We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg

Summary

Blending lyric memoir and cultural criticism, acclaimed poet Franny Choi’s debut essay collection explores our obsession with cyborgs and what sci-fi representations of Asian femmes reveal about race, gender, sexuality, disability, labor, technology, and language.

In the 2014 film Ex-Machina, a Japanese maid named Kyoko—beautiful, obedient, unspeaking—peels back the skin on her face to reveal glimmering circuitry. The white man who has been trying to understand her inscrutable behavior looks on in horror. When Franny Choi first watches this scene, their own face awash in the screen’s eerie glow, they feel a familiar mix of revulsion and self-recognition. Yes, Choi thinks, that’s what I’ve been trying to say.

In this luminous essay collection, Choi descends into the uncanny valley to encounter notable cyborgs and robots from across American culture and asks why so many of them bear the faces of East Asian women. Just why is it that whenever artificial intelligence is represented, a sexy but unfeeling Asian woman enters the frame? What does the literal objectification of Asian femmes say about how the West imagines—and dreads—an increasingly automated future?

Choi draws from their own experiences along with queer, feminist, and critical race theory to answer these questions. Refusing the detached safety of critical distance, they write instead “at stabbing range”—a risky intimacy that collapses the space between human and machine, critic and subject. We Radiant Things draws closer to the images carved out for us, the histories of oppression that animate them, and the future in which we try, painfully, to find ourselves.