H.M.A. (she/her)
thenewwhat.bsky.social
H.M.A. (she/her)
@thenewwhat.bsky.social
Southeast Asian Chinese writer and PhD student, ABD, in English (contemporary Southeast #AsianAmerican fiction #AsAmLit).
https://thenewwhat.substack.com
📷: Siora Photography on Unsplash
*cracks knuckles* #nowreading Nguyen Tan Hoang's A View From The Bottom and very excited for it
March 4, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Reposted by H.M.A. (she/her)
“BTS’s rise during COVID-19 suggests that the pandemic intensified the association between Asian racial formation and techno-Orientalist and colonized labor." Awesome work by Julia H. Lee on BTS, Asian racialization, Korea’s imagining in U.S. Orientalism, & COVID.
This is a new direction for my work, and one that makes me nervous. "BTS & the Labor of Techno-Orientalism" is the first step in a longer work on Asian racialization in the time of COVID. Thank you to the editors/readers at Lateral for their support.

doi.org/10.25158/L13...
BTS and the Labor of Techno-Orientalism
This article makes the case that the discourse around K-pop supergroup BTS and their fans—known as ARMY—marks an intersection between techno-Orientalism, the abstraction and demonization of Asian labo...
doi.org
December 21, 2024 at 3:49 PM
Reposted by H.M.A. (she/her)
Two stages of writing:

1) This shouldn't take too long
2) Oh no
December 4, 2024 at 7:36 PM
I finally learnt how to use the Zotero/Word plug-in this week AND how to do mail merge labels. Feeling pretty pleased at being part of the 2000s at last. (Save a bottle of water, don't give in to the ecocidal algorithms, DIY!)
September 21, 2024 at 6:24 AM
I haven't read the article yet (I will) but I had to stop and do a double take at the stock photo being everyone's most 'grammable local library(@Orchard).
September 19, 2024 at 2:26 PM
Got back advisor comments on my first 6,000 words (10% of the dissertation, I keep reminding myself) 🫠 千里之行,始于足下 and all, but I feel even more daunted now...
September 8, 2024 at 12:34 PM
⬇️ This is golden ⬇️
Occasionally an academic client makes a Zoom appointment with me because they’re working on a humanities journal article, but they’re stuck, and they don’t have enough of a draft to share.

I have a method for getting them unstuck! In case it can help anyone else, here it is: (1/10)
September 6, 2024 at 2:50 PM
Reposted by H.M.A. (she/her)
Anyone who tries to tell you "more words are better" is nowhere near experienced enough a writer to be selling you anything writing related, whether it's a workshop, a book, or a theft machine.
I want to highlight this stupid fucking bullshit because literally EVERY TIME an AI writing company has a website, they always have a screenshot that looks good until you read the words that are on the screenshot.
September 3, 2024 at 2:29 PM
I believe this was a long-running theme on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, especially in the final seasons.
August 30, 2024 at 3:26 PM
I'm speechless...
Devastated to see that Bitch mag let their URL/ archives die, & furious that bitchmagazine dot org is now "a publication dedicated to helping you attract an emotionally committed, high value man into your life" w/ articles on "how to be submissive in a relationship, 4 feminine ways" etc. 🤮 🤮 🤮
August 30, 2024 at 3:19 PM
Reposted by H.M.A. (she/her)
So now I'm going to be thinking about the economic and colonial implications of the association between spices and sexuality every time I see the 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ rating system used for romance novels.
Spices started going down in price, and that meant that—shock and horror—regular people could afford them, not just the wealthy!

So of course, the wealthy decided that spice was in fact not all that important—not only that, spice was a sign of sinfulness and decadence.
August 16, 2024 at 1:14 PM
Reposted by H.M.A. (she/her)
It’s just wild and also v mundane that every single book has to be written sentence by sentence, and then you go back and re-write all the sentences.
August 12, 2024 at 3:34 PM
But then *he* becomes a Bothan (spiritual) 😭😭😭 so it's just nested foreshadowing 💀 Sorry, I still have feelings about that rocks fall everybody dies plot, and never recovered 🥲
Star Wars has a long tradition of inserting retcons about various background characters, but I still absolutely adore how Andor decided to shake it up with “you know the lady who said ‘many Bothans died’? Well her marriage is shit, her kids hate her and she’s a narcissist”
August 14, 2024 at 2:41 AM
This just drives home two points for me.

