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Unruly desires and capacious subversions: Coco Ono’s conceptual burlesques
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Unruly desires and capacious subversions: Coco Ono’s conceptual burlesques
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Content
Unruly Desires and Capacious Subversions: Coco Ono’s Conceptual Burlesques
By
Alice Siyuan Zhao
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART & DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTERS OF ARTS
CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
May 2024
Copyright 2024 Alice Siyuan Zhao
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my thesis committee:
Chair: Amelia G. Jones
Committee members: Jenny Lin, Dorinne Kondo
I am eternally grateful to my past mentors without whom my career as a scholar would simply be
unimaginable: madison moore, Jonathan D. Katz, David L. Eng.
A special thank you to Kayla Tange (Coco Ono) for chatting with me about her performances
and sharing about the Private Practices archive, which is the first archive of AAPI sex workers
within the U.S.
Thank you to my friends who have provided me invaluable support throughout my time at USC.
I am especially grateful to have Tracy Fenix, Thalia Williamson, Linna Wang, and Hannah
Huntley in my life.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….ii
List of Figures…….………………………………………………………………………………iv
Chapter One: Introduction………….……………………………………………………………..1
Chapter Two: The Sociopolitical History of Asian/American
Femininity ………………………….……………………………………………………………..4
Chapter Three: Sex Work and Sexual Performance For Survival…….…………………..……...12
Chapter Four: The History of Femmes of Color in Burlesque………………….….……………15
Chapter Five: Prosthetics and Gestures as Media….……………….……………………………18
Chapter Six: “Dear Mothers”…………………………………………………………………….21
Chapter Seven: “Dom Balloons”…………………………….…………………………………..31
Chapter Eight: Concluding Thoughts……………...…………………………………………….38
Bibliography……....……………………………………………………………………………..39
iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère in Paris, 1926 @ Getty………………….……16
Figure 2. Kayla Noriko Tange, “Dear Mothers” performance at the 6th annual Asian Burlesque
Extravaganza at the Highline Ballroom in New York on May 12, 2018. © All rights reserved by
the artist……………………………………………………………………………………..……25
Figure 3. Kayla Noriko Tange, “Dear Mothers” performance at the 6th annual Asian Burlesque
Extravaganza at the Highline Ballroom in New York on May 12, 2018. © All rights reserved by
the artist……………………………………………………………………………………..……25
Figure 4. Kayla Noriko Tange, “Dear Mothers” performance at the 6th annual Asian Burlesque
Extravaganza at the Highline Ballroom in New York on May 12, 2018. © All rights reserved by
the artist……………………………………………………………………………………..……27
Figure 5. Kayla Noriko Tange, “Dom Balloons” performance, 2015. © All rights reserved by the
artist………………………………………………………………………………………………33
Figure 6. Kayla Noriko Tange, “Dom Balloons” performance, 2015. © All rights reserved by the
artist………………………………………………………………………………………………34
Figure 7. Kayla Noriko Tange, “Dom Balloons” performance, 2015. © All rights reserved by the
artist………………………………………………………………………………………………36
1
Chapter One: Introduction
My earliest encounter with Kayla Tange’s work was watching her autobiographical
documentary titled “Dear Mother” (2020). I was deeply touched by the mere five minutes
comprised of footages from Tange’s daily life as an artist and a burlesque dancer, accompanied
with the her vocal narration of the words she would have wanted to address to her South Korean
birth mother if she had agreed to meet up. As a transnational adoptee, Tange was raised by
formerly interned Japanese American parents just outside of Los Angeles. As a multimedia artist,
Tange uses her practice comprised of sculpture, installation, and performance art to bring
visibility to the history of transnational adoption of Korean-born children, an extremely
profitable industry following the Korean war. As an erotic conceptualist under the name Coco
Ono, a name that drew inspiration from Coco Chanel and Yoko Ono, Tange co-organizes an
experimental monthly showcase with drag king Wang Newton that bring together Asian
American sex workers and performance artists whose practices serve as antidotes to ancestral
trauma and Asian American stereotypes.
Trying to parse out my intense affective reaction to Tange’s short autobiographical
documentary, and the uncanny feeling of being seen, I came to realize my identification with
Tange’s experience might have stemmed from my own journey of transnational migration. As an
(im)migrant born in Asia, I landed in rural Connecticut from Beijing for high school as a
fourteen-year-old parachute child – kids who migrate to the West on their own while their family
remains overseas. In the “Racial Dissociation – Parachute Kids and Psychic Nowhere” chapter of
Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han suggest that we can
understand Asian families’ investment in parachuting their children as a way of accumulating
2
their own cultural capital.1 Eng and Han also mention that many U.S. universities actively seek
out students from Asia who can pay full tuition to keep these institutions running, and in that
sense, parachute kids can be seen as financial investments both for Asian households and
American institutions. Reflecting on my own experience through this critical lens, I have
observed the structural similarities between Tange’s experience with transnational adoption and
my own journey with parachuting — both turn children into commodities under the rhetoric of
liberalism and “better opportunities” in the First World. My “commodity” awareness is further
intensified living with the trope of hypersexuality around Asian women since moving to the
States. Writing about Tange’s practice as someone who identify with her narrative, I am not
offering an objective analysis of her performance as an outsider, but rather, I am in Trinh T. Minh
Ha’s words “speaking nearby.” In this process, I am hoping to honor Tange’s labor in striving for
alternative ways of inhabiting the world while wrestling with the feeling of disposability as an
Asian woman and a transnational adoptee.
I was intrigued by the ways Tange enacts healing through working as an exotic dancer,
which requires the seemingly intentional commodification of her body. Taking up the Asian
American femme body packed with contradictory tropes of objecthood/personhood,
hypervisibility/anonymity, Tange contextualizes it between her and the viewer during her
performances so that its meaning becomes relationally negotiated and established. I find myself
asking: what is the significance of calling attention to the hypersexual, fetishized, and
historically criminalized Asian female flesh? What are the political benefits of publicly forfeiting
the Christian standards of feminine chastity through partaking in sexual performances? Does
burlesque hold any liberatory potential in relation to tropes of hypersexuality that have always
1 David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of
Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2019), 107.
3
already burden our bodies? These are questions that ground my exploration of Tange’s
conceptual burlesque performances. Notably, Confucian imperatives of feminine demureness in
Asiatic cultures to an extent accounts for the relative lack of explicit discussions around issues of
sexuality within Asian American discourses. Instead of reclaiming Western tropes of chastity
often idealized in their embodiment by white women, I am more concerned with orchestrating
actions to reclaim sexual agency in relation to subjects who are already deemed sexually deviant
upon birth. I also hope to explore the sexual kinship that exists between queer and Asian subjects
as neither could fulfill Christian ideals of the family due to their “nonnormative” sexuality. While
monogamy and chastity were constructed as the desired social condition for women – sex work
and the instrumentalization of sexuality outside of capitalistic hetero gains contests such
limitations on the body.
