UC Irvine

This dissertation explores how transmedial performances of racialized sexualities disrupt disciplinary regimes of visuality, inviting a deeper consideration of embodiment. Blending methods of performance ethnography with practices of close reading, I track the multi-sensorial engagements and entanglements of in/human subjects and objects in spaces organized by or around cinema, musical performance, public health, museum exhibitions, and adult film to understand how these sites represent race and sexuality and express it as well. I argue that sex/objects co-perform alongside “properly human” bodies and co-create an intersensory and relational Asian/American sexual ecology. My research mobilizes ecology as a theoretical and methodological framework to capture the dynamic interrelationship between subjects and objects, places and bodies, and energies and rhythms emerging from and circulating through technologically mediated performances of racialized sexualities. Taking up the question of racialized sexualities ecologically, I argue, detaches sex from the over determining disciplinary boundaries of “the human,” and opens up multidimensional, multisensory, and multiscalar approaches to whom and what is accounted for in the assemblage of “Asian/American sexualities.”

Chapter two, “Pharmacologizing Wellness: HIV, PrEP, and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” examines how public health organizations appropriate the aesthetic practices of pornography organizations vis-à-vis public service announcements produced by the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center (APIWC) in San Francisco. The third chapter, “Bound, Drowned, and Drilled: Staging Sexual Sensation at kink.com” explores the role of staging sensorium across two different transmedial sites of BDSM performance of pornography production: the live studio tours offered by kink.com of the historically preserved Armory building housing the sets and the 2013 documentary about the company, Kink Focusing on the stages of performance, as a choreographed transmedia practice. Chapter four, “Gay Geek Socialities and 8-Bit Aesthetics: H.P. Mendoza Queers the Asian Art Museum” traverses the museum space as a form of queer nightlife producing, exhibiting, and experiencing racialized sexualities. The epilogue, “Prosthetic Intimacies: Sexing Queer via Rico Reyes’ AC/DC,” takes a scene of erotic encounter between a man and household appliances, allowing us to think otherwise about the onto-epistemological boundaries of what is “sex.”