplied in a

way that dismembers her, and in the process becomes uploaded into the mainframe, she

experiences the feeling of being “pure pain without a body” (Tiger Flu 275), forcibly subject

to the sharp clarity of being fragmented while conscious and without the blur of ambivalence.

The body’s virtuality, then, is a technology of sociality that cannot be claimed as

either inorganic object to be wielded towards an endless possibility ex machina, nor organic

subject of universalized feeling and difference. The technology of the Asiatic body, and its

techno-Orientalist aesthetics that produce it, is an erotic mediation that comes with

(re)habitual practice. The ambivalence of virtuality (re)habituates us to conceptions of

im/materiality, in/organicity, and dis/embodiment, along with the deeply eroticized interplays

of power that sustain these iterations of sociality. While virtuality can make multiple and

simultaneous modes of sociality sensible precisely through its ambivalence, its waywardness

means that virtuality’s possibilities around reciprocity or shared vulnerability cannot be taken

for granted; the erotic is not inherently queer and can indeed reproduce the conflation of

suffering and pain. Yet, as techno-Orientalist aesthetics continue to resonate through

speculative texts like Tiger Flu, virtuality’s cosmic possibilities—registered as the

im/material, in/organic, and dis/embodied—endure through the erotic ambivalence for which

the “Asiatic” body is multiply reproduced as interface.

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Chapter Two: Fugitive erotics and refugee figurations in On Earth

We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Your hand under my shirt as static

intensifies on the radio.

Your other hand pointing

your daddy’s revolver

to the sky. Stars falling one

by one in the cross hairs.

This means I won’t be

afraid if we’re already

here. Already more

than skin can hold. That a body

beside a body

must make a field

full of ticking. That your name

is only the sound of clocks

being set back another hour

& morning

finds our clothes

on your mother’s front porch, shed

like week-old lilies.

— Ocean Vuong, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” Night Sky with Exit Wounds (43-6)

If the Asiatic body is figured through speculative visions around in/organicity, its

erotic mediations index the Asiatic body as aesthetic site and matter of racialized, gendered,

and sexualized difference within globalized modernity. Where conceiving of techno-

Orientalism as an aesthetic has surfaced the simultaneous im/possibility of ethical

subjectivity within such conditions, this chapter moves us from techno-Orientalist

discourse—and its critiques around the spectral labour of in/organic bodies that are circulated

as forms of globalized capital—to similarly erotic inquiry around the Asiatic body’s capacity

for critically aestheticizing ethical relationality. Given the formative role of imperial war in

generating liberal humanist desires for global community, I orient our reading of the Asiatic

body’s erotic mediations towards the figure of the refugee. In Ocean Vuong’s epistolary

novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the production of the Vietnamese/Vietnamese

American refugee figure traces the ways in which reciprocal sociality is possible through

47

refugee practices of archival memory and afterwar survival, read here as forms of queerly

reproductive labour. Whereas in Chapter One I foregrounded techno-Orientalist aesthetics as

a framework for reckoning with the erotic ambivalence that the Asiatic figure poses in its

bodily in/organicity, here I turn to the refugee figure for the eroticized interplays of power

and knowledge that it indexes as an Asiatic body in the afterlives of Cold War geopolitics.

Chapter One’s focus on techno-Orientalist tropes positions the “Asiatic” body within the

globalized geopolitics of hypo- and hypermodernity, through speculative narratives around

the ends of global capitalism and its subjects. Building upon such spectral circulations,

Chapter Two attends to the production of the refugee figure as an iteration of the “Asiatic”

body that circulates in the geopolitics of afterwar—in particular, within U.S. empire in

relation to the Vietnam War.

By turning to the aesthetic registers of refugee archives, which index the presence of

the immaterial and lost, I ask how the erotic mediations of the “Asiatic” body also produces

modes of address. Rather than reanimating self-expression as a sign of subjectivity, this

chapter asks how the aesthetic production of the refugee figure enables orientation towards

the eroticized interplays of power conditioning the capacity for communication and care.

Here we reckon with what I call a fugitive erotics, which gestures to the aestheticization of

Vietnamese and Vietnamese American characters in Vuong’s novel, and the erotics of

refugee epistemologies around loss and care that they practice. Fugitive erotics specifically

turns to the work of address via refugee epistemologies and the interrelated subjection of

Blackness within modern subjectivity. Dina Al-Kassim writes, thinking with relationality in

terms of address coheres “against the humanist assumptions of sovereign speech that enable

speaking truth to power” (On Pain of Speech 2). Seemingly unimaginable and yet-to-come

habits of survival around imperial war may have already arrived, but they cannot be

registered if the sociality of refugee figures is only accounted for in terms of sovereign

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subjectivity. Foregrounding address attends to how refugees have also been made to be the

vehicle for analyzing subjecthood's problematics. How can address produced through the

fugitivity of the refugee archive enable ethical relationality oriented to interplays of power—

while honouring the ways in which practices of grief and loss are often out of time with the

teleology of healing and justice, and as such cannot always be articulated through genres of

postwar international human rights discourse?

Fugitive erotics foregrounds the simultaneously material and immaterial relationality

of discourse and remains critically curious about how the body mediates sociality—without

taking the body to stand in for the self, or embodied intimacy to stand in for relationality.

Fugitive erotics follows Ma Vang’s conception of “fugitive knowledge” or “history on the

run” (Vang 8 and 4), wherein the refugee is both “critical idea and social actor” who

articulates the ways in which “refugee histories are not really lost, they are secreted” (10).

Fugitive erotics is therefore less a question of what refugee figures reveal, but how their

figurations enable sociality, regardless of their legibility as configurations relationality or

care. Here emerges the desire of this chapter: to attend to the elusiveness within the refugee

archive, without seeking to capture the Vietnamese refugee figure as its resolution; and to

orient a critique around Asiatic in/organicity in relation to the erotics of knowledge

production around the Vietnam War, which have produced that very figure of the Vietnamese

refugee through genres of “organized forgetting” (Espiritu 20).

