Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Winner of the 2016 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Cultural Studies, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America addresses a central question: why do Asian American artists, authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts, despite race being recognized as a legal or social construction rather than a biological fact? Rachel C. Lee explores this phenomenon by examining novels, poetry, theater, and new media from the U.S. and internationally, such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, as well as exhibits like Body Worlds featuring bodies from Chinese prisons.

In her analysis, Lee delves into the preoccupation with human fragments and posthuman ecologies within Asian American cultural production and theory. She reveals how the concept of "Asian American" is a mental construct that intersects with the biological body. Through chapters focusing on different body parts as entry points into Asian American texts, Lee introduces a fresh approach to studying biosociality and biopolitics in Asian American criticism. This approach explores themes such as pastoral governmentality, embodiment scales, and the racial subjects' queer (cross)species identities.

By bridging Asian American studies with Science and Technology Studies (STS), biocultures, medical humanities, and femiqueer perspectives on family, care work, affect, and ethics, Lee establishes a new intellectual framework. She advocates for an Asian Americanist critique that considers potential changes to human biologies, pushing for innovation within the field and emphasizing the relevance of this critique across disciplines.

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