a terrible femininity: futures of radical uselessness

In colonial Hong Kong, a Chinese woman Yan shows up at the home of her childhood friend, Liang, to evade the imperial police pursuing her for stealing money from the governor’s son. When she begins to disrobe in his room, Liang turns away thinking that she, a prostitute, is trying to seduce him. She insists that he look at her, with ‘no seduction in her voice’ (Liu, 2012a), Liang notes. He turns to see that instead of human limbs, Yan has ‘the most beautiful mechanical legs [he] had ever seen’ (ibid.). As it turns out, while working as a mistress for the governor’s son, he had her drugged and remade into a cyborg, an indefatigable sexual machine. ‘Will you help me?’ (ibid.), she asks, and Liang, an engineer of automata, affirms that they would reverse ‘this’—to take her back to humanity, or rather femininity.

Yan categorically rejects the offer: ‘No … That’s not what I want’ (ibid.).

This ontological rejection in Ken Liu’s short story ‘Good hunting’ (2012a) is particularly striking because Yan had never really been a human. As a hulijing—part fox, part woman—she had been a figure of alterity who existed simultaneously as adjacent and in opposition to humanity, while yearning for ‘human things in [her life]: conversation, beautiful clothes, poetry and stories, and occasionally, the love of a worthy, kind man’ (ibid.). ¹ Despite her prior affinity towards humanity and the violent conditions of her separation from it, in this crucial juncture she chooses to move further away from humanity by asking Liang to turn her into a cyborg-fox, relinquishing the human remnants in her by becoming an object.

The ontological and epistemological conflation of being a woman and being an object—usually a sexualised and commodified object—has been crucially emphasised in feminist theory and gender studies. ² Furthermore, racialised bodies, colonised subjects and disabled bodies have been variedly apprehended as objects, especially in colonial and capitalist contexts. ³ In Yan, objectification accrues along multiple axes—gender, race, animality, sexuality and coloniality—and her movement across different ontologies both speaks to the profound crisis of her embodiment and gestures to a post-humanist proposition of existence and capacities beyond the human.

For the most part, feminist postcolonial responses to objectification have been to ‘remedy’ it by ‘rehumanizing the othered bodies’, i.e. by giving back humanity (Kim, 2015, p. 298). Counterintuitively, Yan responds to her objectification by giving up human agency, subjectivity and power in favour of a seemingly disempowering objecthood by becoming an animal-machine assemblage. ‘Human’ is a key word here, as the liberal humanist tradition recognises human capacities for power and agency as attributes, as necessary conditions, of subjecthood, even as its category of ‘human’ is itself based on ‘exclusionary configurations that create otherness’ (ibid, p. 295). In objecthood, Eunjung Kim (ibid.) sees a challenge to this exclusionary legacy of humanity and subjecthood, especially in relation to disabled bodies. She makes the provocation that by becoming object, i.e. by embracing vulnerability and a practice of powerlessness, hierarchies of ableism and histories of oppression are dismantled (ibid.). ⁴ What Kim effectively offers is a vision of a future outside of inherited oppressive conceptions of humanity.

Turning my attention to the figure of the woman of colour, I ask: burdened as we are with legacies of objectification and the feminist, anticolonial grievances against it, what can this promise of a radical future look like in practice? In this article, I argue that the wilful embodiment of objecthood, as practised by Yan, creates an anti-utilitarian future founded upon strategies of unintelligibility that enable women, specifically women of colour, to exist outside of sexualised, racialised and commodified femininity.

Colonial subjection and the nonhuman

The story, told from Liang’s perspective, opens with young Liang and his father, demon hunters, in hot pursuit of a hulijing who has bewitched a villager. Liang is first entranced by ‘the most beautiful lady [he] had ever seen’ and later, terrified by the animality of the hulijing: ‘She howled, and the sound, like a dog’s but so much wilder, caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. She turned and snarled, showing two rows of sharp, white teeth, and I stumbled back’ (Liu, 2012a). The hulijing is first set up to be seen as the subject, the desirous seducer and ravenous hunter: a threat to humanity. However, when Liang meets Yan, the hulijing, as she shifts from fox to human form, he is erotically drawn towards her nude body even as he attempts to capture and kill her. This scene shows the hulijing to be the persecuted object, the hunted animal and the desired female body. The hulijing’s porous animal-human personhood visibilises how Western philosophical conceptions of humanity/ism have excluded certain lives from value and legitimacy by deploying logics of animalisation, objectification and commodification.

