In a call-out to writers, Disobedient’s new articles editor Robina Nguyen writes about the xenophobic and anti-Asian roots of techno orientalist sci-fi.

Cyberpunk emerged to absolve growing fears about an Asianized West: If it is going to survive, it has to drop the racism.

It’s been 9 years since James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.1 premiered at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. 

The MCU cult classic became sensationalized for its intimate action, playful humor and killer retro soundtrack. Its latest volume debuted this May and has grossed more than $781 million worldwide. 

But the otherwise light-hearted film revealed an unpleasant anti-Asian sexist undercurrent. In the second volume, Mantis––an Asian-presenting extraterrestrial with empathic powers––is introduced to the Guardians of the Galaxy, a team of intergalactic mercenaries who defend the Andromeda galaxy. 

Since the 2017 debut, Mantis has been negged, belittled and infantilized. Drax, one of the Guardians, calls her “disgusting,” “weak” and “horrifying,” even going as far as making vomiting gags when he sees her. 

Mantis is treated as a “pet” and her ignorance of social customs is used as a cheap punchline. She is presented as a naïve and trusting character because of her upbringing and pet-master relationship with her foster parent, Ego, who exploits Mantis’ powers and gets her to put him to sleep. 

Her relationship with male characters in the film are profoundly reminiscent of the submissive Asian woman trope coined in the 1830s. 

Created in 1973 by writer Steven Englehart and artist Don Heck, Mantis was the first woman of color officially introduced as an Avenger. Since then, she has been featured in more than 100 comic issues as a badass martial artist and a fiercely determined and compassionate cosmic superhero.

So how did Mantis’ on-screen rendition go so awry? 

Let’s unpack. 

Anti-Asian misogyny in sci-fi emerged in the early 1900s, and director James Gunn is no stranger to it. It’s rooted in techno-orientalism, a concept coined in 1995 that describes the Western idea of using Asian cultures to represent the near-future. It pervades sci-fi and real-world news coverage of Asia, reducing Asian bodies to machines and riddling the media with futures full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai. 

Ridley Scotts’ seminal 1982 film Blade Runner is set in dystopian Los Angeles with East Asian-influenced cyberpunk aesthetics. The Japanese-inspired action sequences of The Matrix and the futuristic Asian division of the 2012 film Cloud Atlas also draw inspiration from techno-orientalism. 

Time and time again, Asian women are depicted in the sleek, silver bodies of cyborgs and androids. Our bodies are reduced to clones, docile servants and objects of desire for white male fetishization. 

Mantis is glaring proof of sci-fi’s inability to depict Asian women without drawing upon dehumanizing, submissive stereotypes.  

A quick crash course into orientalism: In 1978, Palestinian-American professor Edward Said first popularized the concept as a huge call-out to shitty writers from the 19th century. It was a time when European male writers would ramble on about the “glorious Orient” in spiraling manuscripts. He wrote: “The Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action…European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.” 

In other words, the Orient was a made-up concept, a haphazard patchwork of Asiatic and SWANA (South-West Asian and North African) cultures used to clearly distinguish Europe and place it at the center of human progress. It was a European invention, a fictional, homogenous region of exotic beings and haunting landscapes. “If the Orient was a place that required conquering and aid from greater, mightier powers, then Europe was perfectly poised and justified to extend out into the world and conquer it,” writes Chinese-born New Zealand author Chloe Gong.

Today, American media continues to pump out images and aesthetics of an imaginary Asia to articulate its fears of a futuristic Asian-dominated world.

But why do Asian women––not Asian men––often get the short end of the stick?

According to Edward Said’s Orientalism, European writers would draw up images of weak, submissive Asian women to contrast the strength of the West. Artificial Asian fembots are just the newest twist in the longstanding cultural fetishization and hypersexualization of Asian women.

On March 16, Robert Aaron Long fatally shot eight women at three Atlanta-area Asian-owned spas – six of whom were of Asian descent. The Omicron surge had taken the world by storm and former President Trump’s “kung-flu virus” and “Chinese virus” nicknames for the coronavirus disease made national headlines. 

Long told the police he had a “sex addiction” that triggered the shooting and saw the massage parlors as a “temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.”

As Vox’s Li Zhou reported, Long’s statement about his “temptation” speaks to the enduring sexualization of Asian American women and masseuses “who have been exoticized and fetishized as sexual partners as far back as the 1800s,” Zhou writes. 

When wars wreaked destruction in Asian countries, thousands of women were forced into prostitution to survive. The emergence of films after U.S.-led conflicts in Asia only solidified the image of the submissive, hypersexualized Asian woman.

Most analysts believe techno orientalism is rooted in the yellow peril, a racist metaphor that shows Asians as a racial threat to white America and exposes nations like China and Japan in alliance to conquer, subjugate and enslave the Western world. 

The yellow peril was developed in the late 19th century after the U.S. Civil war – after slavery was abolished, a door to cheap Asian labor opened up. White Americans felt threatened by the influx of Chinese immigrants and in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Later, Russian sociologist Jacques Novikow coined the term in the essay “Le Péril Jaune” (The Yellow Peril), which was used as a fear-mongering tactic to encourage the European colonization of China. 

Techno orientalist genres are rooted in anti-Asian xenophobia. “If we want to bring [cyberpunk] back,” tweets Chloe Gong, “we have to first grapple with the inherent racism in the tropes of the unfeeling technologized cyborg and the Asianized West.”

About Robina

She/her

Robina Nguyen is a Toronto-based high school student and the current EIC of The Outland Magazine. Her work has been featured in the West End Phoenix, Ambre Magazine and Shameless Magazine among others. She loves to paint, haunt local bookstores and argue about the Oxford comma