A01=Franny Choi
anthology
artificial intelligence
asian american
asian femmes
asian femmesartificial intelligence
asian womanhood
Author_Franny Choi
Category=DNL
Category=DS
Category=JBSF11
Category=JBSL1
collection
criticism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
essay
essays
feminism
feminist
forthcoming
gender and women's studies
literary
literary collection
literary criticism
literary essays
literature
nonbinary
pacific islander
queer theory
race and ethnic studies
robots
sci-fixed
Product details
- ISBN 9780063240216
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 19 Nov 2026
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Blending lyric memoir and cultural criticism, acclaimed poet Franny Choi’s debut essay collection explores our obsession with cyborgs and what sci-fi representations of Asian femmes reveal about race, gender, sexuality, disability, labor, technology, and language. In the 2014 film Ex-Machina, a Japanese maid named Kyoko—beautiful, obedient, unspeaking—peels back the skin on her face to reveal glimmering circuitry. The white man who has been trying to understand her inscrutable behavior looks on in horror. When Franny Choi first watches this scene, their own face awash in the screen’s eerie glow, they feel a familiar mix of revulsion and self-recognition. Yes, Choi thinks, that’s what I’ve been trying to say. In this luminous essay collection, Choi descends into the uncanny valley to encounter notable cyborgs and robots from across American culture and asks why so many of them bear the faces of East Asian women. Just why is it that whenever artificial intelligence is represented, a sexy but unfeeling Asian woman enters the frame? What does the literal objectification of Asian femmes say about how the West imagines—and dreads—an increasingly automated future? Choi draws from their own experiences along with queer, feminist, and critical race theory to answer these questions. Refusing the detached safety of critical distance, they write instead “at stabbing range”—a risky intimacy that collapses the space between human and machine, critic and subject. We Radiant Things draws closer to the images carved out for us, the histories of oppression that animate them, and the future in which we try, painfully, to find ourselves.
Franny Choi is the author of three poetry collections, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2023), Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). They are Faculty in Literature at Bennington College and founded Brew & Forge, a project that aims to build connections between writers, artists, and organizers.
