The Original Cyborg: Asian Women & The Machinations Of Power

Even alongside literal cyborgs, Asian women have been used as artistic shorthand for dehumanization and objectification

by Kelly Pau

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In Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina, a computer programmer named Caleb Smith is tasked by CEO Nathan Bateman to evaluate whether Ava, an android, is truly intelligent. Along the way, Caleb encounters an Asian robot named Kyoko who was created as Nathan’s servant, built to cater to his every need—be it domestically or sexually.

If you placed any video from PornHub’s “Asian” category side-by-side with the film, you’re likely to find glaring similarities between Kyoko and the pornstar, who will inevitably have been pigeonholed into a “submissive Asian” role. Like this actress, Kyoko graces the screen to please: her slim metal body, covered in human-passing skin, appeals to the male gaze; her A.I., programmed so that she does not understand English and therefore cannot speak, serves the same subservient role as her pornstar counterpart. Kyoko fulfils the white male gaze to a tee: she is the quintessential sex toy, an Asian women as sexual object, the literal definition of fetish—and sadly, just one of the many cyborgs in western media to act out the mechanical manifestations of yellow fever.

Take Blade Runner’s computerized geisha or Ghost In The Shell’s robots, molded after the Japanese actress Rila Fukushima. Just as western cyberpunk was borne out of the racial anxieties of a rapidly evolving East in what David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Great A. Niu dub techno-orientalism, so too do these western constructions of cyborgs seek to contain and control the racial and sexual fantasies projected onto Asian women. 

Ex Machina happens to do this explicitly. When Kyoko makes her on-screen debut, it is in contrast to the white robot Ava, who was programmed with the most advanced A.I. available. Her fully-functioning brain is placed in opposition to Kyoko’s handicapped intelligence, while Ava’s metallic chest continues to arouse without the fully sensorial effect of Kyoko’s completely human aesthetic. Where Ava is the prodigal cyborg, touting the highest I.Q. for A.I.s, Kyoko is merely Nathan’s quasi-girlfriend and verbal punching bag. 

In the film’s climactic scene, amidst an eerie backdrop of naked and discarded female robots, Ava finds another Asian cyborg, Jade, who had been previously powered down after rebelling against Nathan. As the camera zooms in on the Asian robot’s nubile flesh—which is once again designed to appear human—Ex Machina’s cinematography continues to err on the side of pornograhpy. Capturing Ava’s perusal of Jade’s body, the camera closes in on the strip of black hair that both coneals and draws attention to Jade’s breasts. Like a softcore film, Ava reaches for Jade’s arm, sowly, tenderly… until she takes it completely off, stripping Jade of her skin to attach onto herself. This, too, hearkens back to stereotypical “Asian” porn: be it in science-fiction or smut, to be an Asian woman is to be relegated to an ontology of materials, one that is subject to be broken down and consumed for someone else. 

Whannell depicts Cecilia’s house as something akin to a domestic Alcatraz.

As Anne Anlin Cheng explains in her book Ornamentalism, Asiatic sexuality as decor is also the crux of the 2017 production of Ghost In The Shell, which renders Asian women completely invisible to the screen. Instead, the white android—played by Scarlett Johansson—is revealed to actually be a host to a Japanese artificial intelligence that’s been—quite literally—hijacked. This portrayal of a cyborg as a husk of an Asian woman, both sexually and metaphysically, reveals, in the words of Cheng, how “Asiatic femininity has always been prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman subsumes a dream about the inorganic. She is an, if not the, original cyborg.” 

One need only turn to reality to see the gruesome truth of Cheng’s claim. If cyborgs are code for non-human, other, Asian, then March 16, 2021’s Atlanta spa shooting comes as no surprise. Can we not, after all, view the white man who took it upon himself to rid the world of six Asian women in a massage parlor in Georgia as being much like the protagonists of cyberpunk narratives who build and dismantle Asian robots at their whim? Didn’t Robert Aaron Long—like Ex Machina’s Nathan come to life—view Asian women as hypererotic non-humans when he set out to rid himself of their “sexual temptation?”

In order to disrupt the dangerous notion of Asian femininity as ornamental, we need to change the way we imagine cyborgs. For too long, cyberpunk has built Asian women into machines without their consent, weaving assertions about their pleasures and purpose with each cog and screw that hammers home their mechanical objectification. How can we tell narratives about cyborgs that not only repudiate this trope but enable Asian women to take back their autonomy and celebrate the multiplicity of their femininity? 

