By Addie Tsai
Chapter 3: The Hapacalypse: Gendered Anxieties and Paranoid Essentialism Before #MeToo
“Is the Asian/white subject the harbinger of the end of the world? Or is empire’s subject striking back?”
Storti discusses two mixed Asians known in feminist and anti-violence circles, for the opposite reasons: Chanel Miller and Elliot Rodger. Who’s read Chanel Miller’s Know My Name? I remember that it was through her memoir I first learned the Emily Doe in the 2015 Brock Turner Stanford rape case had an Asian mother. The way Miller examines her own relationship to mixed Asian identity, as well as whiteness, had a profound effect on me, one I wasn’t expecting to experience when I first began to read it.
Addie Tsai (any/all) is the author of Dear Twin (2019), included in American Library Association’s Rainbow List in 2021, Unwieldy Creatures (2022), a Shirley Jackson finalist for Best Novel, and Straight White Men Can’t Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture. She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They are the founding editor in chief for just femme & dandy. Addie is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, where she is Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies.