Takeo Rivera

For the 2021-2022 academic year, I will be in transition between two academic projects. The first, Model Minority Masochism, develops a theory of Asian American masochism, gesturing to a cultural politics intertwined with this racial position, negotiated through a masochistic attachment to the model minority and its various figurations. To do so, Model Minority Masochism examines the masochistic performance of masculine Asian American cultural production from 1982 to the present day to argue that masculine Asian American subjectivity is attached both to the peculiar pleasures of racialization and to the self-punishing flagellation for such pleasure. The second project, tentatively titled Non-Player Orientalisms, takes seriously the contemporary conceptualizations of individual choice and agency in a social world increasingly circumscribed by consumer- driven identitarianism, and how this impacts racialization, the worthiness or fungibility of life, and strategies for survival. Inspired by the recent scholarship of Tara Fickle, Robyn Wiegman, Eva Cherniavsky, and others, I explore how contemporary neoliberal subjecthood is conceptualized principally through consumer agency and entrepreneurship, but also how contemporary racialization is influenced partly through the perceived capacity for consumer agency. I contend that we are seeing the production of new orientalisms, predicated upon both the gamification of our “real” world and our virtual spaces, as well.