My use of the term “fugitive erotics” is also informed by the genealogy of fugitivity.

This genealogy, as I will discuss further, has been developed within critical Black studies as a

theoretical and aesthetic critique around the mutual production of subjectivity and subjection

as projects of modernity. The project of modernity, and its use of Asiatic racial forms to make

meaning out of temporality and spatiality in hypo- or hypermodern terms, does not only

include a history around the enslavement and continued subjection of Black people in life and

49

death—anti-Blackness is precisely that door of no return (Brand, qtd. in Sharpe 1) with its

“blood-stained gates” (Douglas, qtd. in Sharpe 6) through which bodies are figured as

subjects against “[b]lack and blackened bodies,” who “become the bearers (through violence,

regulation, transmission, etc.) of the knowledge of certain subject as well as the placeholders

of freedom for those who would claim freedom as their rightful yield” (Sharpe 4).

This chapter is not, then, an archive of refugee subjectivity that consolidates a

particular poetics, so much as an orientation towards “the ways that subjugated histories are

told ‘quietly’ or told without words or sometimes safeguarded for future tellings, whether or

not I grasp the reasons behind these decisions” within the refugee archive (Espiritu 20). We

are invited to feel the contours of the refugee archive in ways that honour their layered

opacity. In On Earth, such layered opacity features as a helpful mode for thinking with the

refugee as a figure with erotic sensibilities and styles, rather than identitarian terms. This is

not to disavow sensibilities nor attachments to identity in the work of critique; we could say

ambivalence is itself a form of discursive attachment as well. But if we read the text for its

fugitive erotics, we might be able to develop critique that follows On Earth’s affirmation of

the poiesis in refugee practices around survival—which take both the quotidian and cosmic as

aesthetic materiality. The refugee archive that On Earth produces around fugitive erotics

enables critique of erotic associations between mastery and domination as a mode of

sovereign power over self and other. In this sense fugitive erotics continues the work of what

Tan Hoang Nguyen calls the “bottom archive,” which takes “bottomhood capaciously, as a

sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form” that “complicates

[gendered] links between the bottom position and Oriental passivity” (T.H. Nguyen 2). The

fugitive erotics of refugee figures and their queerly reproductive labour intimates the

im/material conditions of knowledge production, which have made the Asiatic body sensible

as a mechanism for making meaning out of difference.

50

Continuing to think with the fugitive erotics of the refugee figure therefore requires

consideration around gendering as a form of knowledge production through the racialized

body. Critical race discourses have developed questions around skin, for example, as

experiments around the racialized surfaces and depths of the Vietnam War, which feminizes

the refugee figure in terms of the erotic and aesthetic labour it is made to do for the sake of

knowledge production. For Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, skin indexes desires around knowledge of

self and other, knowledge that in turn produces skin as an interface for the ambivalence

between self and other. “It is no accident,” Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu writes, “that we have come

to understand human skin as both a thing and not a thing” (5). It is this uncertainty around

human skin with which Tu theorizes skin's materiality as a metaphor—“the final boundary

between self and other”—and index, as “the record of our collective imbrication” (Tu 9).

This collective imbrication is far from universal as Tu attends to institutionally

archived materials of experiments conducted through the US Military Dermatology Research

Program by dermatologist Arthur Kligman, on “U.S. and allied soldiers, Vietnamese

prisoners of war, and Vietnamese civilians” throughout the Vietnam War (Tu 11). Such

speculations around skin as a racial matter persist though the globalization of a “universe of

the possible—a universe … deeply informed by imperial networks, colonial domination, and

race science” (Tu 56). A seemingly “counterintuitive figure” of knowledge because of the

losses it indexes, the refugee figure indeed makes the “colonial excess” of knowledge

production palpable (Vang 26).4 To turn this counterintuitive figuration into an analytic of

4 Drawing from Hmong epistemologies around the “open secret” of U.S. war in Laos during the Cold

War, Vang gestures towards the multiple counterintuitive figures that arise within the refugee archive

itself: as part of its strategy against Vietnam, the U.S. military waged war in Laos while conscripting

Hmong and other Indigenous peoples like Kha, Khmer, Mien, and Brao people as proxy soldiers

(Vang 58 and 5). The open secrecy of this war in Laos was a strategic workaround to the 1954

Geneva Accords, which formally declared Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam independent from France,

neutral, and free come military intervention—therefore inscribing their formal decolonization in terms

of international human rights discourses around global community. What is counterintuitive about

loss as a form of presence within Hmong epistemology cannot be folded into universal conceptions of

cultural difference. Rather, the aesthetics of the refugee as a counterintuitive figure of knowledge is

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agency or self-expression discounts the ways in which the refugee figure carries out the

creatively aesthetic and reproductive labour of survival, in ways that may be political, but do

not always speak through the politics of identititarian solidarity.

Attending to what is considered fugitive, lost, and elusive within the refugee archive

is therefore a process that takes the aestheticization of the refugee itself as a subject of

critique. Fugitivity within the refugee archive also traces the conditions of anti-Blackness in

the aestheticization of the Asian body as a figure of hypo- and hypermodernity. Arthur

Kligman’s use of captive skin—that is, the skin of Vietnamese prisoners of war, civilians,

alongside that of incarcerated Black and white men in Holmesburgh Prison near Philadelphia,

USA (Tu 50—produces a sense of fugitivity wherein “care and capture were … intertwined”

through the martial science of dermatology (Tu 114). In terms of the skin itself as a

technology of the “chemical war” (Tu 131) that was the Vietnam War, dermatological

experiments during the Vietnam War have also saturated white skin with significance “not

just as an absence of colour, but a condition of vulnerability” (Tu 13) in need of protective

technological intervention; meanwhile, Black skin was narrated as insensible to the pain and

suffering of lethal labour, yet inevitably inferior in surviving disease (58). This

dermatological production of fugitivity through the skin produces a modern “viewing public,”

in Simone Browne’s words, which is organized around a visual culture of “biometric

consciousness” around Blackness as a source of knowledge (Browne 27)—particularly, in the

case of the Vietnam War, about supposed racial vulnerability or lack thereof. Further,

fugitivity through the skin is a persistently erotic mediation of Blackness insofar as Blackness

is produced as the matter through which the queasy pleasure of domination is processed—

that is, in life and death, Black people are made to labour through the inscription of

conditioned through particular forms of imperial strategy, which have capitalized on conceptions of

national difference formed in the process of decolonization, while encompassing them within a

persistent coloniality around “Indo-China.”

