By Addie Tsai
Chapter 4: Racist Intimacies: Racial Fetishization, the Femme Alter Ego and Her Retribution
“Racist intimacies encapsulate a set of unfolding relations that unleash past forms of orientalist desire into the everyday dramas of human intimacy, which, among other things, complicates the pursuit of what is understood to be anti-racism.” (142)
How does colonialism intersect with Asian and Asian American women as objects of desire?
“For Brooklyn-based sculptor and performance artist Chanel Matsunami Govreau, interracial desire inspires a performance-based undercover investigation into white men’s attraction to Asian women where humiliation emerges as the artist’s raison d’être.” (146) The idea of being “undercover” comes up repeatedly around mixed race (not just Asian) people and their likeness, both within media and the arts as well as in American life. What else comes to mind?
Los Angeles-based artist and writer Maya Makrandilal, specifically with her performance alter ego the Goddess Lakshmi the Global Matriarch, enacts “the affect of boredom, specifically a boredom with whiteness [that] emerges through racist intimacy.” (147) By turning the eye back to themselves, rather than constructing merely ambiguous external, often white-framed, images of exoticism and intrigue, how do Govreau and Makrandilal reimagine our ways of understanding mixed race embodiment within empire? What does their work open up for you?
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.