On February 18, Dr. Anna Storti gave a rich and necessary talk on what she terms “racist intimacies.” She explored the inextricability of race from desire, and the ways this interplay is both grounded in violent histories and entangled in our contemporary. In her analysis of racist intimacies, Dr. Storti reframes the politics of multiracialism and the clashing, converging histories which produce mixed race subjects. What does it mean for Asian America, and Asian/American bodies, to be adhesed to empire’s erotic life?
By interrogating dominant intimacies (ways that intimacy manifests within white bourgeois sexuality), we begin to more clearly see both how intimacy is woven into the infrastructure of empire and how intimacy might also imply alliances between colonized peoples. Using the sexual preferences of white supremacy as a lens to understand the residual, we gain access to the inner workings of hegemony towards a recognition of and confrontation with power.
Ocean Vuong’s haunting line “no bombs = no family = no me” stands as a testimony to the ways that empire destines Asian America to be “in thrall to desire,” ensnared in an erotics of imperialism that pushes together bodies on opposite sides of an imperial encounter. Asian/Americans with white heritage, as Vuong implies, are conditioned by histories of racial convergence which are also involved in the production of an unstable whiteness. Whiteness here functions not only as a racial form, but also as a structure of feeling which demands constant recalibration. In part because of this instability, Asian America, while subject to the fetishism of whiteness, is also still liable to extend the racism of empire.
Erotic charge, at the structural and individual level, remains a temporal one informed informed by colonial and sociocultural histories. Racial fetishism often seen in sex work, for example, points to the ways that individual desire continually cycles back to racial subjection, where the body must be understood in the context of an impulse commonly described as ‘yellow fever.’ Not all interracial sex, then, is an enactment of racial fetish, but all such relations are necessarily informed by a ubiquitous racism. Andrew Cunanan’s story, and the varied receptions it sparked, points to the paradox of mixed race subjectivity – the tension that emerges when erotic desire folds into fate, and sex can be understood both as intimate choice as well as a product of empire.
Elliot Rodger’s story again highlights the material devastation spun out of this tension. Much of Rodger’s hatred of women can be read as the projection of an internalized racial hatred clearly tied to the imagined masculinity of both white men and Asian men. His own words conceptualize his mixed racial identity within a web of racialized and sexualized gender production, where being half Asian put him at a romantic disadvantage in comparison to white men, but his whiteness still positioned him as superior to other men of color. As we’re confronted with the lack of redemption Rodger’s story and others like it seem to offer, Dr. Storti suggests that perhaps this bleakness is precisely what forms the basis for living out less racist relations.
In her upcoming book, Dr. Storti argues that legal reform alone isn’t enough to unravel the violence of racial and erotic histories that extend into this moment. Instead, she calls for a reckoning with individual racist desire and the desperation its stories evoke. Racist intimacies provide a lens to begin an urgent examination into these desires, suggesting ways to begin imagining alternative futures that hold space for the joy of the erotic, while still refusing to ignore the harm of its distorted histories.
ASIAN AMERICAN & DIASPORA STUDIES PROGRAM