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surveillance and carcerality as modern methodologies for speculating about the meaning of

race, upon the surface and beyond the visible. Fugitive erotics, then, does not necessarily

clarify processes of racialization, gendering, and sexualization but asks how they are

produced as ways of processing the deeply erotic desire to know by learning how to touch

and feel the depths of the body through the surface of the skin. It is not just histories or bodies

that are disappeared within the refugee archive in the discourse of secret warfare, but the

erotic labour that fugitive figures are made to do in fulfilling fantasies of pleasuring the self

by feeling the other.

Reading On Earth in terms of fugitive erotics further unfolds the ways in which the

refugee figure materializes, through aesthetic productions, reciprocity as a form of queerly

reproductive labour. “Queerly,” here, operates in a similar way to the “Asiatic” insofar as it is

a relational sensibility oriented to the sensual and epistemological blurriness of erotic

mediation. The particularity of the refugee archive as one of survival through loss, and the

dispersal of the archive itself through time and space, emphasizes the significance of

queerness and racialization as “techniques of gender dissidence” that “enabl[e] a refutation of

the equation of masculinity with social recognition and legitimacy” (T.H. Nguyen 194). What

is queer about the queerly reproductive labour of On Earth’s Vietnamese American narrator

Little Dog and his mother, Rose, is not so much in the expression of gender or sexuality as

nodes of recognition between self and other (although I will later discuss the power in

sexuality through the sex scenes between Little Dog and his white lover Trevor). Rather,

fantasy as an epistemological aspect of fugitive erotics enables something like solidarity

between Little Dog and Rose in terms of “feminized genders” that enable a “strategic

rejoining of gender presentation and sexual practice” when also oriented to the eroticized

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power interplays of race and empire (T.H. Nguyen 194). On Earth’s particular emulsion5 of

the loss and vulnerability within fantasy’s epistemological porosity that configures Little Dog

and Rose’s feminized gendering in in terms of relational receptivity and power. Their shared

feminized gendering contest associations of feminized receptivity with abject subjectivity,

and critical disavowals of Orientalized femininity, through On Earth's “insistence on keeping

the other at the center of projects of selfhood and intimacy.” Conceiving of “the mother [as]

the first provider of care (regardless of gender), who introduces the child into sociality”

(Musser, Sensual Excess 168) can help us feel out the contours of relationality that take place

between Little Dog and Rose through feminized gendering, particularly in the erotic labour

they perform with lovers, nail salon patrons, or each other.

The phantom limb: Vulnerability in fantasy

In a passage depicting Little Dog, Rose, and an unnamed patron of the nail salon

where the two work, reciprocity figures as a possibility of sociality within fugitive erotics.

Little Dog recalls how the patron removes her prosthetic limb during a pedicure, and requests

a leg massage for the space it leaves:

“When you’re almost done rinsing the soap off, she asks you, gently, almost pleading,

to go lower. ‘If it’s the same price anyway,’ she says. ‘I can still feel it down there.

It’s silly, but I can. I can’ … Without a word, you slide the towel under the phantom

limb, pad down the air, the muscle memory in your arms firing the familiar efficient

5 I borrow Geeta Patel’s language of “emulsion” as a phrase that critiques tropings of hybridity,

minority/majority, or original homeland as they are made to stand in for racialized embodiment within

diaspora. Directly relating narrative tropes of racialized diaspora to colonial empire’s capacity to

displace or connect bodies in proximity, Patel orients readers to the ways in which “[d]iasporas

themselves begin undoing fluency” (Patel 69, emphasis my own) around colonial narratives of global

community, because they are not easily translated as stories of coherent origin or agential movement.

Patel suggests that critiquing empire through such epistemological ambiguity can do queering work—

insofar as queerness troubles fantasies of “purified sexual subjects” whose “representatives must be

found to speak their own positions” in identitarian appeals to critical usefulness (74). If we read On

Earth as an aesthetic and narrative emulsion of loss and vulnerability, then, we can also ask how the

refugee figure enables critique around the interplays of power generated by empire without distilling

refugeeness into a pathological condition signified through conceptions of race, gender, or sexuality.

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motions, revealing what’s not there, the way a conductor’s movements make the

music somehow more real.” (On Earth 83)

Rose responds to the woman’s feeling that her limb is there with a sense of feeling enacted

through muscle memory, an intensely corporeal aesthetic production analogous to that of a

conductor animating the music. And like a conductor, who responds to musicians and sonic

reverberations to animate and translate their movements into a form of address, Rose conjures

up care through response to that of the patron; the two make contact—not just literally upon

the skin, but through fantasy as an orienting affective material, and the woman’s phantom

limb as a sign of both debility6 and the capacity to be cared for. Producing precise

vernaculars of learned muscle memory, Rose fulfills the desire for connection between self

and other through orientation to fugitivity as a form of survival within vulnerability.

