Asian American transnationalism: queer diasporic critique on Netflix’s Bling Empire

ABSTRACT

This essay interrogates Asian American representations in the Netflix’s reality TV series Bling Empire (Jenkins, J., Panaligan, B., Weintraub, R., Chung, E., Eisele, B., & Li, K. M. (Executive Producers) (2021, January 15; 2022, May 13). Bling Empire [TV Series]). We deploy queer diaspora as an analytic tool to read how Bling Empire represents the politics of Asian American transnationalism, through contestations of family tradition, kinship, and racialization rooted in cisheteronormativity. By transnationalism, we mean global (dis)connections of power, identity, labor, and capital built upon the nationalist politics. The following themes emerge from our analysis of the foci above: Representational Privileges of Masculinity, Transnational Kinship Making, and Diasporic Exceptionalism. By disordering the structure of cisheterosexuality, we problematize how Bling Empire works with the Asian American transnationalism supporting the configuration of diaspora, migration, and citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian Americans
• transnationalism
• queerness
• diaspora
• representation

Disclosure statement

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