Queering Asian Americans on Stage and Screen

Racial, cultural, and gender tropes are closely connected with Asian American theatricalization. These tropes could be subtle or explicit, comical or outrageous, condemning or empowering. Dr. Sean Metzger will address the topic of queering Asian American on stage and screen, using the popular film Everything Everywhere All at Once as an example.

Everything Everywhere All at Once features a Chinese immigrant family in various iterations across parallel realities; each of these universes (collectively called the multiverse) is depicted through and might be characterized as a different film genre. These facets of the film can be described through the various iterations of the protagonist Evelyn: laundry owner Evelyn, movie star Evelyn, animation Evelyn, etc. Beyond its literal depiction and metaphorical extensions of specifically Chinese American immigrant life, Everything Everywhere All at Once is also explicitly and subtly queer. The onscreen lesbian romances as well as props like butt plugs highlight the film’s queer elements. However, the narrative and temporal structures further offer models of relationality that elaborate queer forms of becoming. This talk analyzes this film in relation to a larger series of arguably Asian American science fiction films that work in a similar fashion.

Biography of Sean Metzger
Sean Metzger is a professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. He is the author of Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (2014) and The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (2020). The former editor of Theatre Journal, he has co-edited several special issues of journals—Cultural Dynamics (2009 and 2020), Third Text (2014), and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 2019)—and several books, including Embodying Asian/American Sexualities (2009); Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (2009); Awkward Stages: Plays about Growing Up Gay (2015); and The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre (2024).

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