4
Chapter Two: The Sociopolitical History of Asian/American Femininity
The history of American imperialism in Asia, domestic law, and popular culture all
intersect in fabricating Asian feminine tropes. Within the political realm within the United States,
and as Leslie Bow crucially points out in her book Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion:
Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature, the way Asian women were
portrayed as “having ‘nothing else’ but sexuality defined their relationship to the American state:
the conditions under which Asian women were granted permission to immigrate, first as
prostitutes, then as picture brides, war brides, and now mail-order brides.”2 In particular, East
Asian women were encumbered with stereotypes of licentiousness and immorality as early as the
1840s during the Gold Rush in the Western U.S., when Chinese families migrated to California
for the potential wealth promised by gold-mining. While Chinese men who came to the U.S.
were exploited as coolie laborers, “the anti- Chinese movement stereotyped all Chinese women
as prostitutes, dubbing them ‘slave girls,’ female counterparts to male coolie laborers.”3
Expanding on these points, in her book Ornamentalism, Anne Anlin Cheng brings up the
“Case of 22 lewd women” in 1875, which marks first time Asian litigants appeared in the U.S.
supreme court. Cheng mentions that even though these female immigrants held proper legal
documents, the captain who accused them of prostitution assumed so since they were wearing
silk garments and appeared without male accompany.
4 In this case, it is significant to note the
way dress articulated sexual and political identities for these women. With the turn of the
century, amidst a series of Asian exclusion acts during the first World War, the law of the United
2 Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s
Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
3 Mae Ngai, “Racism Has Always Been Part of the Asian American Experience,” The Atlantic, April 22, 2021;
available online at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/we-are-constantly-reproducing-anti-asianracism/618647/. 4 Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 34.
5
States banned Asian women from marriage and the subsequent creation of families, limiting their
right to reproduction. Most strikingly, an act passed by Congress in 1924 stated “Any American
who married a Chinese woman lost his citizenship,”5 which burdened Asian women with tropes
of nonnormative sexuality, infertility, and sexlessness by circumscribing their agency to engage
in intimate relationships.
Globally, the wartime abuse of East Asian women intertwines with the establishment of
U.S. domestic laws governing their sexuality. The wartime phenomenon of “comfort women” in
countries such as Korea and Vietnam — women forced into sexual slavery by military men —
created an image of Asian women as being disposable and always available to invading soldiers.
These comfort women were predominantly Korean, and were forced into Japanese military-run
brothels during World War II.6 A decade later, following the end of the Korean War, the “signing
of the 1953 Korea-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty (still the legal foundation for U.S. troops’ access
to U.S. and Korean bases)”7 warranted the establishment of U.S. military camptowns during the
Korean War between North and South Korea. As a member of the Allied Nations and a source of
political support to South Korea, the U.S. military’s legal occupation of the country made the
livelihood of Korean women in these military towns dependent upon sexual service to U.S.
soldiers. It is crucial to note that the exploitation of these women’s bodies was enabled by others’
racially gendered stereotyping of them. As the poet and author Cathy Park Hong, among many
others, hauntingly call attention to, the popular double eyelid surgery in South Korea was
originally invented by American surgeon Dr. David Ralph Millard following the Korean War to
5 Maxine Hong Kingston, “The Laws,” in China Men (Random House Inc., 1980), 261-274, 268. 6 “Who Are the ‘comfort Women,’ and Why Are U.S.-Based Memorials for Them Controversial?,” NBCNews.com,
accessed February 19, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/who-are-comfort-women-why-are-u-sbased-memorials-n997656. 7 David Vine, “‘My Body Was Not Mine, but the US Military’s,’” POLITICO, November 3, 2015,
https://www.politico.eu/article/my-body-was-not-mine-but-the-u-s-militarys/.
6
make these women appear more attractive to Caucasian soldiers8, showing that racism and
heterosexist misogyny went hand in hand in the historical violations of Asian women.
On the contrary, in countries of the Caribbean, where Asian indentureship served as a
racial buffer between Black slaves and European colonizers, the figure of the Asian woman was
co-opted to fulfill Christian ideals of marriage and civility in contrast to Black primitivity. As the
Asian Americanist scholar Lisa Lowe highlights, in Trinidad, Chinese laborers were not only
valued for their physical strength, but their image was fantasized as one “resembling the ‘civility’
of European marriage and family,” which then symbolized the prospective future of the colony.9
Therefore, it becomes clear that, in both the U.S. and Latin America, the regulation of Asian
reproductive labor is closely linked to sustaining the proper functioning of capitalist systems set
up by Euro-American powers. Asian women’s survival in the Americas has thus been directly
dependent on their sexuality, depending on when she is legally deemed perverse or desirable. In
other words, these instances allude to the inseparable link between East Asian women’s sexuality
and their sociopolitical agency. To make a living and survive, these women inevitably had to
conform to the rules governing their sexualities.
In the cultural sphere, feminist scholars of color have alluded to alternative paths of the
formation of racialized femininity that problematize Enlightenment characterizations of modern
personhood as exclusively organic, male, white, and European. For example, Hortense Spillers
argues that slavery resulted in the “theft of the body”, resulting in Black subjects’ existence as
ungendered flesh instead of bodies that hold subjectivity. Sylvia Wynter also raises the idea of
auto-speciation, which indicates that our understanding of the human is a construct shaped by
8 Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition (London: Profile Books, 2021),
195. 9 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 198.
7
Western “scientific” origin myths that exclusively allot full humanity to the cis, white, male
bodies. Within Asian feminist discourses, Anne Anlin Cheng mentions that the yellow woman
has historically existed between objecthood and animated personhood, embodying a
perihumanity whose existence allow us to theorize an “ontological condition produced out of
synthetic accretions that challenge the division between the living and the nonliving.”10 Cheng
mentions that in order to locate embodiments of Asian femininity, we need to redirect our
attention to ornamental surfaces that circulate within Western culture.
11
The fabrication of Asian American feminine objecthood traces back to historical displays
of colonialism, such as those at the nineteenth-century World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago. By researching the Midway souvenir ethnographic photographic albums found in
archives of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, art historian Serena Qiu points out these
photographs’ deeply artificial representation of Chinese women—their appearance manipulated
through their overexposure, engraving techniques, and textual inscriptions — nevertheless
crafted enduring tropes of East Asian femininity as anonymous (one photograph was only
labeled as “Chinese beauty”), contained in space, and passive.12 The visual archive from the
Exposition functions as evidence of the Western fabrication of East Asian women’s inanimate
objecthood. Qiu also mentions that through the conflation of various Chinese female sitters and
the careless mislabeling of postcards adapted from the ethnographic photograph of a Chinese
woman as “Japanese beauty,” the World Expo’s representation of Asian female figures shows
“the paradox of a system interested in the particularity of Chinese women but blind to the
10 Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 3. 11 Ibid., 21. 12 Serena Qiu, “In the Presence of Archival Fugitives: Chinese Women, Souvenir Images, and the 1893 Chicago
World’s Fair,” Panorama l, no. g (2022), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.11645.
8
singularity of one Chinese woman compared to another.”13 Dwelling between hypervisibility and
invisibility, the figure of the Asian woman endured the colonialist and heteropatriarchal
reduction to stereotypes that catered to the Western essentializing.
Scholars of photography have widely called attention to the lasting impact of
photographic images on codifying bodies with racial and sexual tropes. For example, Teju Cole
points out that colonial photography served to frame African subjects as Other through by
highlighting bodily pain. By circulating “explicit, disturbing photographs of members of that
group: starving children or bullet-riddled bodies,” photographs turning the documented subjects
consumable to the Western audience, thereby establishing an implicit hierarchy of humanity
through triggering the affective sympathy of the viewer. The photo-historian Ariella Azoulay
describes photography as a civil contract that establishes a relationality among the photographer,
the subject, and the audience through its visual epistemes. She points out, “when and where the
subject of the photograph is a person who has suffered some form of injury, a viewing of the
photograph that reconstructs the photographic situation and allows a reading of the injury
inflicted on others becomes a civic skill, not an exercise in aesthetic appreciation.”14 Azoulay
thus echoes Cole in suggesting that photographic images actively structure social relations in the
every day. Further linking photographs with concrete power relations, Juana Maria Rodriguez
critically points out the damaging visuality of the photographic representation’s self-fulfilling
prophecy of irresistible seductiveness of brown women. She comments in regard to the potential
violence of the photographic image in her 2023 book Puta Life, “the image, codified through
visual conventions, becomes the template that teaches us to see sexual deviance, desire, and
13 Serena Qiu, “In the Presence of Archival Fugitives: Chinese Women, Souvenir Images, and the 1893 Chicago
World’s Fair,” Panorama l, no. g (2022), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.11645. 14 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2022), 14.
9
daring in doing so attempts to fulfill its role in identification.”15 In the twentieth century,
Hollywood films such as The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and The Year of Living Dangerously
(1982) also linked Asia with erotic availability. Circulated as photographs and films, sights of
erotically available Asian women intertwine with the legal history that regulated and reduced
Asian women to their sexuality. Indeed, cultural representation directly translates into the ways
in which bodies are treated on the street. As the 1875 court case of alleged Asian female
prostitution demonstrated, the cultural framing of Asian women’s non-normative sexuality
directly led to their criminalization. As racially gendered tropes concretize, they are reinforced
by the law that places bodies in prisons.
It is particularly urgent to highlight the ways tropes of hypersexuality were inscribed upon bodies
of Asian women through the fantasies promised by the seductiveness of their material garments.
For example, Sean Metzger observes in Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race that the
high slit Cheongsams dress, also known as the Anna May Wong dress (named after the famous
Chinese American actress of the mid-twentieth century), enabled the Western fantasy of Asian
women’s sexual availability during China’s opening up to the West in the late 1970s.
16 Similarly,
Anne Anlin Cheng reminds us in relation to the character Shosho played by Anna May Wong in
the Hollywood film Piccadilly, “the most sensuous thing about Shosho has never been her flesh
but what can stand in for it.”17 These examples illustrate the ways in which the inhuman, material
garment play an active role in converting Asian female bodies into objects of desire. As Cheng
rightfully observes, the photographic archive of Asian women shows that Asian femininity
oscillates between hypervisibility and anonymity, the synthetic and the organic, the living and the
15 Juana Maria Rodriguez, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), 17. 16 Sean Metzger, Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014),
104. 17 Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (New York (N.Y.): Oxford University press, 2021).
10
inanimate, and the object and the subject. Tracing the ontology of Asian femininity to the
present, Leslie Bow suggests in her 2022 book Racist Love that the figure of the Asian woman
approximate robots, kitsch objects, and kawaii items in the 21st century. Drawing from the field
of psychoanalysis, Bow argues that cute things such as toys like Hallo Kitty manufactured by
Sanrio serve as transitional objects for the rehearsal of Western anxiety around an Asia rising in
global power. As cuteness affectively invites the pleasure of consumption and dominance, the
invention of Asian caricatures allows Western consumers to redirect their fear around Asia
towards the pleasure of its consumption, what she defines as “racist love” throughout the book.18
Bringing up popular movies such as Ex Machina, Bow also calls our attention to the ubiquity of
the figure of the Asian female cyborg who embody the fantasy of the merging of the inhuman
and the human.19 As Anne Cheng notes, the simultaneous objectification and overcapitalization
of Asian female bodies require us to reckon with both “the violence of impersonality and the
violence of personality.”20 When liveness and hypervisibility pose the risk of being seen, does
the underlying anonymity behind codified images of Asian feminine stardom create room for
fugitive promises of living otherwise? In what ways might Asian woman access corporeal
autonomy? What role does dress and prosthetics, or what Sean Metzger characterizes as the
“skein of race,” play in lending mobility to bodies laden with tropes of sexual deviance? How
can we improvise for “more life” from preassigned conditions of animated objecthood? Instead
of viewing the reduction to the ornamental as a “lack” that put Asian femme bodies in a state of
temporal deferral of waiting to become human, this thesis explores how our existence as
affective and aesthetic ornaments also provide our bodies freedom be in a state of movement and
18 Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022),
101.
19 Ibid., 123. 20 Ibid., 65.
11
alter our bodies’ felt relations to power. The prosthetic can become a channel for self-definition
outside of the existing terms of humanity. Following the call for a post-humanist discourse in
Black Studies and queer and feminist scholars’ effort to problematize the distinction between
“nature” and “culture,” I hope to consider how we might locate more liberatory forms of
embodiment in nonhuman matters. In the context of Coco Ono’s burlesques, how has she
reappropriated prosthetics and gestures not to abet Model Minority-like obedience and “passing,”
but to contest predetermined tropes that structure Asian feminine sexuality? How do such
performances trouble the existing binary of the person and the thing, embodying what Jack
Halberstam defines as a “wild” way of living — the notion of “existing without explanation,
without a niche, outside of an orderly and inevitable scheme of life”?21
21 Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 26.
12
Chapter Three: Sex Work and Sexual Performance for Survival
Apart from the close kinship between sexuality and the law, another reason to attend to
Asian femme sexual performances is their promise of financial stability among such
communities. This raises the question: how is the occupation of sex work complicated by the fact
that it is a means for survival — when sex work grants a degree of social mobility for East Asian
women in and beyond Asia and that massage parlors and salons have been a major channel that
guarantee economic independence for them?
