Abstract
The goal of this essay is to explore what kind of hate is produced against Asian bodies in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. By centering Asian/American affect and materiality – marginalized voices, narratives, and feelings of Asian/Americans as affective-performative texts, this essay attends to critique the historical continuum of racial discrimination against Asian/Americans (i.e., yellow peril) and advocate for social justice, equality, and inclusion in the U.S. Overall, I argue that Asian/American bodies are both physiologically and ideologically desensitized, dehumanized, and weaponized as the revival of yellow perils over the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, this essay highlights the possibility of adding affective and performative lenses in Critical Intercultural Communication research, exploring the politics of Asian/American bodies and the hate discourse as a case study for further academic conversations in Asian/American scholarship in Communication.
Highlights
In the contemporary U.S, former President Donald Trump continues to refer to coronavirus (COVID-19) as a Chinese virus online and in public speeches (Kurtzman, 2021)
Given the coinciding timelines of the increase of the anti-Asian sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian reports — incidents and/or anecdotes reported by victims of hate on the website serve as discursive texts to evaluate the historical continuum and revivals of yellow perils and the discursive practices of imbalanced power relations in the U.S racial formation
As represented in this report, the use of you and we indicates the collective sense of people who are not Chinese through the act of hate against Chinese/Asian people
Summary
The goal of this essay is to explore what kind of hate is produced against Asian bodies in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay highlights the possibility of adding affective and performative lenses in Critical Intercultural Communication research, exploring the politics of Asian/American bodies and the hate discourse as a case study for further academic conversations in Asian/American scholarship in Communication. Critical and affective turns to body politics — in this case, the materiality of yellow peril — are imperative to further examine how Asian/Americans are living the everyday with the hate discourse in the present moment. Through the exploration of the anti-Asian tropes (i.e., yellow peril) in the COVID-19 discourse, affective-performative texts present how the temporal state of affect mirrors the historical continuum of the Asian/American stereotypes and materializes hate through the economy of circulation. I present my reading of the theme, Desensitized Ethnicities
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