In their ensuing conversation, Yan challenges the misogynistic attitudes towards hulijing and prompts Liang to question his inherited beliefs about the malevolence of demons. To his aspersions that hulijing seduce and devour men, Yan asserts that ‘A man can fall in love with a hulijing like he can with any woman’ (ibid.). Liang discounts this similarity, but Yan points out his own erotic interest in her naked body. Drawn to Yan’s company and conversation, Liang protects Yan from his father, recognising the humanity in her othered body. And yet, this cross-species relationality is emergent from his erotic affinity towards Yan, a recognition of her feminine humanity and of its sexual utility. It is this specific utility that makes her intelligible, and thus usable, as a human.

Over the years, Liang and Yan try to adapt to their changing world as myriad industrial and technological innovations ushered in by colonialism erode the old beliefs in demons and magic. ⁵ Demon hunters are no longer needed in the steam-powered and automata-enhanced colonial regime, and Yan’s ability to shapeshift into her fox form gradually reduces. And thus, the two friends separately migrate from their childhood home in rural China to the retro-futuristic cityscape of colonial Hong Kong. Liang finds employment as one among many Chinese labourers working to run the funicular railway to Victoria Peak where the ‘masters’ of Hong Kong live and which is thus forbidden to the Chinese. Finding an affinity for machines, he later ascends to the role of an engineer. His supervisors note that ‘It will certainly be cheaper than hiring a real engineer from England’ (ibid.), pointing to the exploitative, utilitarian labour system in place that values skill and labour differentially across different races and ethnicities.

On the other hand, stuck as a human, Yan is ontologically marked as a woman of colour, a colonial subject, a sexual object and a labouring body, experiencing these augmented states of abjection in becoming increasingly embedded in the structures of colonial-capitalist modernity. When they meet in the city after many years, she tells Liang about her profession as a prostitute:

In this form, what can I do? I don’t have claws. I don’t have sharp teeth. I can’t even run very fast. All I have is my beauty, the same thing that your father and you killed my mother for. So now I live by the very thing that you once falsely accused my mother of doing: I lure men for money. (ibid., emphasis in original)

The narrative of the nonhuman hulijing Yan becoming imbricated in the nexus of gendered racialisation, erotics of race, coloniality and capitalist labour lays bare the dehumanising and utilitarian logics of colonial subjection. While she was a figure of abjection in rural China’s old magic set-up as well, her being co-opted into racialised humanity in a colonial-capitalist regime leads to further levels of abjection. As a Chinese woman, she is a labouring body in the global networks of colonial industry and an object of imperial libidinal desires, the ultimate fulfilment of which is her codification as a racialised cyborg crafted specifically for sexual labour.

In a similar vein, Liang is later commissioned to experiment with mechanical limbs that would eventually replace Chinese coolies, objectifying them as labouring body parts and making them altogether obsolete, the colonial dream of inexhaustible labour:

In the mansions up on the Peak, I heard—though I’d never seen—that automatic sweepers and mops I designed roamed the halls discreetly … The expats could finally live their lives in this tropical paradise free of reminders of the presence of the Chinese. (ibid.)

As colonised subjects, Yan and Liang orientate themselves or are forcefully made to orientate towards and eventually become objects, as a mode of negotiated survival in a labour system wherein they are ‘expendable [as humans] and indispensable [as labouring bodies, as objects]’ (Mbembé, 2004, pp. 373–405). The story offers a bleak, stark vision of the future of our inherited colonial-capitalist labour system by indulging in its ultimate fantasy instantiated in the figure of the female cyborg and the automata worker: turning these racialised, sexualised, commodified labouring bodies into actual material objects.

In the next section, I turn to Yan’s ontological arc to clarify the stakes of her multi-species embodiment, specifically in the context of her choosing to become entirely object, seemingly giving in to this colonial-capitalist utilitarian fantasy.

From ‘fur and flesh’ to ‘metal and fire’

In Ornamentalism (2018), Anne Cheng argues that the synthetic quality of Asiatic femininity in the colonial-capitalist gaze stems from a racial-material history that conflates the yellow woman and the ornament. Cheng (ibid., p. 17) excavates the specific racialisation of Asiatic femininity that works ‘not through biology but through synthetic inventions and ornamentations’. Drawing on an orientalised history of the ornament as a gendered and racialised material artifact, she proposes the yellow female body as a site where ‘the intractable intimacy between being a person and being a thing’ (ibid.) coheres. Yan’s ontological arc shows how despite her alternating embodiments as an animal, a human and a cyborg, her being a racialised woman makes her always already an object. The eventual object-becoming of Yan is anticipated by the ornamentalisation of hulijing early in the story. In the initial encounter, Liang compares the beauty of hulijing to ‘the paintings of great beauties from the Tang Dynasty the opera troupe had hung around their stage’ (Liu, 2012a)—ornamental, peripheral and decorative. Later, Liang notes that when Yan steals from the governor’s son, the bigger scandal is the stealing and not that the son had a Chinese mistress because ‘it was expected that he would’ (ibid.). The implication is that Yan, as a Chinese female colonial subject, would be in the periphery of an English coloniser.

