How does a virus dance? The virus in a yellow jumpsuit might, perhaps, jump and kick its legs up in the air, before landing on the ground with a loud “hai-chah” exclaimed; the virus with the thin and long moustache might stand in one corner and stroke his moustache whilst gyrating to the rhythms of the music; and the 55-year-old virus that lives in the Highlands might do anything it likes, though most probably with its movements affectively flattened.

This dance score takes its inspiration from recent scholarship on yellowface and whitewashing practices, engaging with Felicia Chan’s definition of whitewashing as “the logical extension of yellowface, once cultural representation became divorced from human agency and subjectivity, i.e. ‘hollowed out,’ and began to be consumed as commodified artefacts” (Chan 2017: 45). The pandemic has been racialised, oft-referred to as the “Wuhan virus” and the “Chinese virus”, and anyone who passes as Chinese (or, really, of East or Southeast Asian descent) in the western world has been Othered and, in some cases, physically assaulted, violently denying them of their sense of self.

Here, borrowing from Richard Dyer, disco dancing offers a heightened and queer way to resist these racialized and racist patterns with a new choreography: “Its eroticism allows us to rediscover our bodies as part of this materialism and the possibility of change” (Dyer 2006: 108). The spectres of whitewashing may gesture towards a lack of imagination in the representation of “Asian-ness” but there is also an asymptomatic dance. On the one hand, such empty white space raises questions about how, following Peggy Phelan (1993), the unmarked might diffuse nefarious representational tropes. On the other, the empty space also points towards the incalculable scale of the situation, not just to the (largely invisible) rising death toll of the pandemic, but also to the widespread scale of violence towards people who might pass as East and Southeast Asian in the western world.

Works cited 

Chan, Felicia, 2017. “Cosmopolitan Pleasures and Affects; Or, Why Are We Still Talking about Yellowface in Twenty-First-Century Cinema,” in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 14, pp. 41 – 60.

Dyer, Richard, 2006. “In Defense of Disco 1979,” in New Formations 58, pp. 101 – 108.

Phelan, Peggy, 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge.