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Abstract

From Dr. Fu Manchu’s villainous ambitions to destroy Western democracies in the 1930s, to dystopian urban landscapes modeling East Asian cities in 1980s cyberpunk media, and the roboticization and commodification of Asian female bodies in the 2010s, Western media has a long history of deploying orientalist and techno-orientalist tropes centering the West and maintaining white imperialist agendas. In this paper, I ask: How does contemporary Western science fiction TV about advancing technology reproduce techno-orientalism? This study aims to identify how techno-orientalism is perpetuated and reconfigured in modern visual culture and contextualize these representations within current discourses on Asia(ns) and technology. I conduct a content analysis on one episode of Black Mirror (2011) and two episodes of Love Death + Robots (2019). The findings reveal that techno-orientalism manifests through Asian-coded aesthetics and tech-charged hypersexualization and expendability of Asian bodies. These representations continue to position the East as a spectacle in binary opposition to the West. They also suggest a shift from earlier portrayals by representing Asian sexuality as perpetually accessible through digital mediums and capable of queering the West. Given the mutual influence between visual culture and real-world sociopolitical dynamics, it is critical to examine the essentialization and representation of Asia(ns) in dystopian popular media amid the current era of accelerating digital technology, tech-takeover anxieties in the West, and the escalating US-China digital rivalry.

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