these kinds of strong, virile, enthusiastically cis-hetero-heroic representations have nothing to do with dismantling the white supremacist heteropatriarchy that actually oppresses Asian people of all genders, because empowerment is not the same thing as emancipation. All those kinds of representations care for is a bigger piece of the poisoned pie. And none of it addresses the fact that the precise way white supremacist heteropatriarchy works is to pass oppression down, the way grief gets passed down, in Larkin’s famous poem: from man to man, deepening like a coastal shelf—until its last
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