Politics of Composure: Performing Asian/American Femininities

Abstract

Politics of Composure: Performing Asian/American Femininities examines composure as a reoccurring conceit, emotional labor, and performance of feminized racial subjects through the multiethnic literature and cultural production of the post-Civil Rights era. Staging an array of literary and visual readings, from Yoko Ono’s 1965 Cut Piece performance where she remained poised in an encounter with sexual harassment, to Anita Hill’s 1991 measured testimony for the Senate Judiciary Committee, I see composure as a gender and racial performance defined by self-control. While this dissertation focuses on Asian/American women, central to composure is a relational analysis of literary and visual work by Black women. Through this approach, composure is a capacious analytic which I distill for the dissertation’s focus on how composure entangles the troublesome representational logics of the Asian/American body politic while offering another way to think through and with labor, broadly conceived as affective, artistic, and capitalist labor. Further, the project is animated by an attention towards what limns dis/composure, which bears a broader question in the ethics of looking or recognizing another’s composure. I ask: What does dis/composure offer for understanding racial and gender performance and social relation? How does dis/composure form a method and analytic for conceptualizing and understanding racial femininities as political projects?

In my dissertation, I demonstrate how composure is a drama of misrecognition, familiarity, and survival through women of color feminist theory, psychoanalysis, performance studies, and the aesthetics of the “cool” located in the fields of Black and Afro Asian studies. Femininity and feminization through configurations of the maternal and mothering make up a central tension in conceptions of dis/composure as both willed acts of self-control and as social relations. Therefore, composure emerges as an analytic at the crossings of performance, psychic states, maternal/social relation, and material embodiment. My dissertation offers three main findings. First, composure as a performance concept, as a performative, offers another theoretical premise not driven through repetition, but rather, interruption. Composure is not a fixed psychic condition or surface, but is an ephemeral act, i.e., you find and lose your composure. This marks the conceptual organization of the dissertation, through the interruption of noise and illness, or dis/composure. Second, this dissertation contributes to sound studies scholarship on Asian/American femininity by asserting the habitual conflicts between signal and noise for composed, femininized Asian subjects as a significant ontology. Third, composure generates a distinct method for studying racialized femininities that entails the broader ethical questions of racial injury and discourses of liberal sentimentalism. Through composure, this dissertation establishes a starting point into rethinking the political coalition of racial femininities across their distinct ontologies, visualities, and histories of racial capitalism.