Sensuous Machines: Sexuality, Violence, and Robots in Asian American Speculative Poetry

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore how two collections of Asian American speculative poetry – Franny Choi’s Soft Science and Margaret Rhee’s Love, Robot—prioritize sensation to challenge the cultural construction of the Asian female robot. As liberal humanism’s promise of rights through visual representation and narration fail to manifest, speculative poetry offers an alternative sensory apparatus that recognizes minoritized subjectivity. Playing with poetic opacity, inscrutability, and ambiguity, Choi and Rhee highlight the sensory power of sexuality to defy categorical definition. Their experiments in robot sensation offer new models for being-with attentive to the politics of racialized, gendered, and human embodiment.

KEYWORDS:

• Sense
• sexuality
• speculative poetry
• Asian American

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Aline Lo and Swati Rana for their patience and support through this process, the anonymous peer reviewer for their feedback, and Pujita Guha for listening to and revising with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Franny Choi, Soft Science (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2019), 86.

2. Ex Machina. Directed by Alex Garland (New York: A24, 2014).

3. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds., Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 5.

4. A notable exception to this reliance on literature and film is Larissa Lai’s collection of poetry, particularly her poems from the perspective of Rachel, the replicant from Blade Runner (1982); and Larissa Lai, Automaton Biographies (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). See also secondary criticism: Kit Dobson, “Dystopia Now: Examining the Rach(a)Els in Automaton Biographies and Player One,” in Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature, ed. Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014); and Tzarina T. Prater and Catherine Fung, “‘How Does It Not Know What It Is?’: The Techno-Orientalized Body in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Larissa Lai’s Automaton Biographies,” in Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, ed. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

5. Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 9.

6. Ibid., 9, 13.

7. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 8.

8. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2.

9. Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 24; and Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 3.

10. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), xvii; and Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 161. For more detailed historical context on the relationship of Asian American literature to avant-garde movements, see Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde, 1–18; and Audrey Wu Clark, The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Modernist Literature and Art (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 1–23.

11. Vivian L. Huang, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 4.

12. Ibid., 14.

13. Some other notable pieces considering the Asian female robot/android/cyborg: Leslie Bow, “Asian ● Female ● Robot ● Slave: Techo-Orientalism after #MeToo,” Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 108–52; and Juliana Hu Pegues, “Miss Cylon: Empire and Adoption in ‘Battlestar Galactica’,” MELUS 33, no. 4 (2008): 189–209.

14. LeiLani Nishime, “Whitewashing Yellow Futures in Ex Machina, Cloud Atlas, and Advantageous: Gender, Labor, and Technology in Sci-Fi Film,” Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 29–49. Nishime fits Kyoko into a history of depicting “Asian female bodies … as the product rather than the producers of technology, built to fulfill their role as devalued service laborers in the globalized future.”

15. Danielle Wong, “Dismembered Asian/American Android Parts in Ex Machina as ‘Inorganic’ Critique,” Transformations 29 (2017): 35.

16. Bow, Racist Love, 119–20.

17. Ibid., 125.

18. Wong, “Dismembered Asian/American Android Parts,” 43, 48.

19. Choi, Soft Science, 87.

20. See Veronica Fitzpatrick, “‘Can I Fuck This?’: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina,” Cléo 5, no. 1 (April 21, 2017) for a detailed analysis of sex as a means of identifying the human. A 2013 Noam Chomsky lecture (unspecified within the original text) that is referenced throughout “Kyoko’s Language Files Are Recovered Following Extensive Damage to Her CPU” provides more context for the claim that language is a characteristic feature of humanity.

21. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 176.

22. Ibid., 177.

23. Choi, Soft Science, 88.

24. Bahng, Migrant Futures, 151.

25. Rachel C. Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 39–65. Rachel Lee describes the “epidermal notion of race” as “the visibility of the skin (its pigmentation and oiliness) as a site of racial legibility” despite “greater genetic variability exist[ing] between individual members of the same racial group than across supposedly distinct racial groups.” A more extensive definition is considered throughout Chapter 1 of this text.

26. Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): 31.

27. Ibid., 15–6.

28. Ibid., 20.

29. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xiii.

30. Choi, Soft Science, 53.

31. Ibid.

32. Feminist poetics can be characterized as finding new forms to express the experience of women which are not simply responsive to their historical silencing. For more detailed discussion, see Joan Retallack, “:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (Three Essays onto Shaky Grounds),” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 344–77.

33. Choi, Soft Science, 54.

34. Franny Choi, “Imitation Games,” Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts 34, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2022), https://gulfcoastmag.org/journal/34.1-winter/spring-2022/imitation-games/.

35. Warren Liu, “Posthuman Difference: Traveling to Utopia with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4, no. 1 (2012): 4.

36. Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race, 15.

37. erin Khuê Ninh, “Without Enhancements: Sexual Violence in the Everyday Lives of Asian American Women,” in Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, ed. Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 73.

38. Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir (New York: Viking Press, 2019). Miller’s memoir and other public writings deserve more detailed analysis of her often conflicting rhetoric of feminism, carcerality, and justice.

39. Ninh, “Without Enhancements,” 73–4.

40. I take the phrase “anti-commemorative” from the excellent series of short pieces in Timothy Yu, Jane Wong, Michael Leong, Michelle N. Huang, and Steven Yao, “Against Witness: Anti-Commemorative Asian/American Poetics,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5, no. 2 (2019): 76–112.

41. Ibid., 89.

42. Margaret Rhee, Love, Robot (Brooklyn, NY: The Operating System), 26.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maile Aihua Young

Maile Aihua Young is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research examines the post-1945 development of global public health culture through epidemiology and Asian diasporic literature.