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Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy

2024; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19364695.43.2.11

1936-4695

Janna E. Haider,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

In episode 78 of the film review podcast Guilty Pleasures, the hosts discuss the 2022 film Don't Worry Darling. Twenty-six minutes in, a host describes Gemma Chan, who has a supporting role in the film, as "one of the most stunning people I've ever seen." His co-host agrees: "She looks like the future." The third co-host chimes in, "She looks like a CGI character [ . . . ] chemically made."1 While all three are complimentary of Chan's appearance, the moment is unsettling. Leslie Bow takes up the culture that produced this conversation about Gemma Chan's beauty in the 2022 monograph Racist Love. The admiration of Chan's beauty through comparison to non-human entities is, in the framing of Racist Love, enabled by projection of Asian aesthetics onto non-human entities as reduction. Bow argues that the positive feelings elicited by abstractions of Asian femininity projected onto non-human objects are a form of domination.In four chapters, Bow explores "racist love" as a concept, citing Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan's work on attraction as the form of anti-Asian bias. Bow "takes the process of fetishistic reduction literally to analyze the visual representation not of Asian people but of their object substitutes" (p. 4). She posits that feelings engendered by non-human objects inform reactions to bodies that these objects are made to resemble. Racist love, in Bow's framework, is the "reductive structure of typing" that associates the aesthetics identified with Asian people with non-human objects, from robots, to children's book characters, to handheld juicers (p.7). The application of the aesthetics associated with Asian-ness as a form of fetishization facilitates the reduction of the Asian person to a diminutive possession to be condescended, consumed, and dominated.The third chapter is Bow's strongest. In a discussion of artificially intelligent robots, both in fiction and in venues such as trade shows, given the appearance of young Asian women, Bow argues that the figure of a robot exists to serve and express happiness about it. Of particular interest is an "Asian-looking" "female" robot that is available to be touched by humans, but is programmed to say things like "ouch" and "don't touch me"; these markers of a lack of consent exist to be violated (p. 136). This chapter encapsulates the point of the book: in applying Asian aesthetics to objects that exist to be manipulated, racist love trains people to interact with Asian humans without disregard for those humans' autonomy.The fourth chapter, which makes the greatest contribution to the field, focuses on the experiences of Asian American people who interact with fetish content. Bow explores objectification as subject-making, supplementing Anne Anlin Cheng's work in Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019) with a discussion of Asian America. In identifying with Asian fetishism, Bow argues, the Asian American person can claim an uneasy place of self-affirmation. The conclusion engages with the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the sorts of dehumanizing power dynamics engendered by racist love. Racist Love is a study of the abstraction and the reduction itself, which is a valid project, but it does make the insertion of Asian Americans' experiences of the results of racist love in the final chapter and epilogue feel a bit detached from the introduction and first three chapters.The text provides a strong analysis of the power of aesthetic and the daily interactions with objects that racialize both Asian and non-Asian subjects. Bow moves beyond considering a phenomenon "problematic" by exploring the ways that value and meaning are inscribed upon Asian aesthetics. The text could be enhanced with two considerations. The first is an expansion of the analysis beyond East Asian people and aesthetics. There is one reference to images of a South Asian woman in the introduction, but beyond that, the text is full of references to aesthetics of Korea, China, and Japan. Second, Bow cites an extensive bibliography of theorists of Blackness and the Black American experience, and then applies this work to the Asian American case study. There is space for a more nuanced critique of how fetishization of Black people and Asian Americans co-inform each other to theorize more about what is specific to the Asian or Asian American case. That said, the work is timely and accessible, and makes an excellent selection of case studies with which to support the central argument. It is useful for Asian Americanists based in the disciplines of film and media studies, English and literature, and communications, at the levels of advanced undergraduate or early graduate work.