NGAI
LAN
TAM

The title of this work, agos, signifies an act that causes disgrace, something that needs purification. Here, agos is queerness—a state of being that should supposedly be “purified” according to western heteronormativity. This thesis is a narrative representation of this state—where queerness manifests itself as a material substrate that seeps through the surface of the East Asian body. AGOS ultimately uses diasporic queerness to subvert the western gaze of bodies and environments in a phenomenon known as techno-orientalism.

Western heteronormativity and ultra-basic social binaries have plagued cultures outside of their own. By setting social and racial expectations in place, the west has negatively affected minorities and diasporic communities. The criminalization of queerness during western colonization in many Asian countries has caused it to be seen as a western phenomenon. As western powers exited and went back home to hold progressive queer rights movements, the colonized people continued to adhere to their detrimental anti-queer colonial laws. Asian queerness has always existed but it has been denied and erased as western hierarchies of gender and sexuality are upheld.

To have a conversation about the queer East Asian diasporic experience, we must talk about techno-orientalism. Orientalism’s presence in western media’s portrayal of the East continues to be a distorted and fetishized one. Techno-orientalist tropes consist of two central themes in representing a threateningly forward future: vague and bleak Asian-coded environments, and the ‘hollow Asian’ archetype. The general and jumbled depictions of different cultures in one environment stems from the west’s view of the East as one single entity. Similarly, the ‘hollow Asian’ archetype sees all Asian bodies as devoid of emotions, free will, and consciousness. Asian bodies are reduced to holograms, sex dolls, and robot archetypes, reinforcing the claim that we are machine-like beings who lack a soul, which is the very definition of humankind.

A record of emotional and physical intimacy, AGOS depicts both the calm and complexity in the connection between race, identity, and sexuality. Instead of using vague Asian cityscapes to represent the future, this project chooses external and internal environments specific to queer experiences. There is the anxiety, melancholy, and soiled feelings that individuals are harboring. Through a physical rupturing of these emotions, the “robotic” Asian body is defamiliarized to challenge normativity and interrogate social and racial stereotypes. The use of queer East Asian American subjects is a response to techno-orientalism’s flawed depiction of our bodies. It shows what happens when these “Asian robots” are seen as individuals with human feelings. Their very existence is proof of how this system malfunctions when western expectations are not met.