“Racist Love: AI’s Race Fetish”
Join the Center for East Asian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature for a talk featuring Leslie Bow (UW-Madison) on Thursday, February 1 at 5 pm at Saieh Hall, Room 203 (5757 South University Avenue).
Hear Professor Bow explore the ways that Asian Americans are subject to “racist love,” fetishistic attraction counter-intuitively linked to racial anxiety. This talk will focus on a specific racial form: artificially intelligent robots, real and imagined. How do technological marvels embodied as young, Asian, and female code assumptions not only about vulnerability and care, but violence and domination? Portrayals of touching futuristic nonhuman things, she suggests, provoke questions about the capacity for consent in a stratified present.
Through media, literary, and tech examples, Professor Bow explores the ways that Asianized, anthropomorphic things provoke split racial feeling, revealing how racialized pleasures cloak racial resentment, techno-Orientalist anxiety, and fears of globalization.
Click HERE to REGISTER for this FREE IN-PERSON event!
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Leslie Bow is fourth-generation Chinese American hailing from the Bay Area. She is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Asian American Studies and Dorothy Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of the award-winning, ‘Partly Colored’: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York University Press, 2010); and Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton University Press, 2001).
