The Asian (as) Robot: Queer Inhumans in the Works of Margaret Rhee, Greg Pak, and Chang-Rae Lee

Abstract:This paper embraces the Asian (as) robot in a cluster of Asian American texts: Margaret Rhee’s Love, Robot (2017), Greg Pak’s Robot Stories (2003), and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014). Taking cues from work in queer inhumanisms, it explores what happens when Asians “turn away from the demand for full humanity” (Luciano and Chen) and instead intentionally conflate ourselves with non-human objects. What new notions of race can emerge, and what new notions of human emerge? By engaging with such questions, this paper provides a critical intervention into techno-Orientalist discourse that often focuses on the dehumanization of Asian bodies subjugated as robots and other machines. Techno-Orientalist critique is limited, I contend, when it assumes to resuscitate a universalized notion of the human as the pinnacle of recognition and agency. Counterintuitively perhaps, I embrace the Asian (as) robot in order to enable other understandings of race when it is not tethered to human embodiment