Death Becomes Her: Asiatic femininity, aesthetics, and the politics of disfigurement

Abstract

“Death Becomes Her: Asian Femininity, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Disfigurement,” reconsiders narratives of anti-Asian violence and highlights the work of Asian American and Asian Canadian artists, writers, and cultural producers who fight for agency over their representation. Engaging in visual arts, archival material, literature, and cultural production, my research contends that the disfigurement (defined as the defacement or mutilation of one’s appearance or body) of Asian women is deeply shaped by cultural narratives of inscrutability, hypersexualization, exoticization, and dehumanization. My research addresses three questions: 1) how is disfigurement, as a mode of representation and enactment of violence, shaped by the ideas and power structures of race, gender, and sexuality? 2) How do Asian diasporic writers, artists, and cultural producers use aesthetic strategies to contest the violence of disfigurement? And 3) what kinds of alternative epistemologies and ontologies can aesthetics of disfigurement (or what I refer to as disfiguration) offer in re-representing Asian American women? Using an interdisciplinary and Women of Color feminist approach, “Death Becomes Her” reveals that queer, femme, and non-binary Asian American and Asian Canadian cultural producers reclaim the aesthetics of disfigurement as a politics of resistance and creative expression. I conceive of this politicization as an aesthetic practice of disfiguration and contend that these artists use it to challenge dominant cultural narratives of Asian women by reframing Orientalist scripts, confronting the colonial and binary logic of human against nonhuman, and imagining queer utopic worlds. Ultimately, this project argues that disfigurement is not merely a consequence of dominant narratives, but an aesthetic form that (re)constructs and circulates ideas of race, gender, and sexuality.