The exquisite corpse of Asian America : biopolitics, biosociality, and posthuman ecologies / Rachel C. Lee.

Author
Lee, Rachel C., 1966- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • New York : New York University Press, [2014]
  • ©2014
Description
1 online resource (v, 325 pages) : illustrations (some color)

Availability

Available Online

Details

Subject(s)
Series
Sexual cultures [More in this series]
Summary note
Winner of the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America addresses this central question: if race has been settled as a legal or social construction and not as biological fact, why do Asian American artists, authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts? Engaging novels, poetry, theater, and new media from both the U.S. and internationally--such as Kazuo Ishiguro's science fiction novel Never Let Me Go or Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats and exhibits like that of Body Worlds in which many of the bodies on display originated from Chinese prisons--Rachel C. Lee teases out the preoccupation with human fragments and posthuman ecologies in the context of Asian American cultural production and theory. She unpacks how the designation of "Asian American" itself is a mental construct that is paradoxically linked to the biological body. Through chapters that each use a body part as springboard for reading Asian American texts, Lee inaugurates a new avenue of research on biosociality and biopolitics within Asian American criticism, focused on the literary and cultural understandings of pastoral governmentality, the divergent scales of embodiment, and the queer (cross)species being of racial subjects. She establishes an intellectual alliance and methodological synergy between Asian American studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), biocultures, medical humanities, and femiqueer approaches to family formation, carework, affect, and ethics. In pursuing an Asian Americanist critique concerned with speculative and real changes to human biologies, she both produces innovation within the field and demonstrates the urgency of that critique to other disciplines. -- Publisher
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Source of description
Print version record.
Contents
  • Corpse Blood Kidney
  • Introduction: Parts/Parturition 1
  • Lymphocytes
  • 1 How a Critical Biopolitical Studies Lens Alters the Questions We Ask vis-à-vis Race
  • Teeth Feet Gamete
  • 2 The Asiatic, Acrobatic, and Aleatory Biologies of Cheng-Chieh Yus Dance Theater
  • Vagina Gi Tract
  • 3 Pussy Ballistics and Peristaltic Feminism
  • Parasite Chromosome
  • 4 Everybody's Novel Protist: Chimeracological Entanglements in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction
  • Head
  • 5 A Sideways Approach to Mental Disabilities: Incarceration, Kinesthetics, Affect, and Ethics
  • Breasts Skin
  • 6 Allotropic Conclusions: Propositions on Race and the Exquisite Corpse
  • Tissue Culture: Tail Piece.
ISBN
  • 1479813745 ((electronic bk.))
  • 9781479813742 ((electronic bk.))
  • 9781479821525
  • 1479821527
OCLC
896492858
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