AAS3409W: Asian American Women's Cultural Production

This course explores cultural texts produced by and about Asian American women and queers. It wrestles with the complexities of a historical moment in which Asian American women are both increasingly visible in pop culture and increasingly visible targets of violence. We will push beyond judgments of “positive” or “negative” representations of Asian Americans and instead explore the political dimensions of these cultural representations—that is, how they animate, reference, or repress longer histories of migration, war, labor, and empire. We will approach the categories of both “Asian American” and “women” less as static identities and more as shifting political coalitions that bring together diverse groups of people whose experience of gender, sexuality, race, and class deviates from the norm of white, heterosexual, and cisgender American citizenship. In tracking (and at times celebrating) these deviations, we will ask: how might film, TV, literature, art, and theory help illuminate Asian American feminist politics?

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