We Radiant Things

Part lyric memoir and part cultural criticism, acclaimed poet Franny Choi’s debut essay collection explores pop culture’s obsession with robots and what media representation of Asian femmes reveals about race, gender, disability, language, labor, and technology.Kyoko from Ex Machina. Boomer from Battlestar Galactica. Sonmi-45 from Cloud Atlas. Cultural representations of the future of humanity are peppered with cyborgs and robots bearing the faces of East Asian women. Why is it that whenever intelligent machines and alien others are the topic of conversation, East Asian women are caught in the frame? In this lyrical, deeply felt collection, Franny Choi looks everywhere—from film and television to art exhibitions, from the history of AI to memories of growing up as the child of Korean immigrants in the American South—to understand how, like robots, the bodies of Asian American women have been seen as disposable, servile, unfeeling. Asian femmes, too, have been made into sexualized workhorses that flirt with—but never quite touch—the category of human being. It is no wonder, then, as we venture into unchartered territory, that it is up to racialized, feminized beings to lead the way.Drawing from a wide range of sources—including Asian American studies, queer and feminist theory, disability studies and literary criticism—We Radiant Things: On Being Alien and Becoming Cyborgs paints a vision for Asian American feminist imagination and survival.