Abstract
Abstract: This essay investigates how the grotesque and transgressive aesthetic of Franny Choi's Soft Science (2019) reimagines the Asian American Queer Femme subject's relationship to language, the body, and consciousness. Choi's work unravels this relationship by destabilizing human/nonhuman binary through a polyphonic poetic voice. This act of shapeshifting between humans, cyborgs, cephalopods, and other forms functions as a critique of the oppressive power structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity. To theorize her poetics, I foreground the critical lenses of Donna Haraway's posthuman feminism, Lisa Lowe's Asian American aesthetics, Vivian Huang's inscrutability and Mel Chen's queer linguistic animacies in connection with each other as a framework for understanding the hybrid embodiment of the Asian American Queer Femme. Subsequently, I trace Choi's "hybrid embodied poetics"—a hermeneutic that emphasizes her multitudinous lyric voice—primarily within the poems "Glossary of Terms," "Turing Test," "Shokushu Goukan for the Cyborg Soul," "Chi." Furthermore, this essay emphasizes the interrelated nature of the Asian American Queer Femme's embodied experiences and identities, as Choi's work repositions the theoretical frames of Haraway, Lowe, Huang, and Chen in an intersectional dialogue with each other.
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