I am headed to San Francisco (and it has been a while since I have visited one of my most favorite cities) for the 2018 Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Conference. I was invited to be the discussant for two panels:
Friday, March 30, 2018
F5: Techno-Sanitation: Racial Biopolitics amidst Digitized Neoliberalism (Elizabethan C)
Chair: Marcus Degnan
Discussant: Edmond Chang, Ohio University
Presenters:
Keva Bui, University of California, San Diego – The Sexuality of Techno-Orientalism: Superhuman
Biopolitics and (Re)imaginations of Asian Futurity
Mads Lê – Im/material Refugee Confinement and Detention: Leisure, Borders, Citizenship, and Minimalismas Structural Digital Violences
Gregory Toy, University of California, Los Angeles – Engineering Affect: Genetic Modification, Immaterial Labor, and Technical Wizardry in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja
Saturday, March 31, 2018
S54: Playing Queer Asia: Video Games, Sexuality, and Asian America (Elizabethan B)
Chair and Discussant: Edmond Chang, Ohio University
Presenters:
Miyoko Conley, University of California, Berkeley – Looking for Love in Avian Places: Queerness and Biopolitics in Hatoful Boyfriend
Petrus Liu, Boston University – From Gold Farmers to Tech Bros: The Racialization of Masculinity, Creative Labor, and Sovereignty in World of Warcraft
Christopher Patterson, Hong Kong Baptist University – Author / Auteur / Asian: Ludophiles and the Virtual Orient
Takeo Rivera, Boston University – Who Mourns the Nameless?: Queerness, Orientalism, and Grievability in Dragon Age Inquisition
I am looking forward to hearing the work of these scholars, and I hope I can serve the panels well. This will be my first time at AAAS, and I am a little nervous. I want to make sure that I listen, synthesize, and offer thoughtful and useful questions and responses. Moreover, this will be the second conference this year that I have attended for the first time and where I will know very few people. But it is a great opportunity. Though Asian American Studies is not a specialization (and I have some pretty frustrating stories from graduate school about being assumed to be an AsAm scholar), it is a turn I am interested in making. I am thinking about connecting my second project on science fictions and games of color to Asian American Studies in a more substantive way.
Again, thank you to Keva Bui and Christopher Patterson for organizing and including in me in their panels respectively.