It is no surprise that sex work has been partaken by most marginalized communities of
society. Historically, sex work has been predominately carried out by poor women, women of
color, and queer and trans femmes as it remains one of the only available money-making
professions. When femmes of color are deemed disposable, undesirable, alien, worthless,
commodified, invisible, and socially powerless, their bodies remain the only available channel to
contest their felt relations to power. Specifically, as Asian women are seen as either fetishized
hypersexual objects or as asexual ornaments for their cellophane glamor, calling attention to
one’s sexuality represent an active and impassioned desire to fuck with power and to negotiate
the very terms of their objectification. Juana Maria Rodriguez offers us another way to rethink
the role of prostitution in relation to marginalized subjects in her call to dispel “the false binary
of happy hooker or hapless victim that have dominated public debates about the
decriminalization of sex work and instead insist on the messy affective, material, and psychic
realities these representational accounts leave out.”22 It is helpful to note Tange’s purposeful
choice of maintaining her burlesque practice as an active practice of healing alongside her
professions in what conventionally constitute as performance art and sex work (she mentioned to
22 Juana Maria Rodriguez, Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), 15.
13
me burlesque is not a financially sustainable practice at all since it is often not recognized as
either performance art or stripping.) Tange’s conscious act of placing her body on display as a
way of working through trauma exemplifies Rodriguez’s call to complicate the existing binary.
Since the citizenship of Asian women has long been upheld through performances, as I
previously discussed, it is urgent to highlight sexual performances not as luxury but rather as
necessity for Asian women’s everyday survival. Paradoxically rendered as hypersexual and yet
docile by popular culture, what are the practices that allow Asian women to navigate through
these contradictions? I hope to highlight performance as a particularly generative medium in
yielding sociopolitical agency to racially gendered bodies as it works against the concretization
of the relationship between bodies and their predetermined identities through putting the
meanings of the former in motion and in relation. Taking up the Asian American femme body
packed with contradictions, Tange contextualizes her body between herself and the viewer so its
meaning becomes relationally established. Contrary to the way the neoliberal entertainment
industry seeks to represent racial histories and narratives, performance is anti-representational as
it questions the very process of subject formation instead of reinforcing preexisting notions of
subjectivity.
While Tange’s burlesque performances are specific to her, it unavoidably in the larger
cultural realm as the bodies of women of color have never had the privilege of remaining
culturally unmarked within the United States. As a type of sexual performance, burlesque allows
the performer to merge sexual labor with social critique in a public setting. Since the
sociopolitical award of Asian women’s cultural and legal inclusion in the U.S. has long been
predicated on their passive commodification to serve the pleasure of white hetero men, these
women’s public articulation of sexual desires unavoidably already puts their performing bodies
14
at risk. However, sexual performance brings such precarity of citizenship to the forefront by
challenging the exact conditions of sexual demureness on which their acceptance is predicated.
23
Additionally, the indeterminacy of sexual gestures in performances — their openness towards
interpretations — provides a layer of protection to the bodies being perceived, making it
especially effective as a form of cultural critique as its ambiguity evades surveillance. As Josh
Chambers-Letson points out in his 2013 book, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in
Asian America, the precise indeterminacy of aesthetic performances allows them to be
particularly effective in disrupting the political and legal subjection of Asian Americans.
24 He
also suggests: “Aesthetic performances are spaces that, as much as they may be used to reify
dominant racial ideology, also threaten to undo the formal ‘associations’ between, say, dominant
knowledge about racial difference and the body of the racialized subject.”25
23 Lisa Lowe also reminds us of the gap between abstract citizenship and Asian American embodied rights in
Immigrant Acts, Leslie Bow raises a similar idea on the gap between the formal citizenship of the Asian woman and
embodied contingency of her equal access to resources and institutions.
24 Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race so Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York, NY:
New York University Press, 2013), 78. 25 Ibid., 23.
15
Chapter Four: The History of Femmes of Color in Burlesque
How have queer and feminist BIPOC performances historically staged social critiques
through burlesques in US and Europe? As queer femmes of color have long been marked as
perverse in relation to an “ideal” white femininity, burlesque pioneers such as Josephine Baker
have staged impassioned critiques of racially gendered tropes as early as the 1920s. In Baker’s
famous “banana dance,” she performs in front of a background that resembles a jungle, thus
recalling stereotypes of Black primitivity and hypersexuality. However, she pauses and stops
while makes her way down a tree branch, taking moments to mock the viewer and poke fun at
them. Her banana skirt (Fig.1), reminiscent of phallic entities, also attaches symbolic indicators
of masculinity onto her body. Therefore, Baker cites dominant stereotypes of Black female
hypersexuality at the time, but stages interventions in them since the gestures and costumes of
her burlesque were left open to interpretation. In her 2000 book Second Skin: Josephine Baker &
the Modern Surface, Anne Anlin Cheng suggests that the ambiguity of the object of fetish in
Baker’s dance “highlight[s] the epistemological crisis engendered by the fetishistic system”26
that insist on a distinct, concrete, and singular object of fetish. We may further understand the
political significance of Baker’s performance through the lens of José Muñoz’s concept of
“disidentification,” which he characterizes as a tactical strategy marginalized subjects employ for
survival as they both perform themselves in ways that conform to existing characterizations of
their identities but also purposefully enact slippages to these tropes in order to transfigure them.
27 As Baker purposefully performs racially gendered tropes, she contests the logics of
fetishization through collapsing masculine signifiers of Black hypersexuality with her female
26 Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 2023)., 45.
27 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 6.
16
body. Tracing burlesque performances to our contemporary time, on the most recent season of
the television series RuPaul’s Drag Race, the trans Native Hawaiian contestant Sascha Colby
stunned the crowd with her burlesque dance for the final lip-sync competition, which earned her
the win of the season. Choosing to perform burlesque instead of doing a more conventional
vogue performance, Colby brought sex work to the foreground of LGBTQ vernacular culture.
Figure 1. Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère in Paris, 1926 @Getty Images
17
Considering her works “conceptual performances,” Tange similarly uses burlesque as a
political tool to stage cultural critiques. Frequently invoking BDSM gestures in her dances,
Tange does not conform to the pressure of female obedience but embraces “abject” sexual
gestures as forceful articulations of her queer sexuality. Her embrace of BDSM gestures illustrate
Celine Shimizu’s argument that, while Asian women have historically been cast as sexually
perverse, “a redefinition of sexuality must transpire to include what has been typically classified
as perverse, whether queer sex acts, lesbianism, sadomasochism, prostitution, asexuality,
masturbation, or other non-normative identities, acts, and practices that do not demand morality,
chastity, and demureness that discipline women.”28
In the preceding section, I demonstrated the effectiveness of performance as a medium in
contesting dominant racially gendered tropes through putting the meanings of bodies in relation.
The next section specifically discusses how such relationality is established through costumes
and gestures in burlesque performances.