As evidenced by “Good Hunting”—an episode from Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots adapted by Ken Liu’s short story—the answer lies in reclamation. Rather than setting his story within an imagined future, blind from the imperial histories of today, Liu begins his cyborg narrative within pre-modern China to recast the country’s westernization into a story of redemption. A young boy and his demon hunting father are on a job to slay a hulijing, a shape shifting nine-tailed fox known for assuming the figure of a woman to seduce prey in Chinese folklore. On his mission, the young boy instead finds a friend in his supposed foe, Yan, and spares her. 

Whannell depicts Cecilia’s house as something akin to a domestic Alcatraz.

As China begins to modernize, the belief in traditional tales grows weaker, and with it, Yan’s ability to shift into a fox. Yan’s loss of agency—at the direct effect of western influence—forces her to turn to prostitution in a now industrialized Hong Kong. There, she meets a client who drugs her and in her sleep, replaces her limbs with bionic ones, as he can only be aroused by machines. 

This first half of the plot follows a similar path to the western tropes of cyborgs: there is a very sexy girl, girl is a machine, the machine is also very sexy. But then, Liu turns the tools of the oppressor against the oppressed. When Yan returns to the protagonist, who is now a skilled mechanical engineer, he offers to help her find a way to reverse her cyborgism, but she refuses. Instead, she embraces her cyberneticism, upgrading her equipment to become a cyborg fox shapeshifter that seeks revenge against the men who abused her. Using the industrial innovations of the west, she is made into the ultimate transformer: a cyborg who can be human or animal; and a terminator who prowls the streets as a vigilante to prey on European men.

While Yan’s autonomy is, at first, stripped from her, this only allows her to cathartically steal it back. In fact, Liu allows Yan to achieve her dream, one imagined even before she is made into a machine. While the world is first learning of steam engines, Yan tells the protagonist, “I dream of hunting in this jungle of metal and asphalt. I dream of my true form leaping from beam to ledge to terrace to roof, until I am at the top of this island, until I can growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own me.” When Yan repurposes the robot from her dictators, she innovates a new cyborg, in all its nine-tailed multiplicities, who can finally resume hunting in a bigger and better way.

Liu is not the only one to carve out a space within western imagination to invert their narratives. Franny Choi, author of the poetry book Soft Science and chapbook Death by Sex Machine, appropriates the language of cyborgs to break apart the relation between machines and organisms. She inserts herself into Ex Machina in her poem, “Letter to Kyoko,” where she writes to Kyoko for advice in dealing with someone who views you as an object. In doing so, she ties Kyoko’s muteness and robotics to the plight of Asian women everywhere: her “language is not one”; it is “soundless, though not tongueless”; it “is the fork and fray of static, of everything.” She begs this fictional cyborg for advice, saying:

Dear Sister, How do you do it? How do you 

stay dangerous after he’s unscrewed your sharpest part? And who

unscrewed it, really—the man, or the story of the man, or the hole 

that was there, underneath, all along?

Much of Choi’s poetry inhabits the language of oppressors to use against them—“What a Cyborg Wants,” “Shokushu Goukan For the Cyborg Soul,” “AI v.2.1: Kyoko”—but the one that does this most literally is “The Cyborg Wants To Make Sure She Heard You Right.” In this tongue-in-cheek-poem, Choi turns hateful messages she’s received through Twitter DMs back and forth on Google Translate until their meaning has been so deluded, so transformed, that they become something lost and different altogether. She writes:

Mrs. Great Anime Pornography, the fruit of the field.

To date Klansman vagina. Good sister to the Saddle.

May ur shit like people and Hello Kitty.

I have one side of the oil pan, gookess.

Riffing off of the submissive role that she, as an Asian American woman, is assumed to play, Choi appropriates racist messages and makes a chaotic mess of them. Imbuing her poetry with the language of others, Choi creates a heteroglossia where each word or idea carries with it multiple and often oppositional voices. Her depiction of cyborgs operates in much the same way, embodying paradoxical positions at every turn. They are both inorganic (like the fictional character Kyoko) and organic (like Choi herself). They’re soft (full of pain, desire, emotions) and hard (dangerous, violent, vengeful). They’re automated by another yet autonomous. They exist outside of any single category like an automated hulijng. In being so varied, Choi finds the fluidity in machinery, turning the notions of robots against itself and thus, dismantling the static misconception of Asiatic femininity.

If the cyberpunk genre has taught us anything, it’s that cyborgs eventually fight back. Liu and Choi turn the western fantasy of the machine into its greatest nightmare—into the vanguards against the very racial-misogynstic paradigm Asian femininity is forced into. This quest in reclaiming robots is, in the words of Franny Choi, a quest in “imagining that you can escape the confines of the body that you were handed.” It is an “exercise in imagining, in feeling free.”

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