One, wow, you can find some fascinating stuff in the archives.

Two, 🥴🥴🥴
Since, sad to report, some of us are having to construct our syllabi this weekend, here, for your inspiration (or perhaps NOT) is the English 41 examination from Radcliffe College in academic year 1910-11 (found pasted into an alumna's scrapbook).
August 13, 2024 at 4:50 PM
Reposted by H.M.A. (she/her)
You will all be pleased to note that in my family's shared Important Docs digital file I found not only various photos of our passports and birth certificates and vax cards &etc but also, inexplicably but agonizingly on brand, two jpgs of screenshots from the movie Yentl.
July 19, 2024 at 1:29 AM
Just saw Shang-Chi for the first time and, gosh, that was culturally offensive in such a banal way 🤦🏻‍♀️
June 30, 2024 at 1:47 PM
Finally finished reading Susan Choi's American Woman in two days - after avoiding it for weeks... 🙈
June 20, 2024 at 4:25 AM
How do other #PhDSky folks in literary studies annotate novels... Highlighters? Sticky notes?? A separate journal because the idea of marking up their books gives them hives???
June 20, 2024 at 4:22 AM
Christopher T. Fan's Asian American Fiction After 1965 is currently having me ready to hang up my hat and quit my PhD project bc it so clearly articulates the very research gaps I am trying to address (so I am no longer innovative 😭😭😭)

For real though, it is great reading so far; run, don't walk!
June 3, 2024 at 3:25 AM
Challengers was a genius film 💯 but I'm sorry I couldn't keep in a laugh at the reveal that Tashi's freshman dorm was Rinconada 😆
May 29, 2024 at 6:00 AM
Always glad and grateful to write for DVAN’s diaCRITICS. My latest is a review of recent memoirs by two scholars of Southeast Asian American literature, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Y-Dang Troeung: dvan.org/2024/05/crea...
"Creative/Theoretical Interventions” in Southeast Asian Refugee Memoir - DVAN
In both texts, the authors experiment with formally innovative narrative structure to push boundaries around the how and what—the technique and content—of Southeast Asian American life writing.
dvan.org
May 24, 2024 at 10:11 AM
Reposted by H.M.A. (she/her)
This comment goes straight to the core of one of my objections about the use of AI as a writing aid. The process is part of the point of writing texts. If that process is difficult, this is just proof that the process - & the labour of it - is necessary.
Almost everything I’ve seen about using “ai” to help you write essays straight up ignores the aspect of invention with writing. Simply put, writing helps you clarify what you think and leads to new insights. I remain unconvinced that generative tools are making that process “better.”
“A bottleneck of writing is sentence generation—getting ideas into sentences…That is a big task. That part is really costly in terms of cognitive load.”
May 23, 2024 at 3:33 PM
I have been struggling over this manuscript rewrite for a fortnight and feeling extraordinarily stupid - when really all I am is human 🙄 A machine could not do this, and I certainly don't want it to!
Writers have long since solved the problem of managing "cognitive load" when forming sentences, or at any other point in the writing process: we draft and revise. Recursive processes spread the cognitive load out over time WHILE ALSO FOSTERING REFLECTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS.
Almost everything I’ve seen about using “ai” to help you write essays straight up ignores the aspect of invention with writing. Simply put, writing helps you clarify what you think and leads to new insights. I remain unconvinced that generative tools are making that process “better.”
May 24, 2024 at 4:54 AM
Reposted by H.M.A. (she/her)
Sky friends, I have a new essay out today about Dictée, not fitting in, and who I actually write for… IT’S OK IF YOUR WRITING ISN’T FOR EVERYONE medium.com/asian-americ...
It’s OK If Your Writing Isn’t for Everyone
As a debut author, I’ve had to get used to answering the question: What is your book about? The shortest answer: It’s a memoir about…
medium.com
May 21, 2024 at 11:54 PM