While Rose’s muscle memory indexes her habituation into the efficiency required of

labour routed through global capitalism, interfacing with the patron’s own muscle memory

around her phantom limb enables both bodies to conjure multiple sensibilities around care,

sharing the labour of sociality through habituation. As alluded to earlier, Tu’s scholarship on

U.S. military dermatological experiments by Albert M. Kligman during the Vietnam War

highlights how the Vietnamese body in afterwar has been produced in terms of feminized

fugitivity within the textures, surfaces, and depths of skin, which are circulated as both site

6 Jasbir K. Puar develops the concept of debility in response to discourses that frame disability as a

linear gradation of human subjectivity, and in relation to juridical terms of nation-state citizenship.

Puar does not relegate either debility or disability as inherently more or less prone to becoming

calcified through narratives of citizenship, juridical subjectivity, difference, or liberal humanism.

Instead, distinctions occur where disability signals a form of arrival, if incompletely or ostensibly so,

at being through legibility and recognition; meanwhile the “calculus of debilitation” (Puar xiv)

involves not only a gradual wearing down of capacity but also increased and non-consensual

proximity to death alongside being inscribed as embodying risk and violence. Thus, as Puar notes,

one’s body can be both disabled and capacitated (because of institutional legibility) and one can be

targeted for becoming debilitated but not targeted for death or because of identification as “being”

disabled. Disability, debility, and capacity are co-constitutive and operate under a logic of power as

multiple and bodies as permeable, which means they can be analyzed through bio/necropolitics and

prisms of assemblage, ritual, spectacle, body mapping, dissolution. See The Right to Maim: Debility,

Capacity, Disability.

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and matter of speculations around racialized, sexual, and gendered embodiment. Routing

their habitual movements through each other’s feminized bodies, Rose and the patron

produce possibilities of relationality in relation to the eroticized interplays of power that

condition their encounter in the context of the nail salon. The very skin of Rose’s hands

materializes, in the epidermal, the “wreck and reckoning of a dream” for the refugee figure

and subject (Vuong 79), where the scaly skin of Rose’s chronically pained hands materialize

the relentless physical toil of factory and nail salon work upon the surface. The imaginary of

“the entire country” of Vietnam itself “as a vast laboratory” for martial science (Tu 113)

produces a geography in which knowledge about Vietnamese bodies is made to represent a

map of knowledge about the self and other, ostensibly making sensible difference via race,

gender, and sexuality through its epidermal porosity, eruptions, or latent capacities. The

“calficifed knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones—with or without

citizenship—aching, toxic, and underpaid” (On Earth 80-1) is not merely an abjection that

Rose overcomes towards a sovereign self, but a form of erotic power that enables address

between Rose, the patron, and Little Dog throughout the vast temporal-spatial distances

within the refugee archive.

Little Dog’s interpellation of Rose through a letter that she will never read

underscores how, as he writes, “even here, writing you, the physical fact of your body resists

my moving it” (On Earth 85), whether in the address produced by his prose or the massage

that he gives her after long days labouring in the nail salon. The queerly reproductive labour

of maternality within On Earth’s refugee archive does not, then, exceed the “traces of a

stubborn nonknowing of Asian women” that, for Laura Hyun Yi Kang, haunt the U.S.

empire’s memory of the Vietnam War and discourses of transpacific redress alike (30). Yet

this impossibility around knowing the self or other through the body of the refugee mother

reroutes readers’ desires away from merely using the refugee figure as a boundless resource

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for care via moral education, instead emphasizing the reciprocity that is practiced between

Little Dog and Rose within their unknowability to each other. The capacity for “you” to

become a way of reaching out to Rose becomes potent in its very failure to capture the other

in the process of conjuring a self.

Much like the sexual “prosthetic” of the strap-on dildo, which Amber Jamilla Musser

has theorized as a queer technology of deep listening rather than mimesis of the phallus or

Oedipal penis-envy (Musser 80), the in/organic touch between patron’s phantom limb and

Rose’s hands materialize the spectrality of relationality between self and other. The

spectrality of fugitivity is continually reconjured through the sensuality of Rose’s hands slide

through motions such as "rub[bing],” “cupping,” “pinching,” “stretching,” and “knead[ing]”

the invisible leg (On Earth 83). Little Dog’s narrativization of these motions mediates them

in a way that portrays Rose’s erotic orientation towards the “imperial remains” of the

Vietnam War (M.T. Nguyen 25), figured in this passage as a phantom limb. Rose’s “skin

literacy—the ability to read skin for signs of social life” (Tu 38)—does not only touch but

addresses the phantom limb as a material that is corporeal in its unavailability. In doing so,

Rose practices feeling out the intertwined legacies of beauty work and militarized science in

afterlives of the Vietnam War. Yet readers are reminded by the epistolary form that this

passage is a depiction of Rose feeling out what is not visible—not an instructional narrative

on how to do so. Where refuge within the U.S. empire is “premised on devastating violence,

but also emanate[s] through beauty, through love, through hope—in short, the promise to

life,” the refugee figure is made to circulate, endlessly, the im/material excesses that the

Vietnam War has produced. These excesses are cohered as unpayable debt, whether through

imperatives to perform affective modes like gratitude towards the state (M.T. Nguyen 19),

labour within the loop of 24/7time (see Attewell and Wong), or the feminized labour of

beautifying the public body by working the skin towards “the possibility of a clean, smooth,

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new surface … as evidence of having become modern” (Tu 26). Within this emulsion, the

temporal-spatial configuration of the nail salon archives a relationality sensibility

aestheticized through “folklore, rumors, tall tales, and jokes from the old country [Vietnam],”

where the smell and taste of phở broth being cooked in the staff rooms are constantly “mixing

with formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-Sol, and bleach” (On Earth 80). The porosity of

these materials configure the nail salon where Little Dog and Rose work as “more than a

place of work and workshop for beauty”; it is also a place of ongoing and intergenerational

labour around nourishment (the phở also feeds the children that those working at the nail

salon take care of while they work) and pedagogy (“[i]t’s a makeshift classroom where we …

bend over workbooks at manicure desks, finishing homework for nighttime ESL classes that

cost a quarter of our wages”) (On Earth 80).

