Embodied Scholarship: Risk, Complicity, and Consent in Empress Wu's Living Document

Taking up Avgi Saketopoulou’s concept of “traumatophilia” – or what she calls “our attraction to the site of the traumatic,” this paper examines body modification and scarification rituals by Asian American sex workers and performance artists. Drawing from queer leather practices, such performances conjure up the spectacle of the minoritized body while considering how the wound can be a generative space for engaging with histories of racial violence. This paper examines pro-domme and performance artist Empress Wu’s Living Document (2021-present), an ongoing love poem to her partner, another Asian sex worker. Carved line by line into the bodies of herself, her friends, lovers, and clients, the work explores queer love through a syntax of poetry and violence. I performed Living Document with Wu in November 2024 at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association in Baltimore. Taking on the persona of the Researcher, while Wu performed as the Subject, I cut into their body in a performance that disrupted my sense of self as an ethical researcher as I approached what Saketopoulou calls “limit consent.” Rather than critiquing academic extractivism or healing its wounds, Living Document considers how such a wound might be a productive space of ethical experimentation by luring me to the limits of embodied scholarship, opening up questions of complicity, risk, consent, and reciprocity in research.