“What Shall We Do?”: Kathy Change, Soomi Kim, and Asian Feminist Performance on Campus

Abstract

Soomi Kim performed as Asian political radical Kathy Change in the Staging Asian America performance/lecture series at Harvard University in spring 2017. Kim’s performance provokes timely political questions about stereotypes of gendered Asian docility and suggests that the ephemerality of Asian and feminine dissidence is all but erased in official institutional spaces. Performance, then, is the medium through which Asian feminine presence persists and survives.