This peripheral existence of the yellow woman is read by Cheng (2018, p. 3) as a unique ontological position—termed perihumanity—which is ‘more comparable to objects … such that bodies are not so much disaggregated as they are thickly encrusted’. The vocabulary of ornamentalism, ‘thickly encrusted’, invokes the laborious description of her hard metal body by Liang:

I took in her chrome torso, slatted around the waist to allow articulation and movement; her sinuous arms, constructed from curved plates sliding over each other like obscene armor; her hands, shaped from delicate metal mesh, with dark steel fingers tipped with jewels where the fingernails would be. (Liu, 2012a)

Liang describes this metal and chrome body as both ‘delicate’, especially the hands, perhaps in that they articulate human tactual sensation, and ‘obscene’, in that it is like armour, exceeding human power. Yan recalls the night when she first realises this supra-human strength in her metal arms—‘I had let him do all this to me, to replace me part by part, mourning my loss all the while without understanding what I had gained’ (ibid.). She asserts, ‘A terrible thing had been done to me, but I could also be terrible’ (ibid., emphasis in original) and recounts how she choked the governor’s son until he had fainted. Liu (2012b) says that this moment is meant to express ‘the experience of being a member of a colonized population’.

As Cheng writes (2018, p. 137), ‘Racial and gender difference chart a history of profound dehumanization, but at the same time, they have provided the most powerful and affective agents for humanizing the dreams of synthetic inventions’. Yan’s body—racialised femininity at large—offers a malleable, flexible and ‘infinitely iterable’ site for imperial techno-material transformations and desires but also provides the blueprint for a ‘terrible’ femininity. It is notable that Donna Haraway’s (1991 [1985], p. 174) cyborg as a figure embodying a synthetic subjectivity emerges from her theorisations around labouring women of colour, especially Korean immigrant women working in assembly lines. ⁶ Haraway’s cyborg urges a rejection of feminist identity politics, a move towards a future of animal-human-machine fusions and multi-species affinity (ibid.). Indeed, Yan’s ‘terrible’ femininity premises a powerful feminist, anticolonial retaliation, but the history of her own body shows how in colonial-capitalist contexts, women of colour exist ‘with machines and as machines, treated as obsolete objects’ (Kim, 2015, p. 315) such that even in a supra-human cyborg body, she is still essentially an object of utility, specifically of sexual utility. In my reading, her climactic choice to step further into objecthood, by embracing a cyborg-fox, opens a far more radical vision of a feminist, anticolonial, post-humanist future.

The Asiatic woman offers two simultaneous mythic visions, ‘atavistic (the geisha, the slave girl) and futuristic (the automaton, the cyborg)’ (Cheng, 2018, p. 137)—and in both these visions, she is marked for use. Yan’s ontological arc follows this script in offering us the atavistic ‘fur and flesh’ hulijing and the ‘metal and fire’ cyborg. While the utility of the cyborg is clarified in the story, the hulijing is initially presented as a threat rather than a commodity. But its existence has the utility of maintaining employment for men as demon hunters in rural China and, associatively, of maintaining their masculinity. ⁷ But it is when she is stuck as a human that Yan actively experiences being a use-object, when she must become a prostitute to survive, and experiences the most abject forms of colonial subjection in being remade into a cyborg without her consent. The reproduction of colonial-capitalist practices relies on deploying dehumanisation as a tactic of control and coercive exploitation, but by wilfully eliminating human (feminine) utility from her body, Yan attempts to become wholly unintelligible to the system.

A dream of being unusable

In the first part of the story, as Yan and Liang take stock of their changed world, Yan remarks: ‘the old magic is leaving. A more powerful kind of magic has come’ (Liu, 2012a). As Yan sees it, the old magic, the system that had sustained her as a hulijing and created the need for demon hunters, has been eroded by industrial technology, which she deems to be ‘a more powerful’ new magic, transforming their landscape and their lives. She insists that they must find newer ways to ‘survive’ in the new world, implying that survival for colonial subjects is linked to utility. They must find different ways of being of service to the world.

The old magic–new magic dichotomy staged in the story also rehearses the script of imperialist presumption of the primitivity and barbarism of the colony, justifying colonisation as a project to guide the primitive into modernity and humanity/ism. ⁸ It is also this presumption of incompetence that provides the scaffolding for the systemic dehumanisation and objectification of colonised populations as labouring, exploitable bodies. The insidious nature of the new magic is wholly revealed when they move to Hong Kong, for the new magic is really colonialism, the shadow puppeteers of capitalist innovation. The landscape change, an analogue to the larger systemic changes and to colonial subjection, points to the historical process of 1) a country becoming a colony that is, much like the woman of colour, peripheral to the empire and ornamental to its imperialist expansion, and 2) colonised subjects becoming usable objects.