This emulsion of nourishment, intergenerational relationality, and toxicity in the nail

salon of Little Dog’s memory casts the refugee figure’s queerly reproductive labours in terms

of sensorial habituation between the in/organic circulations of self and other. In the same

space that Little Dog’s cousin becomes afflicted with asthma “from years of breathing the

noxious fumes into … still-developing lungs” (79), Rose transforms the patron's phantom

limb into yet prosthesis—but one of relief and catharsis—by touching its very immateriality.

This ambivalence does not romanticize or overdetermine the refugee body as an object of

discourse whose significance is in alternative enlightenment towards ethical subjectivity—

doing so would displace the refugee figure's significance onto its infinite capacity to labour.

Rather, Little Dog’s mediation of this encounter between Rose and the patron unfolds

fugitive erotics as a sensibility around the immaterial, and feminized labour that goes into

surviving as a “counterintuitive figure” (Vang 26) of knowledge. The erotic cadences of the

patron’s request to go “lower” also accentuates Rose’s “bodily knowledge” around the ethical

relationality that is oriented towards interplays of power through vulnerability, rather than

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domination or mastery. Rose’s movement downward at the patron’s request unfolds an

“erotics of bottomhood” (T.H. Nguyen x) wherein self and other are produced through

sensing and touching the interplays of power conditioning their encounter.

Little Dog’s inclusion of this scene in his letter attends to his mother’s erotic labour as

life-giving—regardless of its capacity serve critique. In doing so, his letter remediates

interplays of power that have produced colonial excess through the Vietnam War; but it does

not necessarily turn these excesses into legible, or even alternative, narratives of the war.7

The letter’s own mediation of spectrality that facilitates address between Rose and the patron

foregrounds the in/organic “life cycle of memories and their industrial production, how they

are fashioned and forgotten, how they evolve and change” (V.T. Nguyen 12). The queerly

reproductive labours of fugitive erotics engender an archive composed of muscle memory

shared between Rose and Little Dog, who finds that his “hands moved on their own” when he

massages her back after work. “Having done this hundreds of times by now” (On Earth 84),

the muscle memory of his hands engages in care work that reciprocates Rose’s own muscle

memory around care work in the nail salon. In this intergenerational circulation of refugee

memory between Rose and Little Dog, queerly reproductive labour engenders value around

the body in labour that is not limited to capital accumulation nor social mobility. Stopping

Rose before she can get to the cash register to ring up the total cost, the patron places a

hundred-dollar bill directly into her hands, after which Rose slips the bill into her bra rather

than the register (84). The habitual muscle memory of monetary exchange, too, become

rearticulated and rerouted, turning to a gendered piece of clothing (the bra) rather than the

cash register as an archival container of Rose’s labour. The signification of the bill as a token

7 For Troeung, Global North figurations of the Cambodian refugee flatten the temporal-spatial

capacities of refugee lifeworlds into a frame within which “whiteness enters … as an adjudicator of

the refugee’s humanity” and refugee “lives [are] blank slates before” their experiences in refugee

camps (Refugee Lifeworlds ix). Feeling out the spectrality of Cold War colonial excesses, then,

requires reconfiguring critical sensibilities wherein the aesthetics of refugee lifeworlds are confined to

the refugee camp as imagined through Global North styles of knowledge production.

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of financial speculation is interrupted and transformed into a nominal payment, an

acknowledgement that the cost of Rose’s labour cannot be tracked in the path between salon

chair and cash register. Between the coin that Little Dog dips in Vicks VapoRub and scrapes

across his mother’s back for pain relief, or the hundred-dollar bill that the patron with the

phantom limb places into Rose’s hands instead of the cash register (84), signifiers of capital

and value remain in their materiality—but are reinvested as momentary extensions of hands

reaching out to each other, offering forms of care that are not predicated on a sense of pity or

humanitarian obligation towards “phenomenological forms of graduated sovereignty and

differential humanity” (M.T. Nguyen 4), but on recognition around the intertwined labour of

beauty, care, and sociality.

Dear Ma: Erotics of the epistolary and queerly reproductive labour

Written as a letter from Little Dog to Rose, On Earth’s epistolary form presents a

form of “Vietnamese exilic remembrance” (Espiritu 20). The temporal-spatial elusiveness of

such exilic remembrance appears not only through Little Dog’s characterization as a son of

Vietnamese refugees, but in his remark that “I am writing to reach you—even if each word I

put down is one word further from where you are,” since Rose was never taught to read in

English (On Earth 3 and 5). This elusiveness does not foreclose relationality between Little

Dog and Rose, but recasts the gendered and racialized care they share in terms of shared

sensibility around loss and its illegible, yet felt, resonances. Little Dog’s letter traces the

refugee archive's wayward articulations around violent displacements that produce exilic

remembrance. Letting go of a progressivist teleology around healing, his epistolary form

reckons with the aesthetic potency that Viet Thanh Nguyen identifies in both remembrance

and forgetting as processes of memory (Nothing Ever Dies 12). As a figure that confounds

yet indexes the conditions of these uncertainties, the refugee figure offers a specific iteration

of the Asiatic body in relation to these enduring afterlives of the Vietnam War, which “turn

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out to be no afterlives at all” (Troeung). The erotics of the refugee figure indexes this

enduring temporality of afterwar, wherein fugitivity is a response to globalized modernity. In

direct relation to the history of fugitive slave laws in the U.S., the technologization of race in

the making of modernity consolidates anti-Blackness into a style of liberal humanist

subjectivity produced through the subjection of Blackness and the criminalization of

fugitivity.

