Proceedings of The 6th Global Conference on Women’s Studies
Year: 2024
DOI:
[PDF]
Queering Legibility : Abusive Subtitles and Text-to-Video GenAI in Chinese Diasporic Experimental Film and Hybrid Painting
Diana Mulan Zhu
ABSTRACT:
I present the first two in a trilogy of experimental documentaries and a series of hybrid digital-analog paintings tracing the stories of three generations of women across generations and immigration from China to America. My film, Hand Me Down:Xiaohui begins with my grandmother’s life in Cultural Revolution era China. Through translation by my mother, I asked my grandmother about how girls in her village learned about menstruation and other taboo sex education topics. In Hand Me Down: Liuyang, I asked my mother about her first years in America and whether she faced misogyny and xenophobia as an immigrant woman of color. While we spoke, she taught me how to make our family recipe for dumplings. The two films weave grand historical events with more intimate questions about what it was like to be a girl, a woman, a mother, or a daughter – blending my continued interest in feminist visual activism to understand citizenship, identity, memory, and history. I also draw on family photo archives in digital collaged oil paintings that interpolate excerpts from canonical Chinese American literature. In this paper, I will explore how I hack, queer, and break the English language through abusive subtitling and text-to-image Generative AI to subvert the epistemological and phenomenological whiteness and straightness of my American-born privilege by borrowing queer of color critique frameworks of Sara Ahmed and Jose Esteban Munoz.
keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Asian American Studies, Film Studies, Translation, Art History, Text-to-Image, Generative AI, Oral History, Queer of color critique