28 Celine Parrenas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 229.
18
Chapter Five: Prosthetics and Gestures as Media
As parts of the body, gestures and prosthetics serve as media — tools of communication
that gain meaning through their circulation in between bodies. In her essay “Slough Media”,
Rebecca Schneider calls attention to the ways gestures inaugurate relation due to their ability to
be constantly reenacted.29 In consideration of queer sexual gestures, Juana Maria Rodriguez
highlights the generative potential of BDSM gestures to establish queer sociality outside of
heteronormative relationality. Rodriguez suggests that queer sex and its ability to transform its
own forms of signification recodes the potential of sexual performances as means instead of ends
since it enables one to disengage normative associations between gender and presumed sexual
positions.
30
Aside from gestures, scholars within queer and trans discourses have also theorized
prosthetics as an integral part of our bodies. For example, Paul Preciado suggests that what we
define as human nature “is an effect of the constant border negotiation not only between human
and animal, body and machine, but also between organ and prosthesis, organic and plastic, alive
and dead.”31 Preciado thus challenges assumptions of sexuality as natural by highlighting it as
the result of evolving discourses in the cultural realm over the course of history. Preciado
challenges existing understandings of sexuality by proposing the alternative concept of
“countersexuality,” which he characterizes as an order of prosthetics. He explains,
“countersexuality takes as its foremost goal the study of sexual instruments and apparatuses and,
there-upon, the sexual and gender relationships and becomings that are established between body
29 Rebecca Schneider, “Slough Media,” Situated Knowing, August 11, 2020, 15–43,
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367809584-3. 30 Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York
University Press, 2014).
31 Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, trans. Kevin Gerry Dunn (New York, NY: Columbia University Press,
2018), 22.
19
and machine.”32 Echoing Preciado, Jack Halberstam points out in his 2020 book Wild Things:
The Disorder of Desire that prosthetics have always already constituted a part of our bodies. He
also argues that queer desire should not limit to same sex desire, but include our desire for the
prosthetic matter. For example, Halberstam discusses the queer visual erotics of leather as the
material holds a history of marking queer sexuality. Within the field of Performance Studies,
scholars like Uri McMillan have discussed of prosthetics as media through a consideration of
prosthetics’ activation in social performances. In Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black
Feminist Art and Performance, he discusses prosthetic performance, the performance of
objecthood, as a critical strategy Black women have historically employed for survival.
McMillan defines prosthetic performance as the “dynamic matrix of bandages and other ruses”33
— drawing from both repurposed objects and embodied behaviors. I find McMillan’s theory a
particularly useful lens to examine Tange’s burlesques since the artist employs both fetish wear
and dance gestures as tools of communication on stage. The mediality of prosthetics has also
been discussed within critical fashion studies. As Susan Kaiser suggests in Fashion and Cultural
Studies, since clothes embody subjectivities, they hold the potential for the creation of
communities when subjectivities meld into collective intersubjectivities in a social setting.
34
Focusing my discussion on two burlesque performances by Tange, I will delve into the
ways she mobilizes prosthetic performance to stage refusals against colonial and
heteropatriarchal mastery of her body. How does her queer existence as an Asian woman – a
hybrid of animated personhood and nonhuman aesthetic object — intersect with BDSM gestures
32 Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, trans. Kevin Gerry Dunn (New York, NY: Columbia University Press,
2018), 22. 33 Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York
University Press, 2015), 76.
34 Susan Kaiser, Fashion and Cultural Studies (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2011).
20
and prosthetics in generating new forms of embodiments alternative to the limited channels of
Asian feminine subjectivities prescribed by dominant culture? Situating Tange’s performances
within the above histories of femmes of color in burlesque, I will discuss Tange’s “Dear
Mothers” (2018) and “Dom Balloons”(2019) performances in detail to demonstrate how she
mobilizes prosthetics and gestures in yielding agency and mobility to her body and to Asian
femme representation more broadly.
21
Chapter Six: “Dear Mothers”
Tange performed Dear Mothers at the New York burlesque festival in 2018, which I am
only able to access through video documentations posted on her website. To begin the
performance, she makes her appearance on stage in a traditional Korean Hanbok made up of
purple, green, beige tones with her back facing the audience (Fig.2), conforming to the visual
trope of Asian female anonymity and passivity. She dances around as she gradually turns towards
the audience, then subsequently takes apart layers of her costume. She concludes her
performance in Japanese shibari bondage ropes strapped all over her body, juxtaposed with yin
yang nipple pasties in the color of the South Korean flag taped on her breasts. While Tange
follows the strategies through which women of color burlesque performers in the past have
displayed their difference on stage through tropes of both cultural exoticism and erotic
availability, the ending of her piece calls attention to the ways in which her body actively
contests the stereotypes through which her difference is signified. While acknowledging how
Tange’s performance follows the format of a conventional burlesque performance, I further
discuss the various layers of agency the performance generates both in relationship to the artist’s
own background and within the larger cultural realm.
A. Agency for the performer
To begin with, the title of the performance invokes notions of the mother and the
motherland, a running theme in Tange’s work. Her most recent video work, Dear Mother, is a
video letter addressed to her birth mother who refused to meet Tange when she finally made a
trip to South Korea. Interestingly, the video only performatively addresses her birth mother, but
functions more as a documentary of her journey of finding peace with her own identity. While
the video is directed towards her birth mother, it implicitly broadens the notion of the “mother”
22
to motherland and nurturing relationships she had with her chosen family over the years. As
David L. Eng and Shinhee Han remind us in Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation,
“tansnational adoption involves the intersection of two very powerful origin myths—the return to
mother and to motherland.”35 The burlesque’s title articulates the plurality of. Through the
medium of performance, Tange stages a similar journey of finding a sense of identity outside of
the longing for origin by gradually taking off layers of the South Korean costume she adorns.
The ancient Korean hanbok ceremonial gown Tange begins the performance in was
invented during the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE–668 CE). According to Kayla, the gown
for the performance was purchased from South Korea. However, because of the high cost of the
garment, she could not afford to purchase the whole set and had to piece together the other parts
of it herself in forfeit of the costume’s cultural accuracy. She was actively aware of her
appropriation of Korean culture and her sacrilegious use of the costume by wearing it for her
burlesque. Taking the hanbok out of its geographical and ceremonial contexts, Tange puts the
meaning of the dress up for interrogation. In this case, she invokes the way Oriental costumes
have been taken up in the manner of camp by non-Asian performers such as New York-based
1960s-70s queer performer and filmmaker Jack Smith as well as members of the Cockettes, a
group of queer performers from San Francisco in the 1970s. Yet, as a South Korean-born person
who was raised outside of Los Angeles by Japanese American parents, she draws form her own
upbringing to contest the way ethnicities are often expected to form along the tight lines of
geographies through her appearance in both Korean and Japanese dress. Tange’s performance
exemplifies the Asian American literature scholar Mark C. Jerng’s argument that “transracial and
transnational adoption highlights the ways in which attachment and relationality themselves are
35 David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of
Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2019), 67.
23
crucial sites of racialization and nationalization that compose and decompose the boundaries
between persons and races.”36 Tange’s work serves as a poignant critique of assumptions about
the necessary linkages between one’s perceived identity and birth identity, thereby challenging
notions of the self as inherent and fixed by turning her perfectly visible body on stage
simultaneously illegible, unnamable, and obscure.
In this way, Tange performs her kinship to South Korean ancestry, but also demonstrates
her process of letting go as she had to navigate her distance from it growing up. Tange’s
performance defies both the expectation of transnational adoptees to either seamlessly reconnect
with their motherland or perform their assimilation into American culture. Instead, we can
understand her burlesque as a performance of “disidentification,” which Muñoz defines as a
strategy marginalized subjects employ for survival as they both work on and against dominant
ideologies. Adopting ancient Korean dress as her costume but failing to execute its cultural
accuracy, Tange purposefully articulates the impossibility of gaining full access to Korean
culture as a diasporic subject. Additionally, although the Hanbok is viewed as a marker of
Korean culture in the west, the traditional female dress itself signifies the patriarchal history of
South Korea. During Korea’s Three Kingdoms period when the dress was invented, Kisaeng
women— women who were sexual slaves to entertain government officials (the parallel of
Geisha girls in Japan, and Ji Nü in China) – were also popularized. Wearing the Hanbok for her
sexual performance at the burlesque festival, Tange calls attention to the hypersexualizing and
commodification of Asian female bodies both in Asia and in the West. The inaccuracy of the
36 Rachel C. Lee, The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (London:
Routledge, 2016), 27.
24
Hanbok thus critiques both the Western Oriental fetish and the misogynist ideologies behind the
regime from which the costume emerged.
Meanwhile, the shibari ropes Tange wore towards the end of her performance were
invented during the Japanese Edo period (1603 - 1868) as a tool of punishing wartime hostages.
The shibari ropes were later employed during Japan’s invasion of Korea and used to torture
Korean people. In the years following the Second World War, the marginalization of Korean
Japanese people in post-war Japan relegated them to professions in the sex industry,
demonstrated by the fact that a considerable percentage of the leisure industry such as sex work
and pachinko in Japan are run by Korean families who could not find work in the formal sectors
of the economy. For example, Japan’s richest man, Masayoshi Son, is Korean Japanese and
received his fortune from running pachinko parlors. Given this history, we can observe a parallel
between the ways Tange gained agency as a Korean woman under Japanese American parents
and the ways the Koreans who immigrated to Japan during the war earned money through
running the sex industry. Therefore, underneath a performance that seems to appear as an
extravagant fest of Asian cultural fusion, Tange was able to inhabit complicated narratives that
represent her negotiations with both global and personal histories.
25
Figure 2 and 3. Dear Mothers performance at the 6th annual Asian Burlesque Extravaganza at the Highline
Ballroom in New York on May 12, 2018.
26
B. Cultural Agency
Gayatri Gopinath’s theorization of queer diaspora is a particularly helpful framework to
interpret the aspects of Tange’s performance that address her disorientation in US culture.
Gopinath argues that if diaspora is formed through the search for an origin, queer diasporic
practice bypasses such an imperative by collapsing multiple temporalities and locales.
37 Tange
signifies Gopinath’s theory of diaspora with anachronistic costumes, juxtaposing ancient Korean
hanbok and Japanese bondagewear that originated during wartime, thereby disrupting Western
linear chronology. Although transnational adoptees are burdened with a fraught relationship to
the culture of their homeland, Tange conceives a space of existence in between times and
geographies through colliding temporalities against a sense of cohesion and progress. Employing
acts of shapeshifting through prosthetic costumes, Tange presents her body as one that does not
fit into a monolithic ethnic category. The “in between” space she carves out through movement
and dress holds the potential to disrupt and exceed established categories of racial and ethnic
identities.
37 Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press,
2018).
27
Figure 4. Dear Mothers performance at the 6th annual Asian Burlesque Extravaganza at the Highline
Ballroom in New York on May 12, 2018.
C. Racially Gendered Agency
I argue that Tange’s burlesque not only helps to negotiate her complex cross-cultural and
cross-ethnic identifications, but actively intervenes in existing tropes surrounding Asian
28
American femininity as it was performed in public and the recording subsequently circulated
online. As Tange was dressed in shibari ropes towards the end of the burlesque, racial
“difference” is distinctively signified through the vulnerability of flesh, through which she is able
to demonstrate racially gendered identity as affective and relational. Since burlesques typically
end with the performer naked or in minimal dress, Tange’s appearance in Shibari ropes (Fig. 4),
central to Japanese Kinbaku practices, is especially unconventional. Commonly used in the
BDSM (bondage and sadomasochism, or S & M) context in the West, these ropes tightly wrap
around her body and invoke sensations of constraint. Appearing bonded in front of the audience,
her final appearance to an extent turns the crowd from passive observers to active participants by
invoking their visceral reaction. Highlighting such shift from ethnic dress to flesh, and from
racial identity to sensation, I argue that Tange’s performance shifts to signify the way the
meaning of her body is established in between her and the audience, which allows her to work
against the colonial flattening of subjectivity by unveiling power dynamic as the result of a
relational negotiation.
Amber Musser’s discussion of S&M’s potential to displace race as one’s identity marker
is particularly relevant to my analysis. Summarizing Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault’s
writings, Musser points out that Deleuze urges us to view sensation as a mode of relationality
and affinity, through which one can be “attentive to the flesh while not reifying a connection
between experience and subjectivity.”38 She elaborates: “Deleuze’s emphasis on sensation and
affect speaks to experience, but this experience is not legible as identity, nor is it subjectforming.”39 In sum, Foucault and Deleuze point to the way S&M’s prioritization of affect and
38 Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York: New York University Press,
2014), 23. 39 Ibid., 25.
29
sensation work to deconstruct assumptions that one’s subjectivity is predetermined the moment
they were born based on their markers of racial and gender identity. Instead, by showing that
subjectivity and embodiments are constructed, and thus mutable and unfixed, S&M works
against the Enlightenment characterization of “self” as innate and essentialized.
