Danielle Wong

This thesis attempts to theorize racial substitution as a form of Asian American critique which expresses both a desire of seamless representation and the impossibilities of this seamlessness. Contextualizing the definition in seamlessness in terms of Asian American racialization, whiteness, and as a product of digital and textual editing, racial substitution emerges as an expression of the “intermediary position” of Asian Americans in North American racial politics, as defined by Susan Koshy. Racial substitution builds on José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification and Tina Chen’s theory of Asian American impersonation to interrogate how Asian American artists, writers, and critics interact with the performances of popular culture to replace white actors or characters with Asian Americans to advocate for visibility, and how this act also destabilizes the terms of inclusion in these representational regimes. The first chapter analyzes William Yu’s social media campaigns, #StarringJohnCho and #SeeAsAmStar, to explore how he uses digital tools to curate and rework posters and film clips to replace white actors with Asian Americans. Though Yu turns to these software for their editing capabilities to create images and videos as seamless as the original, his substitutions reveal their own seams through juxtaposition, estrangement, and uncanniness, gesturing to the impossibility of seamlessness. The second chapter departs from digital editing to literary, examining how, in Superfan, Jen Sookfong Lee employs literary editing, an aspect of which is her tendency to substitute pieces of popular culture into her own life or her own image into popular culture, in order to disrupt the genre of memoir and autobiography and its traditional convention of constructing a seamless self. Analyzing how racial substitution operates in these projects reveals a limiting preoccupation with whiteness and the complicity of this mode of critique in racial hierarchies, but it also highlights the impossibility of seamless replacement, opening up possibilities to alternate modes of Asian American imagining.

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This thesis analyzes the digitally mediated forms and aesthetics of contemporary Asian North American poems, performance, and internet art on/about glitchy or non-performing feminine Asiatic cyborgs. Situated at the intersection of Asian American studies, posthumanism, and new media studies, it posits that the cyborg, as an enduring techno-Orientalist trope, continues to index the West’s anxieties about an Asianized future at the same time that it focalizes longer histories of Asian racialization emerging lockstep with shifting im/migration, aesthetics, and labor arrangements. Such arrangements, I argue, are reflexively tied to legacies of Western cybernetic history, US imperialism and Cold War militarism in Asia, as well as the global restructuring of capital engendered by the rise of information and communications technologies. To that end, this project traces how the feminine cyborgs in Chia Amisola’s poetic manifesto, “How to become a cyberfeminist” (2025), and performance art piece Himala (2024), as well as Franny Choi’s and Margaret Rhee’s poetry collections, Soft Science (2019) and Love, Robot (2017), respectively, come to instantiate the “real-life cyborgs,” or, the contemporary feminine Asian subjects discursively and materially shaped by enduring techno-Orientalist scripts and imperialist histories across multiple scales and geographies. I contend that Amisola’s, Choi’s, and Rhee’s turn to intentionally impractical or ornamental glitchy aesthetics and digitally mediated forms––manifest as broken codework poems, non-executable algorithms, lagging sounds, and corrupted graphics––as both mode and method, might, in turn, configure a feminist Asian diasporic cyborg poetics that critically maps and resists the ways in which contemporary feminine subjects come into being or legibility through digital objects. Ultimately, this project examines how strategic glitchy embodiments of the cyborg might enable us to imagine alternative relationalities or more capacious modes of being for Asian diasporic women dis/placed by the multiplicities of empire in increasingly intimate and de-territorialized ways.

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Pro Bernal Anti Bio (PBAB) is the collaborative auto/biography of Filipino filmmaker Ishmael Bernal, begun by Bernal before his death, continued by his lifelong collaborator Jorge Arago, and finished by scholar Angela Stuart-Santiago after Arago’s passing. From the pair’s amassed auto-archive of materials, Stuart-Santiago transformed Bernal and Arago’s words into lines of dialogue, framing the final text as a speculative conversation held between their ghosts. PBAB’s experimental format emphasizes a deliberate divergence from the rigid forms of the neocolonial archive: a structure of narrative-production that enforces and authenticates state control by erasing deviant subjects and alternative histories. While Bernal’s place in the neocolonial archive is marked by his reductive recuperation into state-affirming, normative narratives, PBAB utilizes ephemeral, speculative, and communal methods of memorialization to unearth the aspects of his queer, leftist life that were criminalized under American imperial rule and the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. This thesis analyzes PBAB’s content, format, and methodology to theorize PBAB as an “anti-archive”: a queer, anti-colonial medium that critiques the violences and silences of the neocolonial archive while creating an alternative site of memorialization for queer Filipinx subjects. Chapter One puts PBAB in conversation with Bernal’s 1980 “docufiction” film, Manila by Night (MBN), whose autoethnographic portrayal of a queer, impoverished Manila violently opposed dominant dictatorial visions of nation. This chapter argues that MBN’s appropriation of imperial documentary techniques and dictatorial aesthetics of “beauty” to re-narrativize martial law Manila casts the film as an anti-archive that queers and refigures the visual languages of neocolonial historical narrativization. Chapter Two analyzes PBAB’s methodology of “after-living,” which foregrounds queer Filipinx death to imagine spectral possibilities beyond the limits of queer erasure. Intervening into conversations within queer theory regarding death as the end of queer potential, I examine how PBAB and MBN’s use of (quasi-)auditory modes of record ruptures the silence of the archive to revitalize sites of queer death, presenting Bernal’s voice as loudly still-living even from beyond the grave. My conclusion expands upon these methods of after-living by placing PBAB in dialogue with Reuel Molina Aguila’s poem “Ishma” to identify new mediums for queer Filipinx anti-archival creation.

