Women’s & Gender Studies Feminist Lecture Series Presents:

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 3:00 – 5:00 pm
Lubar Entrepreneurship Center 107

The event is free and open to the public.

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.

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.

Download the flyer.