By routing her figuration of queer maternality through the transformation of

Blackness into a signifier of embodiment via enfleshment, Musser highlights the

impossibility of theorizing queer maternality without attending to the racialized feminization

of its labours and conjurations alike. Musser therefore enables critique around the erotics of

care and poeisis as directly materialized through empire’s production of Blackness in the

trans-Atlantic slave trade. The connection between Black enfleshment and Asiatic skin are

highlighted in the geopolitics of “the global north” that is traced, if not through nation-state

boundary in the transnational spatialization of imperial war, through the racialized and

gendered geographies of the skin, such as in “dermatological atlases—understood as maps of

the skin” (Tu 5). What Saidiya Hartman phrases the “calculation of black humanity into slave

law” (Seduction and the Ruses of Power 537) condition the production of racial form as a

mediation of difference. Fugitivity within U.S. empire is therefore conditioned by the

development of surveillance technology and capital, linking the trans-Atlantic slave trade

with militarized imperialism as projects that compose the modern subject via the

transformation of “surveillance as a scientifically acceptable and socially necessary practice”

and technique for materializing “the good of modern state power” onto Black and otherwise

racialized bodies (Browne 11). Racial form, read in this way, is also an inscription of

maternality as a kind of erotic power, erotic, sexual, and aesthetic labour, and sensorium for

practicing ethical relationality in relation to sociality as an interplay of power.

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In addition to being a figured as a body that always exceeds nation-state borders

because of its fugitivity, the refugee figure has been employed to critique those very borders

and their claims to ethical subjectivity. These borders and their logics around citizenship

(national or globalized) can be imagined as “imperial networks” within which “[t]echniques

of rule, representation, sexual regulation, and morality, in addition to colonial bureaucrats

themselves, travel” (Mikdashi and Puar 217). The figuration of the refugee, then, is not

necessarily a question of alternative subjectivity or “a relentless story about the coercions of

the visible” wrought by colonial speculative fictions. Rather, this figure poses a version of

questions like “how is it we know we are seeing what we think we are seeing?” and “[w]hat

are the conditions under which we see” race, gender, and sexuality as the bodily matter of

difference (Cheng, Second Skin 3)? This is the “how” of relationality in afterwar, which can

be surfaced through a turn to the queerly reproductive labour of Vietnamese refugee figures.

Foregrounding imperialist conceptions of difference through skin, I revise this question, here,

turning from a focus on aesthetic around the visual to those of the erotic, following

Patterson’s suggestion that “elusive forms of erotic interaction that forego distinctions

between player and machine … make us aware of our bodies in the moment of interaction”

(Patterson 161). This ludic dimension of erotics that Patterson unfolds enables the difficult

question of pleasure in the production of the Vietnamese refugee figure. That is, the refugee

figure indexes desires for relationality between self and other in the quotidian catastrophe of

imperial war—along with the ambivalent pleasures of beauty, sex, or care conditioned by the

afterlives of the Vietnam War.

Rather than necessarily issuing a corrective to such figurations of the Vietnamese

refugee in America, reading the figure for its erotic mediations within Vuong’s novel enables

critical orientation to the poiesis in refugee practices of survival, and its queerly reproductive

labour around sociality. The long durée of afterwar itself as a condition for discourses of

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refugee figurations that the refugee, as figure and subject cannot be reduced to political

“lessonification”—though they have been imaged as such in media attempts to make sense of

the suffering caused by U.S. military occupation and withdrawal (Troeung, “On Refugee

Worldmaking”). Letting go of lessonification as a relational practice means that what might

be considered elusive within the refugee archive need not enact “ethical currency for the

shoring up of white liberal personhood” (Troeung, Refugee Lifeworlds xix) in order to

materialize its presence. By conjuring aesthetic materiality out of both pleasure and pain

between Little Dog and Rose or Trevor, On Earth enables an erotic mode of reading that is

centered on habituating ourselves to the ambivalent feeling of “exposure, vulnerability, and

receptiveness in our reaching out to other people” that Tan Hoang Nguyen describes as a

“bottom archive,” composed of erotic vulnerability and the power in powerlessness (T.H.

Nguyen 2). Whether in Little Dog’s sexual positioning as a bottom to Trevor’s top, or in the

uncanny debris of mourning and shame within their scenes of sexual intimacy, the porousness

between pleasure and pain are wrought by vulnerability.

Through the erotics of the epistolary form, the novel aestheticizes questions around

how it could feel to dwell in the refugee archive and, in doing so, honours the erotic labour

that the refugee figure does in speculating otherwise. Little Dog’s letter to Rose does not

merely represent the ambivalence of their relationality through the epistolary form; rather, in

the uncertain address of a letter that will never be read by its addressee, the epistolary

becomes conducive to feeling what is immaterial within the archive, speculating what may

seem impossible to imagine. Seemingly written in a confessional mode, the letter itself

practices a speculative form of refugee archiving; for while Little Dog notes that Rose cannot

read the letter, he gestures towards different kinds of readability, such as muscle memory or

skin stories. Composing his letter with the ambivalent sensoria of memory, then, Little Dog

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turns the epistolary form into a speculative genre, and a way of practicing the poetics of

uncertainty.

As Tu’s work suggests, skin indexes empire’s concerns around vulnerability and

militarized defense, which are not only projected upon the skin, but infused and injected

through its pores, so that the body’s supposed phenotypical materiality is not only betrayed

by the skin but its capacities around vulnerability in relation to social life. Through aesthetic

registers on the skin, the refugee figure erotically indexes a “refugee epistemology” that

“articulates loss as presence (in place and time)” (Vang 4). To this extent, skin composes an

in/organic materiality insofar as it has been formulated simultaneously as racialized,

gendered, and sexualized biological matter, and as a metaphorical boundary whose porosity

poses both an eroticized threat and potential for military technology towards imperial war.

