Inscrutable Syntax: Reading Asian American Women as Cyborgs in Franny Choi’s “Chi”
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This paper builds on and departs from Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg by examining how Franny Choi’s poem “Chi,” from her collection Soft Science (2019), reimagines communicative failure as the very condition through which Asian American women’s cyborg subjectivities emerge. Positioning the Asian American female body as already technologized through Orientalist fantasies and histories of feminized, hypersexualized labor, the paper traces how Chi’s speech is cast as illegible within techno-Orientalist discourses, mobilized to justify feminized care and labor, and reconfigured through glitch and semantic excess. The analysis demonstrates how techno-Orientalist and ableist frameworks converge to construct Chi as inscrutable, dependent, and serviceable, turning her communicative breakdown into a pretext for both care-as-discipline and the extraction of labor and sexual availability. Drawing from disability studies, Asian American studies, and posthumanist feminist theory, the paper shows how Choi’s poetics of unintelligibility transforms communicative breakdown into a site where agency emerges through, rather than in spite of, failure. Through close readings of “Chi,” this paper argues that Asian American women are already constituted as cyborgs and that, as such, they articulate alternative forms of agency rooted in non-normative communication.
Abstract
This paper builds on and departs from Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg by examining how Franny Choi’s poem “Chi,” from her collection Soft Science (2019), reimagines communicative failure as the very condition through which Asian American women’s cyborg subjectivities emerge. Positioning the Asian American female body as already technologized through Orientalist fantasies and histories of feminized, hypersexualized labor, the paper traces how Chi’s speech is cast as illegible within techno-Orientalist discourses, mobilized to justify feminized care and labor, and reconfigured through glitch and semantic excess. The analysis demonstrates how techno-Orientalist and ableist frameworks converge to construct Chi as inscrutable, dependent, and serviceable, turning her communicative breakdown into a pretext for both care-as-discipline and the extraction of labor and sexual availability. Drawing from disability studies, Asian American studies, and posthumanist feminist theory, the paper shows how Choi’s poetics of unintelligibility transforms communicative breakdown into a site where agency emerges through, rather than in spite of, failure. Through close readings of “Chi,” this paper argues that Asian American women are already constituted as cyborgs and that, as such, they articulate alternative forms of agency rooted in non-normative communication.