Years later, when the two friends meet in the city, both working towards survival in their own ways, Yan has changed her mind about survival. To Liang’s acceptance of his survival strategy as an engineer for the colonial masters, Yan asks ‘but will [you] thrive? Are you happy to keep an engine running all day, yourself like another cog? What do you dream of?’ (Liu, 2012a). Liang reflects on how he couldn’t remember his dreams, letting his mind ‘grow to fit the gaps between the ceaseless clanging of metal on metal’ (ibid.). This points to an insidious, psychic objectification, of identifying with and as an object, stemming from experiences of dehumanisation in his racialised, colonised body. This amplification of colonial objectification is in service of the white imperialist future that Liang is helping to build for his masters, which will ultimately erase bodies like his. Yan’s eventual object-becoming, however, offers an alternative model to colonial objectification.

At this point in the story, when Yan has worked for several years as a prostitute and has not yet been changed into a cyborg, her dreams are of ‘hunting in this jungle of metal and asphalt … imagining [her] true form leaping from beam to ledge to terrace roof until [she] is at the top of this island, until [she] can growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own me’ (ibid.). Hunting here recalls a past where she, as an animal, had hunted other animals for subsistence and was hunted by humans in a multi-species ecosystem; power for her has always been a close cousin to survival and not so much a basis for a hierarchy of life. She yearns for her ‘true form’, presumably her lost animality, and it seems that her project is one of feminist empowerment and revenge, a specifically gendered kind. This dream seems possible to her when she tastes the ‘terrible’ power in her cyborg femininity, and she comes to Liang seemingly wanting all the material power and none of human frailty. Just as Yan as a hulijing had survived in rural China using the very animality that had made her abject, it is also in collaboration with the new technology that she finds a return to her true form, a new body capable of hunting again that she designs herself. When the transformation is complete, Liang sees her with a power made of ‘fire, smoke, engine oil and polished metal’, as a ‘glorious hunter’ (ibid.). One might read that the intended implication for this new body is that of a vengeful violence against the masculinist colonial-capitalist system. Instead, I propose a reading against the grain for this scene, one guided by objecthood-based critique.

As mentioned earlier, dehumanisation has been deployed as a tactic of colonial and capitalist control, one that sees marginalised peoples as pliant for extractive utility—as ‘exploitable humanity’ (Kim, 2015, p. 306). Kim (ibid., p. 307) contends that, ‘to be properly human as a woman of color, ironically, is to be equipped with capacities exploitable in global production’. Remember that Yan’s utility—for ornamental, aesthetic, industrial and sexual labour—stems from the recognition of her feminine humanity, whether as a shapeshifting hulijing, as a Chinese woman in a colony or as a female cyborg. If humanity has enabled a specific utilitarian dehumanisation, in becoming a cyborg-fox Yan discards the human remnants that are in her, thereby circumventing the usable capacities of her body and the utilitarian designs of the colonial-capitalist system on her body. The hold and power that the liberal humanist system has over marginalised peoples is in its purported promise of rehumanisation, of giving humanity back, of empowerment. In wilfully becoming object, Yan not only overturns the power of the system to determine and decide her ontological status but, in my reading, also confounds the political category of power itself. Contrary to Liang’s visualisation of her as a hunter with new power, I see her seeking not object power but rather the unintelligibility of objecthood by placing herself outside the structures and systems that reproduce hierarchical power. The ‘terrible’ that had meant Yan’s supra-human strength here indexes a ‘terrible’ ontology that disengages with power and utility and, in doing so, becomes unintelligible to the system. In my reading, an anticolonial, post-humanist and feminist future coheres in a practice of anti-utilitarian unintelligibility; a careful, sustained dismantling of language, structures and systems of use and utility is necessary for a future outside of inherited systems of sexualisation, commodification and fetishisation for women of colour.

‘I will find others like me and bring them to you. Together, we will set them free’ (Liu, 2012a), Yan tells Liang before flying off at the end. Her project has decidedly changed from that of revenge or empowerment into one of manifesting a radical future of being unusable and unintelligible for people like her wading amidst varied networks of power. An ornamental myth in origin, Yan pursues becoming wholly inscrutable to history, discourse and systems.

If we turn to previously presumed passive sites—corruption, irresolution, silence dehumanisation—and look for potential rupture therein, might we excavate a wider, fuller, fertile range of radical resistances beyond narrow, legible—thus exclusionary—understandings of resistance and agency?