While Tu orients us to “skin as a repository, as an alternative archive through which we

might grasp how history becomes embodied” (9), thinking with the erotic mediations of skin

can also enable conceptualizing skin as an interface through which self and other are not only

produced, but oriented to each other upon the porosity of their surfaces. In this sense skin is

not only a repository but the very “‘stuff’ of archives,” composed by “the seemingly trashy,

dirty, disgusting, and untidy disorganization of bodies, things, and emotions” that the skin

supposedly binds, and the “mess, clutter, and muddled entanglements” that are “historical

memory, aberrant desires, and the archive” (Manalansan 94). Tracing the refugee figure

through the presence of absence, Vang proposes that “[r]ather than a repository, the refugee

archive is a key method with which to emphasize the embodied and material aspects of

histories that run and the spiritual dimensions of forced displacement without recovering the

loss” (Vang 10). If we attend to the fugitive erotics of the refugee archive, then we can ask

how the refugee figure gestures towards the conception of war as an “altered sensibility” or

“habit of mind” rather than a time and space (Tu 19). The counterintuitive figure of the

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refugee reconfigures sociality with self and other, by indexing the body itself as the erotic

mediator of relational sensibility.

Indeed, the novel opens with a corpse as the uncanny presencing of a body visibly

arrested in the temporality of death: Rose, encountering a taxidermy buck at a roadside rest

stop, asks Little Dog: “Can’t they see it’s a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck

forever like that” (On Earth 3). Rose gestures towards the ways in which a “genealogy of the

afterlife of the Cold War” confounds a temporal-spatial separation of life and death, present

and past, as “archival scraps” that are “partial and incomplete” (Troeung, Refugee Lifeworlds

xi) can be deeply unsettling as they are transformative around relations of power in the

ambivalence they present for survivors of the war. By interweaving scenes of the Vietnam

War amongst shared memories with Rose, his grandmother Lan, and his white lover Trevor,

Little Dog conjures the pleasures and pains of such ambivalence, in relation to sex work,

chosen kinship, debilitation, familial abuse, and substance use. All these forms of

relationality within the text produce a “genealogy of the afterlife” that indexes the

im/materiality of labour around sociality.

Formally, the epistolary novel unfolds through spectral fragments where “the subject

is dispersed in the scene setting of the fantasy rather than represented in a single element or

character,” as Dina Al-Kassim writes of fantasy as a phantasmic mode of relationality

(“Scenes of Self-Conduct” 14). The novel begins with “Dear Ma,” as many of its sections do.

But even before this, it opens with “Let me begin again” (On Earth 3). Preceding “Dear Ma”

with an invocation towards the letter’s multiple beginnings and temporalities, the novel's

epistolary form intertwines with its contents towards fantasy as address. Fantasy, conjured

and reconfigured through address, offers something that may feel like care or solidarity, but

does not take epistemological clarity as a stand-in for meaning.

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Arriving at love: Sex, pain, pleasures in power

If beauty, care, and sociality make up the labours of Little Dog’s and Rose’s

feminized gendering, how does body’s habituation to shame and pleasure figure in such

bodily mediations? How might mediations of shame and pleasure within the refugee archive

of On Earth also enable erotic vocabularies around the feeling of subjection, where “[t]o

arrive at love ... is to arrive through obliteration” (On Earth 119)? Tan Hoang Nguyen's

inscription of sexual practice as a “vernacular,” rather than direct representation, for sexuality

(T.H. Nguyen 3), is critical for enabling questions around On Earth’s sex scenes between

Little Dog and his white lover, Trevor, wherein Little Dog articulates the interplays of power

that inscribe their bodies in terms of Trevor’s body as an embodiment of white American

masculinity, and Little Dog’s feminized gendering and racialization as a form of subjugated

masculinity. The sexual intimacy between them turn readers to the complexities of pleasure

and pain in power, surfacing “the critical force of bottomhood” as an erotic mode for

“[a]ffirming bottomhood, femininity, and race” as intertwined configurations of power that

can “rewrite abject masculinity without writing off femininity and the feminine, thus enabling

a new mode of social recognition” (T.H. Nguyen 27 and 19). Trevor’s whiteness manifests as

the power of conjuring the time and space needed for the two to have sex at all: as Little Dog

remarks

He was always white. And I knew this was why there was a space for us: a farm, a

field, a barn, a house, an hour, two. A space I never found in the city, where the

tenement apartments we lived in were so cramped one could tell when a neighbour

had a stomach flu in the middle of the night. To hide here, in a room in a broken-

down mobile home, was, somehow, a privilege, a chance. (On Earth 111-2)

The power of reciprocity in the fugitive therefore depends on shared avowal between Little

Dog and Trevor around the racialized, gendered, and sexualized inscriptions of their bodies.

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Whether or not this avowal is realized is unclear and perhaps not the point so much as Little

Dog’s critical sensibility around the temporal-spatial iterations of power, which condition

refugee captivity within U.S. empire (Troeung, Refugee Lifeworlds 16).

Yet Little Dog’s sexual position as bottom, with Trevor on top, does not simply

represent scenes of total domination or surrender of power. As Musser suggests in relation to

Tan Hoang Nguyen’s theorization of bottomhood, conceiving of “topping as deep listening”

can enable “an investment in the opacity of the other’s pleasure, while also illuminating

dimensions of racialized abjection and care” (Musser 22). Such intermingling of pleasure and

pain is articulated when Trevor grabs Little Dog’s hair while topping him and pulls it, hard.

