ManChyna’s Queer Tiger Mom

Abstract

In this article, I introduce Queer Tiger Mom, a conceptual project by performance artist ManChyna that disrupts Asian desire for assimilation into white futurity. The Queer Tiger Mom project responds to two controversial texts that inform North American Asian racialization and its assimilatory relationship with whiteness—the Maclean’s Magazine article “‘Too Asian’?” and the American publication of Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Disassimilation is my neologism, applying José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification to the narrative of assimilation into liberal multiculturalism. Disassimilation describes Queer Tiger Mom’s assimilation-focused form of Muñoz’s analytic category, neither rejecting nor fully adopting the desire for racial incorporation. ManChyna’s Queer Tiger Mom takes multiple forms as a cultural text—a party, performance and song (“Tiger Mom,” 2012). i With all its elements taken together, Queer Tiger Mom mobilizes the racialized, gendered and sexual pathologies projected onto North American Asians, which Chua and Maclean’s reproduce. Channeling these pathologies through Man-Chyna’s queer Asian masculinity, Queer Tiger Mom re-circuits the sexual and racial puerility that David Eng (2001) argues is projected onto Asian masculinity. ManChyna’s Queer Tiger Mom crosses this psychosexual-racial pathology with a gender-inappropriate motherhood, evading these tropes by exaggerating them in a physically impossible and antisocial sexual union—dom top mother and power bottom son in one versatile body. Queer Tiger Mom depravedly embraces sexual and racial pathology, animating and terminating the heterosexual futurism of Battle Hymn by mobilizing Chua’s servile assimilation with the deathly potential of queer Asian masculinity. By queerly exaggerating the pathologies manifest in Chua’s Battle Hymn and ManChyna’s embodiment, Queer Tiger Mom emulates, but ultimately denaturalizes, their presumed connections.