Cruelty Counts: Anti-Asian Violence and its Queer Afterlives

This dissertation examines the afterlives of violence in queer Asian/American and diasporic visual and performance culture. As a broad response to the conjuncture of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the renewed attention to anti-Asian violence, this project rethinks violence beyond its familiar terms as a scene of spectacular, individual, and repetitive injury. This dissertation offers a critique of the dominant protocols of documentation and representation of violence, what I refer to as the aestheticization of violence. It questions how particular protocols and methods such as counting, measurement, and visualization, shape and delimit our collective sensibilities and knowledge of scenes of harm. In rearticulating anti-Asian violence beyond normative imaginaries and practices of liberal justice, including entrenched practices of policing, prisons, and criminalization, I rethink the dominant liberal forms of Asian American identity and its politicization. Working against a narrow and individual notion of ‘hate’ violence, the archives I unpack deploy a queer Asian/American critique of disparate sites of violence and loss. These sites expand the purview of what anti-Asian violence mean. Each chapter contends with how the contests over life and death expose and rethink how human life is valued and devalued through racial, sexual, and gender differences. Queerness is central to this project because its centering of messy intimacies that traverse geographies, histories, and subjects that unsettle the category of Asian American under neoliberal multiculturalism, a crucial precursor for unmaking anti-Asian violence beyond the state. The artists and queer aesthetics I unpack defamiliarize various sites of (non)spectacular violence: the U.S. military camptown in South Korea, the Atlanta Spa Shootings, the Asian American fraternity, the AIDS epidemic, and the Korean diaspora in Canada. As a dissertation that grapples with the structures and conditions that at times produce life-shattering violence, this work ponders on what remains and how marginalized peoples endure. It follows the ethical and political struggles to creating something a new from violence’s wake.

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