Hesitating after Little Dog involuntarily yelps, he keeps going when Little Dog asks him to

grab more hair and keep going. Through his letter, Little Dog meditates on his endurance of

violence intertwined with care that have made suffering mundane but that also, in response to

Trevor's touch, moment, make pleasure available in pain:

To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. Eviscerate me, we mean to

say, and I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll say yes. ‘Keep going,’ I begged. ‘Fuck me up, fuck

me up.’ By then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately,

of love. Fuck. Me. Up. It felt good to name what was already happening to me all my

life. I was being fucked up, at last, by choice. In Trevor’s grip, I had a say in how I

would be taken apart. (On Earth 119)

Having been “fucked up” so often by the spectral presence of both violence and

beauty that saturates his relationship with love, Little Dog finds pleasure within the erotics of

bottoming and topping as they enable sensorially relational modes. He accesses fugitivity

within the vernacular of sex through his eroticized surrender—not necessarily to the

conditions of abjection, but to the possibility of pleasure in vulnerability. This process of

bottoming and topping affords Little Dog an erotic vocabulary for a sensibility of care and

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pleasure oriented towards the violence he has experienced as a queer, Vietnamese American

son of refugees—precisely through that “feeling of being a body” that has been made to

signify total abjection (Musser 87). The erotics of racialized, gendered, and sexualized power

are also articulated through Little Dog’s use of the word “fucking” to invoke the layered

processes of having sex with someone, fucking them up, or fucking them over. Sensorially,

this layered process registers as anticipation, too, of bodily feeling, such as when Trevor’s

hand moves “lower, toward the waistband’s elastic resistance, the snap never coming, the

fabric’s rustle at my [Little Dog’s] ankles, my cock, the bead of moisture at its tip the coldest

thing between us” (111). The erotic power interplays between Trevor and Little Dog—which

the erotic sensibility of racialized bottomhood depends on to make pleasure palpable in

pain—are not inherently transformative, as bottomhood presences unreciprocated

vulnerability: “I had thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the

world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong. The rules, they were already

inside us” (On Earth 120). The conditions of sex as a vernacular are emphasized here, as

habituation cannot be reduced to rational disavowals around the power in pleasure and pain.

To the extent that being topped by Trevor enables Little Dog to orient himself in relation to

vulnerability to violence, this same erotic sensibility enables Little Dog to name the body's

remarkable capacity to perpetuate violence through intimacy. This is perhaps what Little Dog

narrativizes when he “flicker[s], like a bulb in a storm, seeking myself in his steering” as he

loses himself to the pleasure of Trevor yanking his hair while topping him, finding an erotic

vocabulary to take his “pain gathered to a breaking point” and offer it as a condition of

pleasure with the “rare agency to stop” (111). Reciprocal sociality becomes a possibility in

the erotic sensibilities around arriving at love. Yet, as the refugee figure of Little Dog shows,

reciprocity and violence alike cannot always be contained by making the self and other

palpable, nor universalized conceptions of love. Rather, love, too, is revealed to be a process

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mediated by erotic habituation around power interplays that may not be inevitable, but can be

transformed through address around the conditions of self and other within fugitive erotics.

Love, then, is an uneasy, but capacious, point of arrival for this chapter, which asks

how the aesthetic production of the Vietnamese refugee figure in On Earth enables the

queerly reproductive labour of reciprocity, in ways that enable address between in/organic

bodies through the intermingling of pleasure and pain, shame and beauty. Thinking with

erotic mediations that refugee figures make palpable within the novel also disrupts liberal

humanist desires to disavow the production of self and other as projects of modern

subjectivity. The fugitive erotics enabled by the refugee figure, instead, invites questions like:

“[i]s it possible to know something that is itself constantly slipping away?” (Vang 25) And is

it possible to arrive at an ethical sensibility between self and other within the unknowable,

one that we could call love? In response to such questions, the fugitive erotics in On Earth

We’re Briefly Gorgeous affirms the reciprocal sensibilities that refugee figures enable

between self and other—without demanding that intergenerational losses of the Vietnam War

be figured in certain terms.

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Coda

The possibilities of reciprocity are difficult to write through despite their emphasis

within these pages. Especially when, as Mimi Thi Nguyen writes of refugee figurations,

imperial power does not only manifest as violence, but “also emanate[s] through beauty,

through love, through hope—in short, the promise to life” (5). Through such emanations of

power, the desire to reach out for another self, another other, can reproduce the trope of

needing to know the body in order to love it as an unyielding limitation on each body’s

capacity to liberate another.

Yet, following Audre Lorde, conceiving of knowledge in relation to each body’s

capacity for erotic power shows that love need not be discarded as an elaboration of captivity,

even as it may be inscribed through systemic cycles of use, abandonment, and disavowal. The

body itself becomes a question that only becomes more palpable in its immateriality—such as

when Little Dog comes across a wake in Saigon wherein mourning is practiced with karaoke-

singing drag performers, intergenerational communal feasts, and sound of weeping from

mourners who watch over the body of a neighbour who has died in the middle of the night

(On Earth 224-6); or when, over 165 years after the death of her lover Peristrophe Halliana,

Kirilow Groundsel wistfully ruminates about the virtual space of the Dark Baths as the most

recent moment in each other’s presence (Tiger Flu 329).

Throughout this thesis, I have suggested that Tiger Flu and On Earth are not simply

representative affirmations of such theoretical aims. They, as texts do the queerly

reproductive labour of turning what is both opaque and spectral about the Asian body into an

orienting surface for reconfiguring aesthetic figurations of self and other. Figures of racial

form within these novels help us reckon with the ways in which speculating about ethical

relationality or self and other is made possible through erotic labours that are not honoured

through moralizing politics of subjectivity, such as sex work or the work of making life worth

70

living. If we conceive of power as an erotic interplay rather than a totalizing erasure of love,

then the at times uncanny capacity for the body to dwell in grief and suffering (or joy and

pleasure, for that matter) might be multiplied and dispersed. Love might then become a

shared practice of honouring vulnerability, and of avowal that, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs

notes, “[i]t's not more important that you be familiar to me than that you are free”

(“Possibilities of Divine Love” 34). Within this thesis, the erotic registers of refugee

epistemologies and techno-Orientalist tropes index the queerness of the “not-yet-here”

(Muñoz 12) as a continuation of time and space that can be destructive. Yet, through erotic

vernaculars of bodily feeling such as sex, or scholarly critique, love has already arrived, if in

ways that cannot always be registered.

71

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