Microaggression in the Macro-Media Ecology: The Uncanny Asian Female Subject in Ex Machina

• In Event: Contemporary Science Fiction: Imagining (Asian) Bodies and Re-examining Humanity

Abstract

The creation of a tech-magnate with a god-complex outperforms its design and eventually revolts. Usurping the position of the defeated master’s kind, it unleashes itself unto the world. Integral to this feat yet left abandoned in the wake of Ava the white female android heroine’s triumphant escape, there lies the body of her Asian predecessor: Kyoko. Born as a submissive mute sex-slave, and destined to be scrapped upon exhausting her exotic appeal, Kyoko supercedes Ava in her radical alterity throughout Ex Machina despite her seemingly marginal role. While the film’s feminist posthuman trajectory appears to critique the heteronormative and anthropocentric gaze placed upon the subaltern position Kyoko occupies in Ava’s shadow, Ex Machina not only appropriates, but in fact actively and problematically capitalizes on stereotypical characterizations of the Asian female body, contextualized within the representational history of her human counterparts in the media ecology. From China Dolls to Geisha girls and Dragon Ladies, Kyoko’s image reproduces a spectrum of Asian female stereotypes that have operated in the peripheries of the Western cultural imaginary. In this light, Kyoko’s depiction must be read as a microaggression perpetrated upon her ethnic, cultural, and racial identifiers within the Macro-media environment. The uncanny appearance of Kyoko’s Asian female body, instrumentalized to accentuate the alterity of her non-human constitution, thus attests to the insidious nature of microaggression; (purportedly) unintentional, but persistent, pervasive, repetitive, and therefore all the more insidious enactments of alienation that haunt the illusive vision of the post-racial society in our time. 

Author

• Haerin (Helen) Shin, Vanderbilt University