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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 alegible subject of discourse around racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference. FollowingAudre Lorde, I conceive of erotics as a relationship with power that each body has the capacityto engender, offering a conception of subjectivity that critiques liberal humanist valorizations ofsovereign speech and organic humanity. Erotics confounds binarized conceptions ofin/organicity, im/materiality, and self/other by foregrounding forms of relationality that areconsidered illegible within the archives of imperial war and global capitalism. Practicing critiqueoriented to erotic mediations enables what is considered immaterial to become palpable, throughcritical 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 epistemologicalambivalence of erotics, as it indexes speculative narratives around inorganic subjectivity andlabour wrought within post-Cold War global capitalism. Reading narrativizations of imperial war in the transpacific within Ocean Vuong’sepistolary novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Larissa Lai’s speculative fiction novelThe Tiger Flu, I suggest that ambivalence enables reciprocity to become a mode of ethicalrelationality that does not disavow interplays of power, but attends to conditions that haveinscribed illegibility as absence. Chapter One reads The Tiger Flu for techno-Orientalist aesthetictropes that have produced concepts of “Asianness” such as virtuality, glitches, anddisembodiment in relation to global modernity. I ask how the Asian body both indexes and isconditioned by discourses of organic subjectivity and labour rather than functioning only as representations of ideological consciousness, or avatars of dialectical critique. Chapter Twoforegrounds On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to develop the concept of “fugitive erotics” toframe refugee epistemologies around care, survival, and memory from within conditions ofdisplacement and loss. Overall, I ask how we can address our selves and others as forms ofmediating the uneasy interrelations between care and violence—through the body, without takingit for granted.

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Assistive technology mediates the relationship between disabled and able-bodied lives. Recognizing the varied definitions and uses of technology, this thesis uses the phrase “assistive technology” to reimagine and reconceptualize the relationship between disabled people and their technology. Conjuring the idea of “support” or “aid,” an examination of assistive technology invites dialogue on relationships of both interdependence and mutual exchange. In this thesis, while assistive technology is used to encompass a wide range of technological mediums, particular attention is given to the intimate everyday uses of technology by disabled people. In closely reading ventilators and gelatin as forms of assistive technology, the chapters of this thesis explore and reimagine socially approved bodily relations to and with technology. To examine assistive technology, this thesis begins at the level of the intimate, that is the quotidian spaces of care, treatment, and disabled life. I engage with two artifacts of visual culture; public discourses of ventilators in the Covid-19 pandemic and the “bio-shrine” gelatinous sculptures of artist Sharona Franklin. Specifically, the experiences of Michael Hickson and Sharona Franklin—two disabled people with varied experiences navigating ableism—are united in their intimate relationship with assistive technology. I ask, how does critical disability studies conceptualize technology? What materials, components, relationships, modes of labour, and forms of mediation are encompassed by the category “assistive technology”? And lastly, what are the potentials born from embracing our intimacy with technology? To consider these questions, I posit the framework of disabled assemblage which envisions the trans-corporeality of disabled life. Chapter 2 engages with the implications of the interwoven projects of ableism and racism on disabled life by considering the genealogies of scientific thought and technological development. Chapter 3 contributes to discourses of disability, aesthetics, and materiality by positing gelatin as a form of assistive technology. Through the framework of disabled assemblage, this thesis identifies not only the implications of redefining conceptions of assistive technology, but also the importance of examining assistive technology within critical disability studies.  

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The definition of and discourses surrounding Filipinx identity have been historically circumscribed by gendered and racial expectations. Such expectations have been essentialized through colonial and state narratives, as well as the more unintentional means of socially-driven standards that stem from the Philippines’ eras of occupation. Filipinas and queer Filipinxs have been particularly subject to stereotyping by colonial powers and the Philippine elite, which results in their continued relegation to certain stigmatized or limited roles. I look to Filipinx komiks to demonstrate that accounting for the construction of appearance, both in terms of self-representation and the representation of others, destabilizes the hegemonic notion of essential identities. Indeed, the interconnection of surface and self is purposefully overwritten in the colonial and hegemonic advancement of singularizing images of the Filipina and the queer Filipinx. This thesis aims to challenge the naturalization of identities that are assigned to Filipinas and queer Filipinxs by emphasizing modes and cultures of self-formation as they are represented in Mango Comics’ "Mars Ravelo’s Darna" and Carlo Vergara’s "Zsazsa Zaturnnah." The komiks’ superheroes, Darna and Zaturnnah, emphasize self-formation by visualizing the different configurations of gender, race, sexuality, and class that Filipinas and queer Filipinxs construct as surface appearances in order to navigate social hierarchies that seek to other them. I discuss how komiks can afford the unique representation of Filipina and queer Filipinx self-formations by examining sequentiality and the interplay of visual and narrative components—characteristics that distinguish komiks from other mediums, particularly in their ability to emphasize marginalized perspectives. I also discuss specific instances in which Darna and Zaturnnah represent self-formation. At the same time that they signal the historical and on-going systems that seek to delegitimize Filipina and queer Filipinx subjectivities, Darna and Zaturnnah push femme and queer transformations to the forefront and demonstrate the power and joy of performance. "Mars Ravelo’s Darna" and "Zsazsa Zaturnnah" at once name systems of social degradation and resist circumscription within them, through complex interconnections of form and representations of self-formation.

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