Speculative Ephemera: Reimagining Racialized Embodiment in Korean American Family Photographs

Abstract

This article uses personal family photographs to explore a framework of speculative looking. I begin by considering the category of Asian/American woman not as a knowable entity but as an analytic. I then consider family photographs and alternate modes of speculation to further consider Asian/American gendered subject formation. Using photography, I autoethnographically close read images while thinking about the many afterlives of the Korean War in relation to gendered migration, assimilation, and family formation. I argue for a speculative looking that creates new bonds and possibilities for care by insisting on alternate temporal knowledges across time, allowing visibility to become a site of contestation and possibility. Photography has historically functioned to discipline Asian bodies into racialized and gendered subjectivities to monitor citizenship. The ephemerality of family photographs offers a way to think about the nonlinearity of memory and the everyday presence of violence alongside enduring forms of care.