Much of my current research agenda concerns the political and affective desires that fall within the rubric of ‘mixed race.’ My book manuscript explores how these desires travel within the Asian diaspora, notably the scenes in which empire casts Asian people with white heritage. I engage cultural figures (Andrew Cunanan, Joanna Gaines, Daniel Holtzclaw, Elliot Rodger, Tura Satana), writers (Sara Ahmed, Grace Cho, Michiyo Fukaya, Chanel Miller, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Julietta Singh, Ocean Vuong, Michelle Zauner) and artists (Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Chanel Matsunami Govreau, Isamu Noguchi, Gina Osterloh, Emma Sulkowicz), theorizing the ontological dilemma of mixed race subjection alongside the sexual logics of empire that bring Asian people and whiteness together. My methodology turns toward minoritarian aesthetic practices—memoir, self-portraiture, performance and installation art, queer visual culture, poetics, sculpture, ceramics, and revolutionary protest—as critical, but understudied, indexes to articulate the evolving relationship between mixed race subjects and US imperialism in Asia and the Pacific. 

Below you will find a list of my publications. Please get in touch if you'd like a PDF.

Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Half, 2012.

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Academic Articles

​“So, I turn inside":
Overcome by the Unbearable, Seeing Myself in Michiyo Fukaya 


Feminist Studies
Special Issue “Celebrating Forty Years of This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave” 2022.
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Paying tribute to Michiyo Fukaya, a mixed-race Asian American lesbian poet and feminist activist who died by suicide in 1987, this essay experiments with a reading practice that merges queer and feminist thought with poetics and autotheory. Throughout, the author interweaves details of Fukaya's life with their own, wading through Fukaya's writings to force attention onto the topics of sexual violence, anger, mental health, and U.S. imperialism. Fukaya—a contemporary of those who grace the pages of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color and All The Women Are White, All The Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies—is largely absent in discussions of third world feminism, women of color feminism, and 1980s feminisms writ large. Attending to this absence, the essay models how one might touch and be touched by their dead, suggesting a turn inwards towards the feminist past as a prerequisite to survival.

​Scenes of Hope, Acts of Despair:
Deidealizing Hybridity in Saya Woolfalk’s World of the Empathics


Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Special Issue “Staging Feminist Futures.” 2020.
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This article builds on the critical scholarship that interrogates the racialized logics surrounding hybridity. Temporal framings (recuperating the past, celebrating the present, and idealizing the future) form the basis of this article, which brings together the nexus of hope and despair to analyze the oeuvre of contemporary mixed race artist Saya Woolfalk. In three multiyear, multimedia, and temporally overlapping projects, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a hybrid race of women able to alter their genetic makeup to fuse with plants. Woolfalk integrates feminist ethnography and Afrofuturism into mediums of video, dance, and textile to bear on the utopian potentials of hybridity. I draw on Kadji Amin’s heuristic of “deidealization” to reveal how the additional ideals of utopia, empathy, and shared ancestry emerge and collapse in the Empathics’ world, arguing that feminist utopian performance necessitates an indelible reckoning with dystopia.​

Half and Both:
On Color and Subject/Object Tactility

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Special Issue “Performances of Contingency:
​Feminist Relationality and Asian American Studies After the Institution.” 2020.

​This essay engages with the artist Jennifer Ling Datchuk, using her work on porcelain as a touchstone to unfold the spaces between subject and object that would assume their easy distinction. Trained in ceramics, Datchuk works with porcelain as an ode to her Chinese heritage and as a meditation on the allure of “porcelain skin.” Like me, Datchuk is an Asian American woman with white ancestry. Like Datchuk, I am drawn to the way porcelain’s features—delicate, oriental, still, object—seem to reflect Asian femininity. When I see blue added to the white base of porcelain, as it is in classic Chinese ceramic work, I feel both colors act as an adhesive, wedding the ceramic surface to connotations of my race and gender. Am I a subject or an object? Drawing on recent debates on Asiatic femininity and object-oriented ontology, this piece offers a personal reflection into the forms of relation that open up when we depart the subject/object divide—the or—in favor of the touch—that adhesive and—that holds the subject and object together. This and is a tactility I feel through porcelain’s colors. Thus, I read the formal elements in Datchuk’s work with my biracial identity in mind, inviting an exploration into the and—the touch—that fastens my subjectivity to a type of object life.

Book Chapters

“How to Speak without Words: Abuse and/as Disability in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Dirty River.” Disability Representation in Film, TV and Print Media. Routledge’s Interdisciplinary Disability Studies Series. Edited by Michael Jeffress. 2021.

“Sexuality,” in The Modern Language Association's Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers, eds. Co-authored with Alexis Lothian. 2020.


Encyclopedia Entries 

“Coming Out,” “Lesbian Feminism,” and “Loving v. Virginia,” in Jason Pierceson, ed., LGBTQ Americans in the U.S. Political System: An Encyclopedia of Activists, Voters, Candidates, and Officeholders. ABC-CLIO: 116-117, 262-264, 265-267. 2019.


Reviews 

“Guilty Party, Curated by Justin Hoover." Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 7(1-2): 229-233. 2022.

“Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora.” Feminist Formations, 33(2): 343-346. 2021.

“Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 7(3): 215-218. 2020.
 
“After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 29(1): 95-98. 2019.


Public Writing 

"Remembering Konerak Sinthasomphone." Reappropriate: Asian American feminism, politics, and pop culture. 2021.

“Watching the Future Closely.” Frontiers Augmented. 2021.


Catalog Essays 

“Truth Before Flowers – Jennifer Ling Datchuk.” Women & Their Work. Austin, TX. 2019.


Poetry 

“July 9th” and “The Moon, the Tide, the Sun.” Sinister Wisdom, 125: Glorious Defiance. 2022.