In Tange’s burlesque, the artist proposes a way of embodying difference without
rearticulating the dominant structural underpinnings of Asian femme identity. Here, Tange’s
Shibari costume alludes to the sensational quality of flesh. Difference is signified through the
sense of constraint instead of a racial identity, which thus proposes a minoritarian form of
knowing that pivots away from culturally legible representation. This revelation of the body’s
relationship to sensation is crucial since in Asian American history, the female body is often seen
as ornamental and inanimate. Drawing on prosthetics, the performance proposes an alternative
way of representing the femme Asian body by emphasizing its capacity for feeling. As Tange
calls attention to the history of transnational adoption, a system profiting off South Korean
children, her performative enactment of the transformation from being a cultural object to a
subject capable of feeling becomes a metaphor for her own journey of healing being sold to the
West as a commodity during her adoption. In Dear Mothers, Tange brands her body with
prosthetic identity markers on her own terms and brings into view the sensational quality of her
flesh, performative strategies that feel especially poignant given how Asian Americans have
typically been represented as unfeeling by dominant media. Although Tange’s Shibari costume
indicates her performance of the act of submission, the artist takes agency by performing willing
submission, thus challenging presumed associations of Asian femininity with weakness. As
Juana Maria Rodriguez suggests, “when a female-bodied femme of color actively asserts the
subject position of sexual servant, a sexual role that is precisely what is expected of her by
30
dominant society, it is the force and articulation of her agency that mark her subjectivity as
queer.”40 In a 2021 interview, Tange shared that she had felt tokenized at nightclubs based on
race — she desired to be included to perform burlesque but was sidelined because there was a
quota for the number of Asian dancers per night and it had been exceeded.
41 This testimony
alludes to the conflicting sexual tropes of hypersexuality and asexuality governing Asian femme
subjects. Drawing on both clothed and unclothed performances, the “Dear Mothers” burlesque
allows Tange to bring such tensions to the forefront.
Burlesque channels the body’s right to range and shapeshift, a mode of performance
made all the more salient given how the movements of women and immigrants of color have
long been restricted through legal and social structures. Although Tange’s body remains subject
to an othering gaze while she is on stage, she turns the audience from passive observers of ethnic
difference represented with her Korean Hanbok into affective agents that engage with her bonded
flesh. Nevertheless, sensations of painful constraint make acutely clear that Tange’s body is
subject to harm, a vulnerability often existing as the sole mode through which bodies of color
come into visibility. Tange’s performance therefore enacts resistance to racial gendered tropes
under limitations.
40 Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York Univ.
Press, 2014), 133.
41 “Interview with Erotic Conceptualist and Performer Coco Ono by Lucy Sweetkill,” YouTube, June 1, 2021,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GukK_r4egng.
31
Chapter Seven: “Dom Balloons”
In Dom Balloons, performed in 2019 at the Townhouse Venice strip club, Tange starts off
the burlesque in a female cop costume made of black leather, fishnet tights, kitten heels, and a
large rhinestone chocker necklace that spells out the word “SEX.” She then stages a series of
intimate moments using red balloons: sitting on the balloon to push it to its limit before it pops;
occasionally placing it between her body and individuals in the crowd. Holding the balloons
between herself and the audience’s chests, Tange popped it between them, creating unexpected
movements of intimacy. As she stripped off her costume, she ended the performance dressed in
the police hat she had on since the beginning, chunky metal chains crisscrossed on her upper
body, leather bondage shorts, a studded bracelet, and zipped up black leather gloves. Once again
invoking the practice of BDSM with her gestures and fetish wear, and yet domming the audience
this time around, the effect of her performance is particularly rich in consideration of the fact it
took place at a bar in Venice that was visibly packed with Caucasian men. In my analysis below,
I will delve into the implications of S&M practice as practiced in such a race- and genderheterogenous setting.
A. Race and BDSM
The act of domming and white masculinity are closely associated together in the history
of Western imperialism. In the Asiatic context, American imperialism in Asia was precisely
enabled through the feminization of Asian bodies (male and female). Meanwhile, the exploitation
of indentured male Asian laborers within the United States was carried out through their
emasculation. In Brown Boys and Rice Queens, Eng-Beng Lim calls attention to the eroticized
dimensions of Orientalism as it involves the feminization of Asian American men.42 In his essay
42 Eng-Beng Lim, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (New York: New York
University Press, n.d.).
32
“Canton is not Boston,” Teemu Ruskola brings up that it was widely understood in the late
nineteenth century that “the exclusion of the Chinese from the United States could not possibly
injure China’s ‘dignity’ in the same way that American dignity was offended at not being allowed
to exercise its “right” to trade freely with China.” 43 These historical accounts all allude to the
way in which the rhetoric of “benevolent” paternalism on the global scale functions through
racialized dominance, demonstrating that power, whiteness, and ownership all tightly overlap.
This dynamic in the political sphere mirrors the power relations in BDSM where the dom, the
person taking more control in sexual acts, takes up the role of ownership and dominance over the
sub, the person passively receiving orders. With BDSM’s resonance in the global political
context, we can shift to think about the meaning of domming performance for an Asian female
performer who is also a transnational adoptee accepted into America. How is Tange fucking with
power by domming the room of cis Caucasian men in the audience?
In J. Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People
Make, he explains the psychological underpinnings for privileged individuals in society to crave
participation in BDSM and take on the submissive role. He mentions that while white men are
endowed with the utmost power and privilege in public, they may fantasize someone having
control over them in their private life.44 Therefore, we can view Tange’s performance as a way of
helping the audience come to terms with their vulnerability against the masculine toughness
often expected of them. Additionally, Tange subverts the expectations of the audience to be
passive observers of her burlesque by engaging them during the performance. She thus suspends
the presumed binary at burlesque shows — the active observer and the passive performer.
43 Teemu Ruskola, “Canton Is Not Boston: The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty,” American Quarterly
57, no. 3 (2005): 859–84, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2005.0050., 878. 44 James Lorand Matory, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (Durham C.: Duke
University Press, 2018).
33
Tange’s involvement of the audience into her burlesque could be understood as an intentional act
of refusal against being perceived as an Other and a passive commodity on stage. As she
described to me during our casual conversation, she hoped to subvert the typical assumption of
the Asian female body being docile, unfeeling, and totally subservient.
Figure 5. Kayla Noriko Tange 2015 © All rights reserved
B. Adoption and Ownership
Questions around racialized ownership are also particularly significant in the context of
transnational adoption since the figure of the Asian adoptee becomes a citizen of the United
States through coerced ownership by their adopted family. David Eng and Shinhee Han point to
the ways in which whiteness become intertwined with ownership in the context of transnational
adoption as the host family, who is typically white, imposes Western values on their Asian
adopted child. Tange’s case differs from the examples in Eng and Han’s analysis, as she is raised
by formerly-interned Japanese parents who were properties of the U.S. state during the Second
World War, adding another layer to her body’s subordinate relationship to the U.S. state.
34
Again, I find Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” a helpful framework to interpret
Tange’s negotiation of her subject position through the critical use of dress and gesture. Starting
off the performance in a cop hat and a leather trench coat, Tange invokes the practice of power
dressing that the fashion historian Valerie Steele discusses in Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power.
