Blending lyric memoir and cultural criticism, acclaimed poet Franny Choi’s debut essay collection explores our obsession with cyborgs and what sci-fi representations of Asian femmes reveal about race, gender, sexuality, disability, labor, technology, and language.
In the 2014 film Ex-Machina, a Japanese maid named Kyoko—beautiful, obedient, unspeaking—peels back the skin on her face to reveal glimmering circuitry. The white man who has been trying to understand her inscrutable behavior looks on in horror. When Franny Choi first watches this scene, their own face awash in the screen’s eerie glow, they feel a familiar mix of revulsion and self-recognition. Yes, Choi thinks, that’s what I’ve been trying to say.
In this luminous essay collection, Choi descends into the uncanny valley to encounter notable cyborgs and robots from across American culture and asks why so many of them bear the faces of East Asian women. Just why is it that whenever artificial intelligence is represented, a sexy but unfeeling Asian woman enters the frame? What does the literal objectification of Asian femmes say about how the West imagines—and dreads—an increasingly automated future?
Choi draws from their own experiences along with queer, feminist, and critical race theory to answer these questions. Refusing the detached safety of critical distance, they write instead “at stabbing range”—a risky intimacy that collapses the space between human and machine, critic and subject. We Radiant Things draws closer to the images carved out for us, the histories of oppression that animate them, and the future in which we try, painfully, to find ourselves.
Part lyric memoir and part cultural criticism, acclaimed poet Franny Choi’s debut essay collection explores pop culture’s obsession with robots and what media representation of Asian femmes reveals about race, gender, disability, language, labor, and technology.
Kyoko from Ex Machina. Boomer from Battlestar Galactica. Sonmi-45 from Cloud Atlas. Cultural representations of the future of humanity are peppered with cyborgs and robots bearing the faces of East Asian women. Why is it that whenever intelligent machines and alien others are the topic of conversation, East Asian women are caught in the frame?
In this lyrical, deeply felt collection, Franny Choi looks everywhere—from film and television to art exhibitions, from the history of AI to memories of growing up as the child of Korean immigrants in the American South—to understand how, like robots, the bodies of Asian American women have been seen as disposable, servile, unfeeling. Asian femmes, too, have been made into sexualized workhorses that flirt with—but never quite touch—the category of human being. It is no wonder, then, as we venture into unchartered territory, that it is up to racialized, feminized beings to lead the way.
Drawing from a wide range of sources—including Asian American studies, queer and feminist theory, disability studies and literary criticism—We Radiant Things: On Being Alien and Becoming Cyborgs paints a vision for Asian American feminist imagination and survival.
