“Terrible” Femininity: Of Ornaments and Automata
“Good Hunting”, Ken Liu’s 2012 story which has been adapted into an episode of the Netflix show Love Death + Robots (2019), foregrounds an anti-colonial feminist revision of the huli jing1 myth in a narrative arc of dehumanization, agency, and empowerment. Liang and Yan, the protagonists of “Good Hunting”, are Chinese colonialized subjects trying to survive in a world (the setting is Hong Kong) that is rapidly changing into a steam-powered and automata-enhanced colonial regime. The story is set in a steampunk universe – a retro-futuristic Victorian period – which folds in the colonial history of Hong Kong and China. While Liang finds an affinity for automata and machine-making to survive in the new world, Yan discovers a “terrible” femininity in becoming-cyborg. These processes of orienting towards objects in Neo-Victorian imperial fantasies repeat and amplify, what Achille Mbembe termed as “aesthetics of superfluity”, the tumultuous mediation between “indispensability and expendability” during periods of global movement of ‘bodies’, such as at the height of imperialism. I ask if and how these Neo-Victorian feminist revisions posit an object-becoming that is ethical and non-oppressive for people of colour, particularly women of colour, whose ontologies have historically been “encrusted” with imperial intimacies of violent objecthood and invisibilized labor. How can this Neo-Victorian object-becoming resist, or rather disrupt, the global capitalist politics that benefits from and supports the exploitation of laboring bodies founded upon sedimented histories of colonization and subjugation?
Chandrica Barua is a doctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has an MSc in Medieval Literatures and Cultures from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a BA (Hons.) in English from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, India. Her interests are peripatetic – gender and sexuality, memory, trauma, and embodiment, posthumanism, critical theory, and intimate histories – and transhistorical, spanning the medieval, early modern, and the periods of global coloniality. She is also a creative writer and translator; her recent work “Stories by the Fire on a Winter Evening” (feminist translations of Assamese folktales) has been published by Zubaan Books, India, and SPF, Japan.