45
Adopting the police costume and the disciplinary tool of the whip, but presenting herself as a
powerful femme figure, she denaturalizes these signifiers of authority traditionally attached to
white male bodies, putting their meanings up for interpretation. Meanwhile, by enacting the
“Daddy” figure to the audience, Tange insists on the promiscuous intimacies and messy
connections derived from sexual encounters against the normative and legible kinship
structures recognized under capitalism.
Figure 6. Kayla Noriko Tange, “Dom Balloons” performance, 2015. © All rights reserved by the artist
45 Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
35
Furthermore, Tange brought the audience to recognize their own queer erotic desire. If, as
Jack Halberstam suggests, queer desire is signified by the attraction to inanimate objects,
46 then
Tange draws on the visual eroticism denoted by leather to contest predetermined
characterizations of “natural” sexualities. It is useful to refer to the rich history of leather among
global queer communities. In Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art,
Andy Campbell writes, “I consistently use leather, instead of another term, for its broad
applicability and elasticity,…, I also prefer ‘leather’ because it names one of the primary
materials in the erotic arsenal of sexual practices that falls under its purview.”47 Considering
leather as the material that binds together a myriad of sexualities, Campbell contextualizes
leather as a queer visual lexicon. As Tange moves around stage in shiny black leather, the
audience was invited to recognize and embrace their own very queer desires.
46 Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 47 Andy Campbell, Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2020), 7.
36
Figure 7. Kayla Noriko Tange, “Dom Balloons” performance, 2015. © All rights reserved by the artist
C. Shifting Between Positionalities of Power
Starting off the performance in an authoritative position domming the audience, Tange
places the viewer in the symbolic submissive position prescribed to marginalized subjects upon
birth. While Tange’s performance begins with her in authority and moving freely around the
room to interact with the audience, she eventually ends the burlesque in a state of vulnerability as
denoted by her nakedness and her return to being the still subject of the gaze. By occupying both
positions of domination and submission, she also blows up the gendered binaries attached to
these positions of power. Similar to the interstatial space she carves out with her switch of
costumes in Dear Mothers and Dom Balloons also casts her body in between Dom and Sub
positions, insisting on the uncategorizable space between these established categories of power
in sex.
Purposefully failing to perform her expected gender role, we might read Tange’s
performance through Legacy Russell’s arguments on the generative potentials behind failure. In
37
Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell argues that “[i]f existence within a hegemonic culture today
requires the gender binary to delineate the self and even to be recognized as human, then is
ceasing to exist within a gendered framework the most skillful of disappearing acts?”48 Adding
onto Russell’s observations, and considering the racially charged connotations of the Dom/Sub
dynamic, I argue that Tange’s defiance of the sexual binary also dispels the stereotypes behind
whiteness as ownership and people of color as being owned, showing the fluidity of one’s
positionality. Through switching between enacting the Dom and Sub, Tange challenges the
necessary relationship between race and one’s predetermined relations to power. Tange rejects
the polarizing binary of white masculine authority and Asian feminine obedience in an attempt to
vacate her body from being associated with a fixed power position.
48 Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2020), 68.
38
Chapter Eight: Concluding Thoughts
This thesis has contextualized Kayla Tange (Coco Ono)’s burlesque performances in the
legal and cultural histories of Asiatic femininity and burlesque performances. Through my
detailed discussions of “Dear Mothers” and “Dom Balloons,” I demonstrated the capacious ways
Tange staged refusals against the racially gendered stereotyping of Asian women. Adopting
gestures and prosthetics as tools of empowerment, Tange’s burlesques carve out alternative
spaces for Asian and queer sociality and embodiment all while working under the
heteronormative and racist expectations within the sex industry. Although these performances do
not fundamentally shift the paradigms of power between the dancer and the audience, they do
bear the potential to rearticulate cultural discourses, gesturing to alternative ways bodies can
occupy space and access liberatory ways of movement. In other words, Tange’s performancs
represent the fugitive possibilities of living and being otherwise as an Asian woman. While I
focus on Coco Ono’s burlesque performances in this project, there are many more Asian
American women that have staged refusals and critiques while working in the sex industry under
which they are expected to serve a largely cis, white, male audience. My project is part of a
larger call for sexual research within Asian American Studies and critical vocabularies for Asian
American feminist resistance through a reclamation of our sexualities instead of eschewing such
discourse.
39
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
In "Unruly Desires and Capacious Subversions: Coco Ono’s Conceptual Burlesques," I delve into burlesque performances by the Los Angeles-based multimedia artist and dancer, Coco Ono (Kayla Noriko Tange). A South Korean adoptee raised by formerly interned Japanese American parents, Tange created the very first archive of Asian American sex workers titled Private Practices. In my thesis, I delve into the ways Tange critically employs extravagant Oriental costumes, fetish wear, and BDSM gestures to subvert racially gendered tropes.
Taking up the Asian American femme body packed with contradictory tropes of synthetic objecthood and organic personhood, hypervisibility and anonymity, Tange contextualizes it between herself and the viewer so that its meaning becomes relationally negotiated. What is the significance of calling attention to the hypersexual, fetishized, and historically criminalized Asian femme body? What does fashion and glamour offer subjects whose reduction to the ornamental forecloses injury but whose precise aestheticization also invites harm? Through a discussion the "exotic" Hanbok and shibari ropes Tange wore during her "Dear Mothers"(2018) performance and cop costume made of Latex and rhinestone she put on for "Dom Balloons" (2019), I will contexualize fashion and beauty as embodied media that allows femme Asian bodies to be in constant states of shapeshifting and transformation in defiance of the act of naming. Through my discussion of Tange's burlesque costumes, I argue that the ontological reduction of Asiatic femininity to what Anne Anlin Cheng calls beautiful "ornamental surfaces" is not necessarily pathological but bears the promise for our ongoing escape.
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In the flesh: the representation of burlesque theatre in American art and visual culture
Asset Metadata
Creator
Zhao, Siyuan
(author)
Core Title
Unruly desires and capacious subversions: Coco Ono’s conceptual burlesques
School
Roski School of Art and Design
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere
Degree Conferral Date
2024-05
Publication Date
05/17/2024
Defense Date
05/17/2024
Publisher
Los Angeles, California
(original),
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
aestheticized performance,Asian American feminism,Asian American performance,burlesque,Fashion,new materialism,OAI-PMH Harvest,queer performativity,women of color feminisms
Format
theses
(aat)
Language
English
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Electronically uploaded by the author
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Jones, Amelia (
committee chair
), Kondo, Dorinne (
committee member
), Lin, Jenny (
committee member
)
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szhao337@usc.edu
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113939996
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UC113939996
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etd-ZhaoSiyuan-12944.pdf (filename)
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Zhao, Siyuan
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Tags
aestheticized performance
Asian American feminism
Asian American performance
burlesque
new materialism
queer performativity
women of color feminisms