Becoming the Monster – Agonistic Memory and Violence in Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen (2022)

This proposal argues for a reading of Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen (2022) as a site of an agonistic narrative (Bull & Hansen 2016) that is structured by violence as a strategic deployment of metaphorical silencing and illegibility, which ruptures the glossy rigidness of 1930s Hollywood. In this novel (a historical fantasy pseudo-memoir), Luli Wei, a Chinese-American queer woman, narrates her story as an actress in the operating on dark magic Hollywood; perceiving its myth-making as illegible and built upon systemic, aesthetic, and symbolic violence as understood by Spivak (1988) and Žižek (2008). Furthermore, following this framework, Luli’s chosen transformation into a monstrosity serves as a counter-violence, disrupting imposed regimes. By embodying the monster, Luli reestablishes gendered and racial violence as a narrative of autonomy (Halberstram 1995; Cheng 2011, 2019; Cohen 2018; Puar 2017). Drawing back onto the memoir form of the novel, it foregrounds memory as a place of sustained conflict that denies closure, providing the reader a glimpse into ongoing structures of violence.