“Loving and Hating the Cute”: Audrey Wu Clark on Leslie Bow’s *Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy*

Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy is an expertly-written, relevant, post-COVID-19 study that expands what Sianne Ngai has labelled “the cute” regarding ideas that shape aesthetic categories applied to Asian Americans (something to introduce core concept). Ngai defined “the cute” as “an aesthetic disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensibly subordinate and unthreatening commodities” in her Our Aesthetic Categories (2012).[1] Leslie Bow argues that Asian American cuteness, whether in the form of the children’s books or young adult fiction, caricatured commodities, social robotics, or visual art, is not only the site of domination as Ngai argues but of deep attachment which quickly turns into hate.

Bow demonstrates how seemingly contradictory concepts are intricately linked through the commodification of racial identities and aesthetics (something like that?) Throughout the book, Bow consistently defines “racist love” as “sexual fantasy masquerading as racial knowledge.”[2] She begins the book by pointing out,

At the millennium, race has been persistently framed in terms of negativity—xenophobia, fear, anxiety. The political rhetoric of racial hatred in the United States is easily recognizable: calls for wall building, claims about restricted free speech, contestations about whose lives matter, assigning ethnicity to a virus.

And yet, paradoxically, we profess to love diversity. The imperative to represent feeds racial scopophilia, a visual pleasure animated by the erotic, but also extending to other forms of emotional attachment: affection, empathy, amusement.[3]

This binary of love and hate, Bow argues, is and has been directed specifically at Asian Americans who have historically been endowed with cuteness through anthropomorphized, Asianized cartoon animals, vehicles, robots, and other forms of artificial intelligence to harmful effects. She develops what Eric Hayot calls the “de-anthromorphization”[4] of Asian Americans into the substitute fetishism of cute things in racist love. Bow also makes relevant once again Freud’s theory of the fetish. In addition to Hayot’s work, and the works she names—Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism (2019), Josephine Lee’s “Decorative Orientalism” (2021), Sunaina Maira’s “Indo-Chic” (2007), and Jane Park’s Yellow Future (2010)—Bow’s Racist Love joins and builds upon the recent Asian American scholarship on post-humanism inspired by theorist Sylvia Wynter: Rachel C. Lee’s The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (2014), Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), and Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘After Man’ (2019).

In her post-humanist critique of Asian American de-anthropomorphization, Bow argues that analysis of cute semi-robotic things, which dehumanize Asian Americans, can also be a site of productivity in discussing Asian American affect. She writes, “the reliance of posthumanism on liberal humanism need not represent an entirely ‘lethal’ view of the posthuman.”[5] For example, in her third chapter on techno-orientalism, she specifically “situate[s] racialized AI representation at the intersection of #MeToo and feminist STS to consider fantasy’s reliance on a social matrix, how imagining a posthuman future relies on scripts of the present.”[6] That is to say, Asianized AI representation explains the subjective agency that has been lost through harassment and assault that the #MeToo movement has addressed.

To explore these themes, Bow’s book is divided into four chapters, all dealing with the effects of anthropomorphized Asian American cute things: Chapter One, “Racial Transitional Objects: Anthropomorphic Animals and Other Asian Americans”; Chapter Two, “Racist Cute: Caricature, Kawaii Style, and the Asian Thing”; Chapter Three, “Asian ? Female ? Robot ? Slave: Techno-Orientalism after #MeToo”; and Chapter Four, “On the Asian Fetish and the Fantasy of Equality.” Although the book’s title has its roots in one of the earliest Asian American civil rights-era essays, Frank Chin ad Jeffery Paul Chan’s “Racist Love” (1972), in which they wrote, “There is racist hate and racist love[,]”[7] Bow’s Racist Love is very much a pandemic-era book. It searches for answers for the surge in anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic for the “the same old stories about Asian-as-threat”[8] and which culminated in the mass shooting of eight people, six of which were Asian women, in March of 2021 by a man who claimed he was suffering from a “sex addiction.”[9] The fetishism of cuteness, of course, always results in the hypersexualization of Asian American women, which, in this case, ended in murder.

Bow’s narrative style, likewise, brilliantly attempts to break the fetishism of academic writing. Mostly, she writes in high academic prose but, at various points, she will write in informal language and fragments to articulate the humanity of Asian Americans against the fetishism of their purported cuteness, which is the subject of the book. In her first chapter, in which she discusses anthropomorphized animals in children’s and young adult fiction, she makes an important and incisive critique of Gene Luen Yang’s lauded graphic novel American Born Chinese: “Grafting notions of species fixitiy onto its portrayal of racial self-acceptance, American Born Chinese nevertheless produces a discomfiting message about the limits of racial integration.”[10] Chapter 2 compellingly argues that racialized objects shows the ways in which Asian Americans and African Americans are stereotyped differently but are both ultimately reduced to things;[11] furthermore, it claims that “cuteness also aestheticizes anti-Asian bias.”[12] The penultimate chapter focuses on techno-Orientalism, specifically US techno-Orientalism, as yet another form of the yellow peril: “Techno-Orientalism has come to refer to a futuristic aesthetic, cyberpunk or otherwise. I would argue that it also engages a specific affective structure; techno-Orientalism is tech feeling as anti-Asian bias.”[13] In the final chapter, Bow argues that racial fetishism ultimately cannot help but “illuminate the hegemonic pressures of normative racial ideation.”[14]

After reading this book, one cannot doubt the severe psychic and physical damage that fantasies of Asian American cuteness incur on Asian Americans as well as others. Bow makes critical contributions to the current posthumanist movement in Asian American studies in arguing that it nevertheless still relies on the Western liberal humanism and the neoliberalism it is mean to critique; but she also persuasively claims that the anthropomorphism of animals and objects, which posthumanists argue productively blur the lines between humans, animals, and artificial intelligence, can be extremely harmful to Asian Americans who are and have historically been objectified and de-anthropomorphized. In arguing that the “label model minority is quintessential racist love[,]”[15] Bow surprisingly does not explicitly discuss the historical binary of the model minority and the yellow peril, which goes back to the scholarship of Robert G. Lee and Colleen Lye. Racist Love is a much-needed, critical analysis of the baneful discourses that have contributed to historical and contemporary anti-Asian violence.

[1] Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories : Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1.

[2] Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 188.

[3] Bow, 1.

[4] Eric Hayot, “Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures,” Representations 99, no.1 (Summer 2007), 123.

[5] Bow, 115.

[6] Bow, 115.

[7] Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan, “Racist Love,” Seeing through Shuck, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Ballantine), 65.

[8] Bow, 23.

[9] Bow, 193.

[10] Bow, 33.

[11] Bow, 74.

[12] Bow, 74.

[13] Bow, 111.

[14] Bow, 157.

[15] Bow, 6.