CONTACT: lena_chen@berkeley.edu, esakuma@berkeley.edu
As an interdisciplinary network of scholars and artists, the BAD ASIANS working group (formerly known as Performing Asian American & Diasporic Sexualities) invites critical engagement with questions of race, gender, sexuality, disability, colonialism, and labor through the lens of performance studies and visual and media studies. We have hosted exhibition tours, STUDIO VISITS (virtual artist-scholar dialogues on work-in-progress), mixers, film screenings, live performance showcases, and symposia.
“Asian (American)” is historically constructed through the myth of the model minority: quiet, submissive, and hardworking. As Eleanor Ty writes, this myth and “its stress on economic and professional success continues to influence the way Asian North Americans see themselves and are perceived by others.” Meanwhile, “Bad Asians,” as theorized by Eve Oishi, “challenge and resist the status quo because they have already been excluded from it or oppressed, silenced, or limited by it.” In many ways, the term is oxymoronic—this figure should not exist within dominant cultural logics. To be a “Bad Asian” in the U.S. is to occupy a space of illegibility—to act “un-Asian,” to appear “un-American.” Rather than retreat into silence or strive for legibility as “American,” this working group asks what are the “bad” performances, aesthetics, and figures that have allowed for Asian American transgression, creativity, and survival. In their unruly existence, Bad Asians confront the myths that have shaped and constrained them, instead insisting on the power of performance to unsettle dominant narratives and build radical coalitions.
This working group examines how performances of Asian America and diaspora on stage and in everyday life are impacted by histories of migration and imperialism and the connections between exclusionary policies of the past to the recent surge in anti-Asian violence. Coming from within and beyond Berkeley, our members represent a wide range of fields, including American Studies, Art History, Art Practice, English, Geography, Political Science, and Performance Studies.