« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Leslie Bow, “Racist Love”

October 20, 2023 @ 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm

We are please to be a co-sponsor of this fall’s Women’s and Gender Studies Vilas Trust Lecture

“Racist Love: #MeToo and Techno-orientalism’s Sexy Things”

Leslie Bow

Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, English and Asian American Studies, Dorothy Draheim Professor of English, UW-Madison

Friday, October 20, 2023
3:00pm-5:00pm
Lubar Entrepreneurship Center Rm 107

Women’s and Gender Studies Vilas Trust Lecture Series Racist Love: #MeToo and Techno-orientalism’s Sexy Things A lecture by Leslie Bow Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor, English and Asian American Studies, Dorothy Draheim Professor of English, UW-Madison This talk explores the ways that Asian Americans are subject to “racist love,” fetishistic attraction counter-intuitively linked to racial anxiety. The talk will focus on a specific racial form: artificially intelligent robots, real and imagined. How do technological marvels embodied as young, Asian, and female code assumptions not only about vulnerability and care, but violence and domination? Portrayals of touching futuristic nonhuman things, she suggests, provoke questions about the capacity for consent in a stratified present. Through media, literary, and tech examples, Bow explores the ways that Asianized, anthropomorphic things provoke split racial feeling, revealing how racialized pleasures cloak racial resentment, techno-Orientalist anxiety, and fears of globalization. Friday, October 20, 2023, 3:00-5:00 pm Lubar Entrepreneurship Center 107 Sponsored by the William F. Vilas Trust Fund and Women’s & Gender Studies Co-sponsored by Departments of C21, Global Studies, English, Cultures & Communities, Sociology, Women’s Resource Center, LGBTQ+ Resource Center, and LGBT+ Studies Program The event is free and open to the public. Images: a photo of Leslie Bow; the cover of Bow’s book Racist Love, and the head and torso of a robot that appears to be a young Asian woman with long hair and a strapless top but then reveals the inner electronics below.

Lubar Entrepreneurship Center 107

WI + Google Map