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Asian Abstraction & the Pleasure of Fantasy

Leslie Bow
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
4:00-5:30 PM
Off Campus Location
Leslie Bow (English, Wisconsin) will be in conversation with a UM faculty member about her recent book Racist Love: Asian Abstraction & the Pleasure of Fantasy. In Racist Love, Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence.
Building: Off Campus Location
Location: Virtual
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: American Culture, Apia, Asian/pacific Islander American Studies, Books, Department Of American Culture, Discussion, Free, Identity
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies, Department of American Culture