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Current Position:

 Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Williams

Graduate Date:

2024

Dissertation:

Peripheral Spill: Sex, Loss, Asian American Queer Performance

Abstract: Peripheral Spill: Sex, Loss, Asian American Queer Performance examines the function of loss, lack, and absence in Asian American sexual subjectivity and sexual representation via a study of queer Asian American art and performance. It engages loss—emergent from histories of dispossession, assimilation, cultural erasure, and exclusion—as an intersubjective phenomenon that produces psychical gaps and absences which rend Asian American subjects from historical grounding and social/cultural belonging. Bringing the theory of racial melancholia to bear on the study of Asian American sexuality, I underscore loss’s relationship to the lacks endemic to Orientalist constructions of gender and sexuality that figure Asian American bodies as passive, submissive, or otherwise queerly receptive. Within these prescriptions, Peripheral Spill explores how a key selection of contemporary artists work through and engender intimacy, desire, and relation across the diffuse losses of queer Asian American life through the performance and aestheticization of queer sexual practices. I sit with the art of TT Takemoto, Dean Sameshima, Hoang Tan Nguyen, Patty Chang, and Candice Lin, who work across performance, photography, video, and installation art. The works under consideration share a set of formal and conceptual concerns around the aesthetics of absence, lack, and ephemeral remains which structure how the queer Asian American subject figures as pliable, voided, or lost within sexual and social relation.Drawing interdisciplinarily across Asian American studies, performance studies, queer of color critique, and psychoanalysis, I argue that these artists engage the afterwards of loss not as a stultifying breakdown of self, but as a condition of possibility for doing, knowing, and imagining sex, subjectivity, and relation otherwise. Driven by queer and critical ethnic studies’ articulations of melancholia as a critical practice of becoming, I analyze the works’ melancholic performances of holding, such as withholding, holding together, holding oneself, and holding on after loss.These performances take on a necessarily erotic valence as forms of psychic and bodily intake which, through the private and inward turns of such practices, refigure how notions of penetrability, pliability, and passivity are experienced and embodied. I argue that these melancholic and queer performances of holding render at once sensuous and unrepresentable the Asian American subject’s singularity as a relational being. This dissertation thus contributes to discourses on relationality and difference across queer theory, feminist theory, and queer of color critique by positioning loss as a key dynamic in the entanglements of Asian American difference and queer relationality. Further, it posits sex and queer sexual practice as enlivening performances of managing and maneuvering through loss, of remaining open towards the past and to others while maintaining the inarticulable specificity of queer Asian American life.

First Book:

still in process

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Current Position:

Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at NYU  

Graduate Date:

2020

Dissertation:

In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt

Abstract: In Due Time: Performance and the Psychic Life of Black Debt analyzes how routine modes of debt and indebtedness restrict black women’s behavior across the everyday sphere and their subsequent engagement with both aesthetic and everyday performance to dismantle such routines. Modes of indebtedness are characteristic of racial capitalism and are embodied as violent behavioral responses to black women—from the current student loan catastrophe that disproportionately targets the lives of black women, entrapping them in generational scores of material debt, to the use of ideological indebtedness that was used popularly to defend Bill Cosby against black women’s account of sexual assault. Indebtedness gathers in material force and affective meaning across the repetition of the everyday sphere, where, I argue such behavioral responses become habituated. I ask, if notions of habituation and indebtedness signal an accumulation of behavior over a period of time, how might we employ time as an aesthetic device to interrupt such processes of habituation? My project illuminates that practices in indebtedness function much like durational performances—aesthetic renderings that bring attention to the passing of time. Thus, I look at black women’s engagement with durational performance via close readings of socially mediated happenings and other durational media, such as the sitcom, commercial campaigns, online discourses, site-specific performances, as well as enduring, black literary texts. Across my project, I mobilize performance as an analytic platform, a behavioral aesthetic, and communicative tool that unveils the embodied and material consequences of the often abstract relation pitted between forms of power and everyday behavior. I argue that everyday embodied acts taken up by black women might refuse and reimagine the logics of indebtedness that currently regulate black women’s lives. I advance the claim that examining indebtedness through the lens of durational performance enriches our understandings of the everyday impact of state violence on the black gendered body.

First Book:

still in process

Latest Performance:

little sister: an Afro-Temporal Solo-Play