Biography
My research turns to 20th/21st century Asian American literature and visual art that demonstrate a dedicated—and oftentimes extreme—commitment to formal experimentalism. My dissertation-in-progress tentatively proposes an “aesthetics of opacity” to think through texts that deliberately elide immediate legibility even as they seem to flirt at it, and reads these texts’ steady accumulation of or persistent play with aesthetic styles as one way of parsing the ever-shifting and ever-precarious conditions of Asiatic racialization. Some of the key figures that I dwell on in this project include H. T. Tsiang, Chuang Hua (Stella Yang Copley), Pamela Lu, Martin Wong, Yoko Ono, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
More broadly, I am interested in gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, Marxist aesthetics, affect studies, comparative media studies, race and culture, and 20th century poetry and poetics. Formerly determined to be a Kathy Acker scholar, I still think about bad sex a lot.